The rapid pace of change in the advertising space can be dizzying. From new ad formats to new ad systems, from startups to mergers, the marketing industry is running at a million miles an hour, and it’s often daunting to keep up with it all. We know that staying informed takes a lot of effort, and it’s critical to make good decisions about how you spend your time and resources.

That’s why we put together Google Ad News. Powered by Google News, Ad News is a simple but powerful way for anyone in the advertising industry to track current news coverage on relevant subjects such as display, search, mobile and even traditional media - all in one place. Subscribe to news feeds in the categories you care about most, or search to find coverage on topics related to your business, such as your niche industry or brand.

We invite you to check it out and share it with your colleagues. Hopefully, you’ll find lots of relevant news that’ll help you spend less time scouring the web and more time building your business.

Posted by Oliver Deighton, Business Marketing

Ring, ring! It’s the new cell phone shopper calling!

With over 450 mobile devices in North America and an average of 10 new phone launches each week, how do shoppers decide which phone is right for them? How do marketers influence these purchase decisions?

click to view image

We’re excited to announce that Google and Compete recently completed their latest research study, Wireless Shopper 2.0, which covers the shifting cell phone marketplace, the rise of the smartphone and the role search plays in the purchase process.

Key consumer findings revealed that today’s wireless shoppers are:

• Open to Switching: At the beginning of the purchase process, 42% did not have a a specific carrier preference, while 78% did not have an OEM preference
• Reeled in by Features: 45% bought a new smartphone because they wanted more features, while 22% bought because they saw a new phone they “had to have”
• Reliant on Search: 62% of consumers who searched for a newly launched mobile device purchased one, and the average consumer conducts 13 searches throughout the purchase process
  

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, these behavioral insights indicate the importance of having a comprehensive digital marketing strategy to bridge the gap between queries and sales. To do so, digital marketers should focus on:

• Targeting the Entire Funnel: The purchase funnel is not as linear as it once was; query trends indicate that search is paying a central role throughout and that generic (non-branded) keyword are prevalent and convert, even at the end of the purchase process
• Device-Centric Campaigns: Shoppers are searching online for everything to do with their wireless device: features, reviews, price, applications, etc. Optimize device-specific landing pages and integrate device-focused keywords and ad texts into campaigns
• Leverage Search for Product Launches: Search is an effective tool for introducing new products to customer prospects, especially during the announcement and pre-launch face - don’t miss the opportunity to acquire new potential lifetime customers

For more insights into today’s Wireless Shopper 2.0, download the full study here.

Posted by The Google Tech Marketing Team

(cross posted from the Inside AdWords Blog)

Over the past year, we’ve been focused on investing in display advertising, and we’ve seen great momentum from the increasing number of you running display campaigns with Google. We’ve rolled out new features and targeting options and more precise measurement tools. To provide more places for you to run display ads, we’ve added more publisher sites (through Google AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange) to our ad network of over one million sites. Meanwhile, many of you have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties. In an effort to make our display media offerings clearer to advertisers like you and agencies, we’re creating a new umbrella name for all these properties, the Google Display Network.

The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites (apart from search sites), where you can buy ads through Google, including YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners (our display partners include all of our AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partner sites that allow text and/or display ads). The Google Display Network offers all ad formats - text, image, rich media, and video ads - enabling you to unleash your creativity and engage potential customers across the Web.

You can run ads on the Google Display Network the same way you always have. Either place bids through AdWords or make reservations on YouTube and Google Finance with the help of a Google account team.

In the upcoming weeks, you’ll see a change in the AdWords interface reflecting this new term, and you’ll see Google Display Network where you might have seen Google Content Network mentioned. We’ve also launched a new website showcasing the sites and benefits available to you on the Google Display Network.

We’re working hard to offer the best display advertising solutions and we look forward to introducing new features on the Google Display Network that help you reach your advertising goals.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

As the Google Enterprise Search team just announced, today we’re releasing the second generation Google Commerce Search, a hosted website solution designed specifically for online retailers. In addition to the proven speed, Google-quality search relevancy, and intuitive user experience of the first version, Google Commerce Search 2.0 includes a number of innovative features for both merchants and shoppers:

• More merchant customization: Today we’re launching a full merchandising dashboard, giving merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering - with no custom code so marketers and product merchandisers can do all of this themselves. Time-based promotions, full left-hand panel facet control and simple product ranking rules make retailers’ jobs simpler and easier.
• Unparalleled shopper experience: With query autocompletion, retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time, as they type, without any custom coding. Search quality improvements make GCS faster and more relevant than before. Because it’s hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. Spelling and stemming dictionaries and new custom synonyms mean that shopping on a retail site can be as easy and accurate as searching on Google.com.
• Better browsing and navigation: Though more and more shoppers are turning directly to the search bar on retail sites when they’re looking to make a purchase, some people will always prefer to navigate through different categories and discover new products. Now, Google Commerce Search allows visitors to shop by browsing around your site as well as searching directly for products.
  

Click here to watch video

To hear more about these new features, be sure to sign up for an upcoming webinar on June 23rd at 10amPST / 12pmCST / 1pmEST. If you're unable to make it, you can learn more or request a demo at google.com/commercesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop and Abdul Salem, Google Commerce Search team

As agencies managing AdWords accounts, you know your clients are not alone in the auction -- any number of advertisers may be using AdWords to offer some of the same goods and services as them. You can monitor their performance and use optimization tools to improve ROI, but you still might not know how they're performing as compared to similar advertisers. We’re aiming to bring more transparency to AdWords with the launch of Analyze competition in the Opportunities tab. For now, this feature is only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but we'll expand this to more advertisers in the near future.

‘Analyze competition’ examines an account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services a client is advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against a client's keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with a client's account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.

When you hover over the data in the 'Competitive Range' column, you'll be able to see more details such as the exact size of the competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers.

In the case below, you’ll see that we’ve chosen to evaluate our performance based on how our CTR compares with that of other advertisers. In addition to CTR, you’ll also be able to look at competitive data for impressions, clicks, and average position, and you can segment data by advertiser location.

(click to view full size image)

As with other areas of the Opportunities tab, you’ll be able to export information from ‘Analyze competition’ to a .csv file.

It’s important to remember that data in ‘Analyze competition’ is anonymous, and as part of our commitment to protect your clients' privacy, we don't reveal information about any advertiser's identity.

Now that you know what ‘Analyze competition’ does, here are some tips on how to make the most of this data:

• Take action. Click the ‘Explore ideas’ button to see customized keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your clients' accounts.
• Consider clients' advertising goals and focus on the most relevant metrics. It’s not always a bad thing to perform below competitors on a metric that’s not important to clients.
• If you see that one campaign is performing poorly in comparison to the competition, you can get insight into changes you can make to improve that campaign.

Just like the other areas of the Opportunities tab, we hope that ‘Analyze competition’ will help you uncover new opportunities to improve your clients' AdWords performance. To learn more about this feature, visit the Help Center, or watch this short video.

To read more about and submit feedback on 'Analyze competition,' as well as discover other new developments in AdWords, visit the Ad Innovations page.

Posted by Alexandra Kenin, Product Marketing Manager

When we discover something great, our first impulse is to share it. How else do you explain the 66 million times people have watched a baby panda sneeze? Sharing the insights you find in your AdWords reports should be as easy as forwarding a YouTube link, so we’ve recently released new options for segmenting, scheduling, and emailing the data on your Campaigns tab.

By clicking the Download button in the toolbar above your data tables, you’ll open a menu that shows you a number of options for sharing reports with others.

click to view larger image

First, you’ll name your report, just as you would in the Report Center. Next, you can add segments to reveal different dimensions of your performance. Add multiple segments at once to get a even deeper breakdown of your statistics. For example, you can segment your campaigns by device and day of the week to understand the days when your customers are more likely to see your ad on their mobile devices. Each new segment you add will appear as a separate column in your downloaded report.

From here, you have a few options. You can simply download your report in formats ranging from .CSV to .PDF and personally deliver it to your favorite teammate. Or, you can choose to email your data to one or all of the users with reporting access in your account.

Finally, you’ll set the frequency at which you want this report to run. So if you’ve set up a filter for your keyword list to show, for example, only those keywords containing the term “free” that have cost you over $50 with a conversion rate under 5%, you can now get a weekly email with a report showing you their performance. All the reports you download from the Campaigns tab will appear in your Control Panel and Library, a new area used to manage the reports and custom alerts that you’ve created for your account.

These changes are just the latest in our ongoing efforts to simplify the ways you access your reports. We hope that with more data in the Campaigns tab and easier access to advanced statistics, looking at the different dimensions of your campaign performance becomes common practice. After all, you never know how many baby pandas could be hiding in your campaigns...

Posted by Devin Sandoz, Product Marketing Manager

Yesterday, we announced a new tool called AdWords Campaign Experiments, or ACE, that will help you optimize your account by letting you accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. We're testing this new tool and inviting U.S. advertisers to participate in the beta.

For more information and to sign up for the ACE beta, please visit the AdWords Campaign Experiments page on Google Ad Innovations.

Posted by Courtney Lischke, Product Marketing Manager

Next Thursday, June 10th at 9am PDT / 12pm EDT, join us for a one hour webinar that will get you up to speed on implementing and using Conversion Tracking in AdWords. We'll also give an overview on using Conversion Optimizer as a bid management strategy, and also on the recently launched Search Funnels reports - Google's first step towards attribution data.

At the webinar, you’ll learn:

• How tracking conversions can take you beyond clickthrough rate and help you focus your spend on the ads and keywords that drive sales and leads
• How the data in Search Funnels can take you a step further and tell you which ads and keywords are assisting your conversions
• How Conversion Optimizer can use your conversion tracking data and cost-per-acquisition goals to help you focus your spend on the clicks most likely to convert

Register here if you’d like to attend, and by June 9th, please submit or vote on Conversion Tracking, Conversion Optimizer or Search Funnels questions that you would like answered during the webinar.

Hope to see you there!

Posted by Jeff Gillis and Lisa Coffey, AdWords team

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

In part 4 of our "Coffee break" series, we caught up with Kaylyn Miller, Associate Search Director at MEC, who shared with us how her team incorporated click-to-play video ads into a recipe campaign for Swanson® Chicken, a division of Campbell Soup Company. The video campaign was established to distribute a new cooking video during two key dipping occasions - New Year's and Super Bowl. The campaign ran for six weeks, starting in mid-December and concluding at the end of January. During our interview, Kaylyn shared the following:

What were the goals of using click-to-play video ads?
We were tasked with distributing the Frank's® Red Hot® Buffalo Chicken Dip recipe, made with Swanson® Premium Chunk Chicken. We were already successfully directing users to print the recipe using paid search. However, we knew that keyword targeting could be a powerful tool for video distribution as well. Our goal was to use contextual targeting on the Google Content Network for cost efficient video views. Knowing that this strategy worked well for clients in the entertainment industry, we were striving to keep playback rate and cost per view in line with Google’s entertainment benchmarks.

How did you set up and execute the campaign?
We began by looking at the most relevant ad groups from our paid search campaign, including buffalo chicken dip, appetizer and dip, chicken recipes, New Year's recipes and Super Bowl recipes. The ad groups were then modified to include broader keywords to effectively target the Google Content Network. From there, additional ad groups were created, such as hot wings, cooking videos, easy recipes and general recipe words to obtain greater reach.

Three distinct starter images were created for the video - Everyday, New Year’s and Super Bowl (images below) - based on the events of a given week. We used the best practice of making the starter image a YouTube-like still, instead of a display ad, to increase consumer engagement.

Click to view images - Everyday, New Year's, Super Bowl

How did the click-to-play video campaigns perform?

The campaign's performance exceeded our expectations. In the 6 weeks it ran, the click-to-play video campaign received more than 34,000 video views with 42% of the videos viewed to completion. In addition, this was a good test for us to see how CPG would perform since there aren’t many benchmarks for this category to-date. We saw a lower cost per view and higher play rate than Entertainment industry benchmarks, a space where we assumed users would be more engaged.

In addition to success found through video viewing, we also found success in on-site engagement. While recipe prints are the main goal of the paid search campaign, they were secondary for the video campaign. We were pleased to find that the consumers who were engaged in the video carried that engagement over to the site. The download rate associated with video plays was 203% higher than the stand-alone paid search campaign, keeping the cost per recipe print in line with the search averages, despite the more premium CPCs found in the video campaign.

What did you learn from this campaign?
This campaign validates that click-to-play videos can supplement paid search to expand reach while maintaining consumer engagement for a client.

If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?
We may have used a portion of the search budget to drive traffic to sites where the video was being distributed by our Social Media and Display teams, but most likely the video wouldn’t have been promoted through keyword targeting.

For more information on click-to-play video ads, visit the AdWords Help Center. For more information on how to prepare this recipe for your next dipping occasion, visit buffalochickendip.com.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team