Banco Bradesco, founded in 1943, is the second-largest private bank in Brazil, with more than 4,600 branches and 47,000 automatic teller machines across the country. Bradesco created a mobile app to provide consumer banking services like checking account balances, paying bills and transferring money between accounts, to its on-the-go customers. Bradesco teamed up with one of its online agencies, One Digital, to promote their latest app across Google AdWords Search and Display solutions. The team focused on driving cost-effective app downloads with the help of the Conversion Optimizer for mobile apps, a bidding feature that uses historical conversion performance data to automatically optimize ad placement so ads show more often when conversions are likely to occur.

Luca Cavalcanti, Director of Digital Channels, said: "Our apps are a key way for us to engage with our users and deliver the value they need. Promoting our apps with Google helped us to exceed our return on investment goals. With AdWords, we've dropped cost-per-download by 70%. Google is an important mobile partner for promoting our apps."

Bradesco promoted their mobile apps with ads on Google Search and the Google Display Network and used the Conversion Optimizer for apps to reach their app download and cost-per-download goals.

• Nearly 1 billion ad impressions and 4.4 million clicks during the first month
• Top 5 Ranking in Finance category of Google Play apps on average
• 31x increase in app downloads
• 70% decrease in cost-per-download (decrease from greater than R$5 to less than R$2)

To learn more about how Bradesco exceeded their app download goals, see here for the full case study.

Posted by: Gabi Viana, Head of Mobile and Social Marketing, Latin America

Ads on smartphones are effective, but many of us have at some point clicked on an ad by accident, which ultimately is a bad experience for the user, the publisher, and the advertiser who pays for clicks that may not be valuable. Our team has been analyzing the types of ad formats where accidental clicks are more likely to occur due to ad layout and placement, and are constantly looking at ways that we can combat them. Today, we’re introducing confirmed clicks into all in-app image ad banners on smartphones, which reduces accidental clicks by prompting the user to confirm that they intended to click on the ad.

We find that most accidental clicks on in-app image ads happen at the outer edge of the ad unit, likely when you’re trying to click or scroll to nearby content. Now if you click on the outer border of the ad, we’ll prompt you to verify that you actually meant to click on the ad to learn more.

This builds on our previous efforts with confirmed clicks for text ad banners on smartphones, which we introduced a few years ago. In the text ad format, tapping on the blue arrow button takes you to the advertiser’s ad destination, whereas tapping anywhere else in the ad prompts you to confirm your click.

By expanding confirmed clicks to in-app image ad banners, we’re now making this improved user experience consistent across the vast majority of the ads that we serve in mobile apps. In our initial tests, we found that confirmed clicks notably improve mobile conversion rates, with a slight decrease in clickthrough rate as accidental clicks are avoided.

This is only the beginning. As devices continue to converge there will be new challenges in the fight against what many have called the ‘fat finger’ problem. But implementing confirmed clicks is an important step that we think will benefit users, advertisers, publishers, and the mobile ecosystem overall, and we’ll continue to look for ways to improve mobile ads for everyone.

Posted by Allen Huang, Product Manager, Mobile Display Ads

In this increasingly multi-screen world, it’s important for marketers to easily run ads that reach people on different devices. But with different specs and standards across platforms, this can currently be difficult, especially for marketers who’ve invested in engaging rich media ad units. Since Flash isn’t supported on many tablets, and building a new ad in HTML5 can be expensive and time-consuming, often marketers’ rich media ads aren’t able to run on tablets. To address this, we recently launched a new feature in AdWords that allows you to easily convert Flash ads to HTML5.

Advertisers can now generate an HTML5 version of a Flash image ad with the click of a button, right within the Image Ad upload flow in AdWords. Because HTML5 ads can appear on browsers and devices that are incompatible with Flash, running an HTML5 version of an image ad alongside the Flash version in AdWords extends reach across devices. In this initial release, these converted HTML5 ads will show only on iPads, though we hope to extend support to additional tablet and mobile devices in the coming months.  

This new AdWords feature is part of our ongoing effort to make mobile rich media advertising easier. It’s the reason we’ve created products like Rich Media Designs for Mobile and continue to innovate around mobile ad serving solutions using the DoubleClick platform.  With the addition of this latest tool, it is now easy for advertisers targeting the Google Display Network with Flash ads to expand their ad's reach without using any creative resources.

To learn more about converting Flash ads to HTML5 in AdWords, visit our Help Center.

Posted by: Ashley Jiang, Product Manager, Display Ads

We recently described some of the work that we do to keep ads safe, and our broader efforts to protect against invalid activity in the AdSense network. Today, we want to share some of the ways that we’re protecting ads on mobile networks.

We’ve adapted many of our systems for protecting desktop ads to do the same for mobile ads. These include automatically discarding invalid traffic as it occurs, refunding any money from this traffic, and investigating each and every claim to make our systems better. You can learn more about why and how we do this in the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.

But mobile-specific attributes like touch screens, app usage, and portability require us to adapt our approach to the platform. For example, it’s important that our systems are driving intentional clicks on ads, which is more complicated on mobile due to the limited space on a phone and the relative inaccuracy of a finger. Our mobile-specific ad formats help minimize unintentional clicks by clearly delineating ads from content. In addition, text-based mobile ads require an additional click if users accidentally click on the edge of an ad.



Protecting our mobile ad network also means ensuring that we provide a good ad experience within apps. We’ve seen that refreshing in-app ads too quickly leads to a poor user experience and lower advertiser value. That’s why we’ve recently increased AdMob’s minimum refresh rate to 30 seconds. We’ve seen this increase publishers’ fill rates dramatically, and improve traffic quality on the refreshed ads by 26%.

The AdMob Ads SDK also provides a safe environment for ads within mobile apps. The SDK enables publishers to incorporate a variety of formats, allows advertisers to choose which apps to show up in, and enables our team to analyze signals that indicate that ads are being displayed and used properly.

On these and all ads, our team constantly monitors and re-evaluates how we detect invalid activity. We’ve updated our detection algorithms to keep up with the steady stream of new mobile devices and implementations, improving the quality of mobile ad traffic by over 12% since 2011. We’ve also disabled thousands of non-compliant mobile publishers in 2012 and returned millions of dollars, including Google’s share, to affected advertisers.

Lastly, we’ve developed the AdMob publisher best practices guide to help publishers create a good experience for users and advertisers, so that publishers can get good long-term performance and avoid problems with invalid activity.

Posted by Henry Kim, on behalf of the Ad Traffic Quality Team