Display ads on Google Images trial

[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.

Ad by Converse on Google Images, designed to gain awareness about their new shoe model.
Ad placed by Range Online, an iProspect Company.

click for full size image

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

Update your Google Advertising Professionals Qualification to the Google Certification Program by October 31

We recently launched the Google Certification Program and we’re glad that thousands of you all over the world have taken the new exams and joined the program. This certification program replaces the Google Advertising Professionals program. To provide you with time to make the transition, we’ve run both programs side by side during a six month grace period which ends in October. To retain certified status and continue using the badge within your marketing collateral, you’ll need to meet the requirements of the new program.

What’s the difference between the two programs? With the Google Certification Program, we’re offering updated learning materials written by Google experts. We’ve developed four in-depth exams on AdWords management called Fundamentals, Advanced Search, Advanced Display and Advanced Reporting & Analysis. The exams are designed to prove proficiency in these areas and are being widely adopted by employees of search marketing agencies. In addition to this, we launched Google Partner Search, a directory to help advertisers find agencies to manage their campaigns. Currently, all Google Advertising Professionals who have opted in are part of Google Partner Search, but this will not be the case by the end of October.

We’re informing all of you who have qualified under the old Google Advertising Professionals program to update to the Google Certification Program. In order to do so, a company must meet a minimum AdWords spend level, and have at least one employee become individually qualified under the Google Certification Program.

If you have an employee that already qualified under the old program, this is a great time for them to update their skills through the Google Certification Program. Upon completion, just update your company profile so that advertisers can find you using Google Partner Search.

To learn more about the Google Certification Program visit our Help Center.

Posted by Jason Shafton, Product Marketing Manager

Google Display Network series: Reach exactly the right audience with precision targeting

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

Google Display Network series: Your toolbox for creative display ads

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:

(Click to view larger image)

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.

(click to view larger image)

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.

(click to view larger image)

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

Carnival Cruise Lines Charts their Course with the Google Content Network

Catherine Schenquerman is an avid traveler and a savvy digital marketer. As the interactive marketing manager for Carnival Cruise Lines, she has been able to merge her love of travel with her interest in experimenting with innovative digital marketing strategies.

Since 2006, Carnival Cruise Lines has worked with its digital agency, Razorfish, to implement successful Google search campaigns that both generate new leads and build brand awareness. But Catherine and her team wanted to explore ways to drive bookings as well. They wanted to be more precise about how they connected with customers at the critical moment in the purchasing cycle, when customers were planning vacations and were about to book a cruise. Catherine sat down with Razorfish to review innovative approaches they could try, and they decided to explore contextual targeting using the Google Content Network.

Experiment, Measure and Iterate

The Razorfish search marketing team quickly got to work. First, they set out to optimize the core components of the campaign within ad groups, and then apply those to their content campaign on the Google Content Network. These optimizations resulted in nearly 400 new ad groups with tightly-themed keyword groupings, each with roughly 8–12 keywords per ad group. The new groupings allowed Carnival to better tailor its messages and precisely focus each message on specific sites and content.

Carnival and Razorfish used two Google Content Network tools to measure and fine-tune its efforts. They began by using DoubleClick Ad Planner, a free media planning tool to help identify websites that its target customers are likely to visit, and then used the Placement Performance Report, which shows performance statistics for ads on specific domains and URLs in the Google Content Network.

Smooth sailing

Within the first few weeks of the Google contextually-targeted campaign, the Carnival team began to see a significant increase in cruise bookings sourced from the campaign. After five weeks, online cruise bookings from the Google Content Network increased 284 percent and delivered a 72 percent reduction in cost per conversion. They also saw a 36 percent increase in leads.

“The Content Network proved to be a great new way for us to extend our reach, by giving us both the push and pull,” Schenquerman explained. “The push to associate our ads with relevant content and help stir demand, and the pull to capture someone who says ‘I want to learn more’– and then to pay for that on a cost-per-click basis, makes a lot of sense.”

Building on the success of their text ad campaign, Carnival recently decided to start running display ads on the Google Content Network. They applied what they learned from their search campaigns to run high performing display ads. Razorfish and Carnival Cruise Lines have been very successful in bring the science of search to the art of display.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Coffee break with clients: Proving the value of display with View-through conversion tracking

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.

What Google solutions did you use to meet the goals?
We ran display campaigns on the Google Content Network, and used view-through-conversion tracking to demonstrate the additive value of display to growing Chegg's user base.

Can you describe the implementation process?
Chegg provided the display creative, with variations by season. We then developed contextually-targeted campaigns around themes such as "textbook," "used textbook" as well as target student groups like "fraternity." From there, we used the placement performance report to see which sites performed well, and moved them into management placements campaigns.

To receive view-through conversion statistics, we made sure that conversion tracking was set up.The campaigns began running in fall 2009 and remain active.

How did the Google solution perform?
By using view-through conversion tracking, we were able to show the client that the sales driven from the display campaign were within its cost/order metrics. We found that a quarter of the conversions came from people who had viewed, but not clicked, on one of Chegg's banner ads. If we simply looked at conversions directly from clicks, the cost-per-conversion would have been well above Chegg's goals.

If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?
Without view-through conversion data, we would have had a difficult time convincing the client to invest in display.

For more information on view-through conversion tracking, please visit the Help Center.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Upcoming webinar: Uncovering opportunities with display advertising

Display advertising is changing rapidly with the emergence of audience data, engaging new ad formats, dynamic creatives, and new technologies. We'd like to invite you to a webinar about our recent innovations in display advertising and how marketers are incorporating it into their strategy.

Specifically, we’ll discuss:

• Google's vision and recent innovations in display advertising
• How to best take advantage of our offerings, from planning to optimizing your campaigns
• How advertisers are incorporating the Google Content Network into their marketing strategy

Date: Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST

Register here

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Now available: Reach the right audience through remarketing

Imagine your client is a travel company, and they're trying to excite users about deals to tropical Caribbean destinations. Users may come to the website, browse the offers and think about booking a trip, but decide that the deal is still not cheap enough. Then, they continue to browse the web. If your client later decides to offer discounted deals to the Carribean, how do they reach users who have already expressed interest in traveling there?

To help you to do this, this week we're rolling out a new feature called remarketing. Any AdWords advertiser can use remarketing to reach users as they’re browsing the web on sites within the Google Content Network. Remarketing is a simple way to connect with users, based on their past interactions with your clients' websites.

We began trialing remarketing last March as part of our interest-based advertising beta. We’ve received a tremendous response from the hundreds of advertisers who’ve been using it in recent months, across all industries - including automotive, retail, local and finance. We’ve seen that remarketing has worked well for many different kinds of advertisers - whether they’re looking to boost brand awareness, or drive clicks and sales, and whether they use display or text ads. For example, if you support search advertising clients, you can use remarketing to create an integrated campaign strategy for them. After driving traffic to their sites with search ads, you can then remarket to the users who reach their sites by showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Content Network.

You can easily set up and create a remarketing campaign for clients through the new “Audiences” tab in AdWords. A remarketing campaign allows you to take advantage of the same features and reports you can use today in AdWords - it’s really just a new way to reach the best audience for your clients' ads.

(click for full size image)

Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say your client is a basketball team with tickets to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page on the client's website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.

You can also run a number of remarketing campaigns at the same time. For example, you could promote discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your client's tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on his “How to get to the arena” page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who’ve previously visited his YouTube brand channel.

Remarketing is a great way for businesses to reach users who are likely to be highly receptive to their ads and special offers. For example, Intercontinental Hotels Group has used remarketing to reach potential customers who have visited one of their hotel websites:

Ad by InterContinental Hotels Group using remarketing to offer incentive to users

(click for full size image)

It helps advertisers and websites get higher returns. It also means more relevant and useful ads for users, and more opportunities to receive special offers and discounts that may be of interest.

As we announced when we launched interest-based advertising, we want to put users in control of the ads they see, so anyone can opt out of remarketing by using the Ads Preferences Manager. Our remarketing product complies with industry standards developed by self-regulatory groups such as the NAI and IAB and IAB UK.

To get started with a remarketing campaign, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Aitan Weinberg, Product Manager

DoubleClick, Google Content Network and YouTube at OMMA Global

This week OMMA Global takes over the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, and Google will be there. Here's an overview of what's in store.

On March 17th, get a complete view of the art and science of rich media advertising from Google's resident rich media experts, Peter Crofut and Chip Scovic.

Next day listen to Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management, deliver his keynote presentation on opportunities in online display advertising. He'll cover changes in the display ecosystem, and how everyone can embrace these changes and achieve their goals. If you miss his keynote, be sure to catch the panel right after on Online Advertising - Rapid Recovery or Recession 2.0?, or the late morning session Connect with the Google Content Network with Jason Miller, Group Product Manager, Google Content Network.

Later in the day, Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manager, Video Monetization will participate in the panel Can Online Video Reach Scale for Clients Budgets in 2010? Hear what he, and other experts, have to say about definition, scale and measurement when it comes to online video.

Our DoubleClick, YouTube and Google Content Network teams will also be at the Trade Show to let you know what's new and to answer your product questions.

Interested in attending? Register here, and if you’re a MediaPost member, your full-conference pass is FREE. You can also sign up for private networking sessions here. Use the code OGSF20 for a 20% discount.

Posted by Sally Cole, Marketing Manager

Go for the Gold with YouTube

The winter games are in full swing with more than 80 countries vying to take home a medal. From February 12 through the 28th, milions from around the world will be tuning in to see the fierce competition. Viewers are already turning to YouTube for event highlights, interviews, and other great games-related content and will continue to do so over the remaining week of competition. The scale of these events is tremendous with an enormous opportunity for businesses to get in front of a global audience.

It’s not too late to take advantage of these engaged viewers on YouTube! Leverage these quick and easy tactics to get your campaigns running and take home a gold medal for your client:

1. Enhanced Online Campaigns: Target YouTube.com and create keyword themes around the events that are relevant to your client. Use 300x250 display ads (Tip: use Display ad builder to create high quality ads at no cost).

2. Placement Targeted Campaigns: Use the Video targeting tool to find relevant content on YouTube. With this new tool, you can target video content by video, demographic or interest. Within these campaigns, use text ads, 480x70 and 300x250 ads to capture the attention of users.

Leverage these tactics to place your ads in front of a global audience as they seek out games content and a taste of Vancouver. You too can be in the spotlight during the games without training six hours a day!

Posted by Jennifer Wasson, YouTube Ads Strategist

Display Ad Builder & Creative Generation

What makes up the ideal creative for your client?

We'll walk you through how you can answer this question using AdWords reporting and the Display Ad Builder, a tool that allows you to quickly and easily customize display ads and to run measurable experiments. Experimentation is not new to advertising, although the theories and ideas that inspired campaigns have evolved over time.

For example, in the early 20th century, the prevailing sentiment in the ad industry was that information made a creative effective. The car ad below sums up the thinking of the time:

National Motor Vehicle, Inc. advertisement (1907) retrieved on 21.1.2010 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National-advertisement_1907.jpg

Theories eventually emerged suggesting that consumers weren't always need-oriented, but advertisers were baffled by how to measure seemingly subjective behavior. Mid century a study was released that put data to consumer responses. It showed that three factors - the size of the ad, the size of the illustration and the numbers of colors - together could help explain some of the readership difference between a magazine's ads.

Today, you can find out the the factors that trigger the strongest response by using the data in Ad Performance Reports in AdWords, which provide relevant statistics for ad variations, such as text ads, image ads, video ads, and local business ads, and run experiments with Display Ad Builder. Here are two creatives developed with Display Ad Builder for a hypothetical online travel company:

Ad creatives developed internally using Display Ad Builder: Image 1 & Image 2

When creating the ads, populate the "Ad Name" field in Display Ad Builder with the ad's elements. We'll call the first "day_scene_cta" and the second "night_people_question." Launch the ads on even rotation to ensure a good sample. Then you can construct a chart like the one below from your Ad Performance Report by adding up the clicks and impressions for each ad component:

Sample data set from internal account independent of example creatives.

In this example, the effectiveness measure is clickthrough rate (CTR), but this can be substituted for conversion rate or cost-per-acquisition (CPA). The chart shows the elements of the ad that had the greatest impact on CTR, benchmarked against the performance of the whole ad group.

You can tweak the reporting to show the impact of relationships as well. Do people prefer images of scenery or people at night? With a well-designed ad experiment, you can use basic data-mining principles to find these results. However you choose to experiment, continue to measure your results so you can find the best creative.

Posted by Eddie Higgins, Agency Team

New ways to optimize Content Network campaigns

We are often asked about how to maximize the ROI from Content Network campaigns. What type of targeting should I use? How many keywords and ad groups should I have? How can I develop effective creatives?

Behind the scenes of many new product introductions this year, we have developed a set of best practices to answer some of these questions for you. Recently introduced as part of a new initiative called Optimization University, these are now available to everyone through a series of 6 videos and the Getting Started guide. The guide and videos provide a conceptual walk-through and product demos of major steps in executing a Content Network campaign.

• campaign setup best practices
• creative appropriate ad groups
• selecting effective keywords
• developing high impact ad creative
• bidding strategies
• conversion tracking and tweaking for ROI

Along with simple tips and tricks to improve ROI, we also go over several tools, such as Wonder Wheel, Keyword Tool and Conversion Tracking, that help you be more efficient with the process. The recommendations are based on our analysis of thousands of campaigns, successful and unsuccessful ones, to understand what works and what doesn't. They are easy enough for you to start applying them to your campaigns today.

If you're starting a new Content Network campaign, watch the first video below; you may find it to be particularly valuable.

(click here to view video)

And you can always bookmark the playlist or find all the latest videos on our YouTube channel.

Posted by Aman Govil, Product Marketing Manager, Google Content Network

New resource for display advertisers on the Content Network

In the last 18 months or so we have made significant changes to the Google Content Network to deliver better performance for advertisers and agencies and to simplify the process of serving ads across a range of websites. As we roll out more features, we want to make it easy for you to keep up and understand what best fits your needs. To this effect, we've just launched a new Content Network brand channel on YouTube.

The site is stockpiled with videos, links and downloads about the full suite of features and solutions on the Content Network. Structured into four key sections, you can learn about various products across the campaign execution cycle and how they help you achieve your various advertising goals. Case studies and research papers from various industries show what the most successful advertisers on the Content Network are doing. And if you need help getting started, please contact us (response times will vary).

And last but not the least, we've also introduced a new creative direction for our videos, to add some color and fun. Enjoy the first 5 videos below, and let us know what you think by sharing your comments on YouTube.

(click here to view videos)

And you can always bookmark the playlist.

Posted by Aman Govil, Product Marketing Manager, Google Content Network

Google Content Network Blast delivers a big bang for your buck

If you live in the New York area, you may have heard or seen the so-called "Google surge," or Google Content Network blast that NY Mayor Bloomberg used to impact voters' decisions in the final hours of the mayor's reelection race. An increasing number of advertisers across industries, including auto, retail, and entertainment, have also used Google Content Network blasts to drive awareness of a new vehicle launch, viewer tune-in for a show, or traffic to an online contest with great success.

The Google Content Network blast entails serving up an advertiser's ads on multiple Google Content Network sites over a specific period of time, blanketing a particular geographic region, audience segment, or high traffic sites, depending on the advertiser's goal. On average, blasts can deliver 100 million ad impressions in 24-48 hours. But you're probably wondering what is special about Google Content Network blasts versus your typical portal homepage buy?

Google Content Network blasts deliver your message on a larger universe of sites than a single portal homepage, thereby reaching more of your customers. In a recent Google and TNS Compete study for a large automaker¹, we found that Google Content Network blasts reach 58% of online auto buyers, which is 20% more than a top portal homepage², and 23% of buyers were reached exclusively on sites available only on the Google Content Network². In addition, 30% of auto buyers never went to one of the major portal homepages 6 to 9 months prior to purchasing their vehicle³. And the best part of all is Google Content Network blasts require no advance booking and deliver relevant ads at a much lower CPM than portal takeovers.

So, as we enter the peak holiday shopping season, consider how you're getting the word out on your merchandise and holiday offerings. Want to make a last minute big impression? Visit The Google Content Network site to learn more, and try out a Google Content Network blast for yourself.

1 Google, Inc. and TNS Compete study for large automaker, May 2009
2 Reach is based on a custom GCN site pack using a parameter of 2% buyer composition mix per site
3 Based on observed clickstream behavior of buyers

Posted by Keiko Tokuda, Google Content Network Marketing Team

Display Week is Back!

The leaves are changing and there's a chill in the air. Hot cocoa and comfort foods are just around the corner. Get ready to warm up with, you guessed it, Display Week!

On Monday November 9, 2009, we kick off our quarterly Display Week webinar series including 10 Tips for Display in 2010, YouTube Promoted Videos, and some very exciting Ad Planner demonstrations.

Webinar seats are limited so sign up today for the week of display. If you can't make the festivities, don't fret. All sessions will be recorded and posted to the training site after the week wraps up.

See you online!

Posted by Kate Stonich, Agency Team

Google Campaign Insights: Better measurement for display advertising

As we've previously said, one of our aims is to improve display advertising on the web and, as a result, grow the display advertising pie for everyone. Three simple principles guide our approach: simplify the system for buying and selling display ads; deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure; open up the ecosystem by making it accessible to more participants.

One question on the mind of every advertiser and agency is: how can I better measure the impact of my display ad campaign?

We hear you. A growing number of advertisers and agencies are running display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network, so we're investing substantially in creating better measurement tools for our clients. At the moment, an advertiser can measure how many clicks its display ads achieve, measure conversions that result from those clicks, compare results with industry benchmark data, and use View-through conversion reporting to measure visits to its website from users who saw its display ad in the past.

Today, we're pleased to announce the launch of a brand new tool to measure the impact of your display ads - Google Campaign Insights. As of today, Google Campaign Insights is available for larger display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network in the US and UK. Over time, we hope to roll it out more widely to assist even more advertisers and agencies in different parts of the world.

Google Campaign Insights is a unique measurement tool that can give reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness, or active user interest, in a particular product or service. It looks beyond the traditional measures of clicks and conversions to calculate the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign.

How does this all work? In short, we use the same expertise we use to improve our own services -- our ability to analyze large quantities of data. Google Campaign Insights compares two anonymized and aggregated data sets: a large group of users (many thousands, minimum) who saw a particular ad, with an equivalent, large group that did not see the ad. It then measures whether there is any significant difference in searches and visits to the advertiser's website between the two groups. Doing this, Google Campaign Insights can determine the incremental change that is directly attributable to the display ad campaign. With this insight, advertisers can establish how well their display ad campaign is working.

(Click for full size image)

(Click for full size image)

Google Campaign Insights provides highly reliable results to marketers because of the statistical methodology our computer algorithms use to combine and analyze large volumes of data from several sources -- the advertiser's own campaign information, ad serving logs and sampled data from Google Toolbar installs that have opted in to enhanced features. All of the results reported to advertisers are anonymized and aggregated over thousands of users.

Advertisers or agencies who run wide-scale display ad campaigns on the Google Content Network and who want to take Google Campaign Insights for a spin should check with their Google representative.

We're excited about the contribution that Google Campaign Insights can make to our clients' campaigns on the Google Content Network and to display advertising generally.

Posted by Paul Todd, Product Management Director

[Note: This post has been reprinted from the Inside AdWords Blog]

Helping your clients "Go Mobile"

With smartphone shipments set to outpace PCs shipments in 2009¹, a staggering number of people are accessing the Internet on mobile web browsers. With audiences increasingly going mobile, reaching consumers on their mobile phones is a growing and important media channel for many marketers. This unique platform offers many opportunities for your clients to engage with their audience because mobile devices are nearly always within their reach.

AdWords helps you go mobile with ease by extending your clients' search and display campaigns to mobile platforms. Whether you're new to mobile or have been using it since day one, we want to share with you a new resource that will help you incorporate mobile into your marketing campaigns: Go Mobile!

Designed to help you and your clients reach audiences, the Go Mobile! site has tips that help you think about how to incorporate mobile into your clients' marketing campaigns - from ensuring that their site is mobile-friendly to how you can leverage location-based technologies to interact with your audience. We hope you'll find it useful in helping to connect your clients to their ever-growing base of mobile consumers.

[1] Source: Gartner and IDC

Posted by the Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Tools, tours, and content strategies with Google at ad:tech

Coming to ad:tech New York? So are we! We're organizing a number of sessions at ad:tech and its partner conference, Content Revenue Strategies (CRS), to help agencies get more out of their search and display spend with Google. Here's the lowdown:

The Google Ads Factory Tour, 11/4/09-11/5/09

The Factory Tour consists of two days of live workshops at ad:tech NY designed to provide you with a comprehensive overview of Google's latest measurement and optimization tools. You'll hear directly from the Google ads team, and walk away with practical tips you can immediately use to improve search and display performance.

The first day will focus on optimizing search and display campaigns. We'll spend the morning highlighting recently released AdWords search optimization tools such as the Opportunities tab and Bid Simulator, and in the afternoon we'll take you through effective optimization techniques for text and display campaigns on the Google Content Network.

The second day we'll expand our scope to cover measurement tools such as Google Analytics and Website Optimizer, search ads quality, and advertising strategies for local and mobile campaigns.

The Factory Tour is open to all exhibit hall and conference passholders.

Content Revenue Strategies, 11/5/09

Formerly known as ADSPACE, CRS is the first and only expo dedicated to AdSense and contextual advertising. CRS will take place alongside ad:tech New York and offers sessions tailored to advertisers as well as small and medium sized publishers. Here you can attend sessions designed to help your clients maximize their performance on the Google Content Network and on emerging blog, video and social media networks.

Additionally, a team of AdWords and AdSense optimizers will be present at the conference to meet you and answer your questions. You can stop by our Optimization Lounge to receive customized performance tips for your clients' campaigns, as well as share your product feedback and suggestions.

Both CRS and the Google Ads Factory Tour will be held in the Javits Center along with the rest of ad:tech NY. We recommend you register ahead of time to save on admission fees. Enter the promotional code 20EXNY9 to receive 20% off an ad:tech full conference pass. If you're only attending CRS, enter the code CRSGoogle to receive $100 off the price of your CRS conference pass.

Hope to see you next month in NYC!

Posted by Devin Sandoz, Product Marketing Manager

The New DoubleClick Ad Exchange

We've just announced the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange. With this launch, your clients can now advertise on inventory in the Ad Exchange through the Google Content Network, offering them additional high-quality options for displaying their ads.

Read the full details on the Official Google Blog, and for more information on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, visit our Help Center.

Posted by the Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Can't make it to Fashion Week? Attend Display Week instead!

Haute couture and the glitterati are descending on NYC for fall fashion week, hoping to inspire consumers to "spend, spend, spend"¹ on the debuting 2010 clothing lines.

You're probably thinking to yourselves, "Hey, that's what I want to do, as well. Inspire consumers to 'spend, spend, spend' on my clients' products." To help spur your imagination, our Agency Learning & Development Team will be putting on a series of webinars from September 14-18 to inspire your clients' display campaigns.

We'll be hosting new webinars on the Google Content Network, and YouTube, among other topics. Don't miss the kick off with 10 Tips for Display in 2010 on Monday, September 14th at 1pm CST. Other featured webinars include:

• Targeting Consumers Across the Web
• Unlocking the Google Content Network
• Researching Your Media Plan

For additional training resources, visit the National Agency Training site.

[1] NY Fashion Week to push stylish consumers to spend, Reuters, September 9, 2009

Posted by Kate Stonich, Agency Training