We live in a multi-screen world where people are constantly connected and moving seamlessly across devices. Not only do mobile devices keep us connected anytime and anywhere, but they play an increasingly important role in shopping, both online and offline. With mobile, consumers no longer just take linear paths to purchase that begin and end on the same device. Instead, there are a range of customer journeys - like starting on a smartphone and ultimately buying in-store, continuing on a different device, or making a phone call.
This era of mobility is bridging the digital and physical worlds, so marketers need to fully understand mobile’s impact both online and offline, and evaluate how each of these actions applies to their business. Here’s a look at two brands who’ve invested in understanding the full value of their mobile efforts:
adidas Being locally relevant is key for any brick and mortar business, and adidas worked with its agency iProspect to leverage mobile’s power to reach local customers. They recognized that in order to build an effective mobile presence, they had to pivot their thinking to understand how mobile drives value beyond mobile commerce, particularly in-store sales. “If we look at a 1:1 response or 1:1 measurement of what our media budget is driving on a mobile site, we're missing a big part of that picture. As performance marketers, a lot of the times we look at direct responses, and what mobile is requiring us to do is redefining direct response," says Kerri Smith, head of mobility at iProspect.
adidas and iProspect partnered to estimate the value of each store locator click on their mobile website. Based on internal benchmarks, iProspect theorized that 1 out of every 5 people who visited the mobile site store locator page went into an adidas store. In-store conversion data from adidas indicated that around 13% of shoppers who go into stores completed a purchase, and that their average order value is $71. Since an active search usually demonstrates stronger intent to purchase, iProspect applied a 20% conversion rate and an $80 average order value. As a result, they determined that 4% of the people who clicked on a store locator translated into an actual sale for adidas, meaning that each store locator click is worth $3.20.
To put that in perspective, for a hypothetical mobile investment of $1 million, in-store sales from store locator clicks was an extra $1.58 million beyond direct mobile purchases. [Download the full case study here]
RadioShack To fully understand how mobile drives in-store sales, RadioShack collaborated with its agency Mindshare to redefine mobile success: “User behavior is much different on smartphone compared to the desktop experience. It became obvious that to be successful, we had to measure mobile performance by focusing on different criteria,” says Lisa Little, Search Marketing Manager at RadioShack.
RadioShack worked with Mindshare to understand how mobile impacted foot traffic into stores. Using mobile search ads to promote their mobile site, they found that 36% of the clicks were going to the store locator page. Based on internal studies, the teams estimated that 40-60% of people who used the store locator on a mobile device visited a store. RadioShack’s internal analytics team also determined that approximately 85% of customers who visited the store as a result of the store locator made a purchase in store. [Download the full case study here]
A holistic view of the mobile customer This new model can help marketers better understand the return on investment they’re getting from their mobile efforts. Both companies also found mobile success because they developed a holistic view of their mobile customers and created strong synergies across all marketing channels. For example, RadioShack’s social, email, digital, video and search marketing teams work collectively to create the best user experience possible for mobile customers. Little says, “This allows us to better understand the behavioral path of our customers, from the initial research phase through the final purchase stage including all the marketing they were exposed to along the way. To be successful, you have to adopt this holistic vision of the mobile user behavior.”
Posted by: Julie Pottier, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
People are constantly connected and searching from all kinds of devices. Advertisers are looking for ways to quickly provide customers with the right information, in formats that make sense for where they are, the time of day, and the device they’re using. As part of AdWords enhanced campaigns, we upgraded call extensions and sitelinks with several new features to help you reach customers in more relevant ways across these varying contexts.
In this post and a Learn with Google Webinar this Thursday, February 28th, at 10am PST (sign-up here), we’ll provide a closer look at these new features, and give you practical examples for how to use them to drive better business results.
Improved extensions for the multi-device world In our world of constant connectivity, people expect to have the information they’re looking for right at their fingertips. Sitelinks provide your customers with links to any part of your website, directly within the ad. On average, ads with sitelinks have a 30% higher click-through rate compared to standalone ads. With enhanced campaigns, you can now customize sitelinks at the ad group level, in addition to the campaign level. You can also customize sitelinks specifically for mobile devices:
People are often looking for ways to connect with you directly on the phone. In fact, there are more than 27 million calls per month through our ads call products on mobile and desktop. In addition to calling you directly from a smartphone, people may wish to find your business’ phone number when they search from devices without call functionality like computers and tablets. With enhanced campaigns, you can now show your business phone number or a Google forwarding number in call extensions on computers and tablets. Additionally, Google forwarding numbers are now free on all devices. Learn more
Precise extension scheduling for more granular control Many advertisers customize their ad content to align with their business hours or special events like sales and promotions. With enhanced campaigns, you can now schedule the specific dates, days of the week, or times of day for your call extensions and sitelinks, at either the ad group or campaign levels. So instead of having to manually turn ads on or off to run specific extensions, you can now schedule them ahead of time.
Example: A multi-national sporting goods business has a website and physical stores in 5 major cities. With enhanced campaigns, Mary, their online marketing manager, can align her AdWords schedule with the operations of the business. Mary runs call extensions between 10am and 6pm when her stores are staffed. After 6pm, she schedules ads to point to the website instead of the call extension. For weekend sales and promotions, she can schedule sitelinks pointing customers directly to her “Sale” page. Scheduling enables sitelinks to appear exactly at the times that Mary sets (e.g., 12 midnight on Saturday) instead of having to manually turn them on at that time. Advanced reporting for sitelinks and new conversion types
Many advertisers drive leads or conduct business over the phone, so they value phone calls as much as, or more than, clicks to their website. To give you greater visibility into the full value of your ad spend, AdWords reports now count phone calls as conversions, making it easier to compare calls alongside more traditional conversion types like online sales. For example, you can now specify that calls longer than 60 seconds count as conversions.
We’ve also made reporting for individual sitelinks more precise and actionable. You can now manage and track sitelinks individually to ensure that each one drives the right ROI. You can also take advantage of per-link approvals so if one link is disapproved, your other links can still run.
Continuing the example from above: Mary uses the new detailed per-link reports to manage individual sitelinks. Below, you can see that the “Swimming” sitelink only got 16 clicks, while the other sitelinks for the sporting goods store got 100+ clicks each. With this precise data, Mary made the informed decision to replace the “Swimming” sitelink with another one, like “Soccer.”
Mary further segments her data with the "This Extension vs. Other” feature. Here, you can see that two clicks occurred specifically on the “Running” sitelink while 137 clicks occurred on the other parts of the sitelink, like the headline.
Feedback We really value your feedback to help us make AdWords even better. In fact, many of the new features that we described today are a result of your ideas and suggestions. Please continue to share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.
Posted by: Scott Silver, Senior Director, Ads Engineering
In today's constantly connected world, it's crucial for marketers to reach people across multiple screens and platforms in a cohesive way. This is largely driven by advances in mobile technology and consumer adoption, with mobile playing an increasingly crucial role in advertisers' overall marketing strategies. Total mobile ad spend is projected to grow ~4.5 times to $22.4B in 2016, representing ~35% of all digital ad spend by 2016.1 We're also seeing incredible growth from online video, which is the fastest growing form of display advertising, projected to grow 2.5 times to $6.5B by 2016.2
Given these transformations, we are working hard to build best-in-class tools for our integrated platform that make it easier for you to create, buy and manage successful campaigns across all formats and screens. Today, we’re announcing a series of improvements that aim to help you accomplish this.
The DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform now helps you:
Create more beautiful video and mobile ads in DoubleClick Studio.
Build robust interactive in-stream video ads in DoubleClick Studio, and use the new IAB rising stars formats to turn your standard 15-second TV commercial into a longer, engaged viewer experience. Check out our demo below!
Preview and test your mobile ads as they will actually appear on mobile and tablet devices. Scan a QR code on your phone or use our Mobile Ads Showcase App to push your ads to mobile and tablet for testing.
Buy video inventory in real time on DoubleClick Bid Manager, and access more mobile and video inventory on DoubleClick Ad Exchange.
With DoubleClick Bid Manager (DoubleClick’s DSP and real-time bidding platform), you’ll soon be able to programmatically buy and report on your video campaigns in the same place as the rest of your display media. We’ll be offering a video beta for select clients in the coming weeks. Contact your sales rep for more info.
Buyers can now find skippable in-stream video inventory and expandable/interstitial mobile inventory from across the web on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Ad Exchange continues to grow its available inventory across high-quality content, helping you expand your creative palette. Manage all of your ads - across devices, formats and channels - with enhanced campaign support in DoubleClick Search and a single reporting interface in DoubleClick for Advertisers.
DoubleClick Search (DS) will be supporting AdWords enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks, to help you better reach your customers across locations and devices. By using enhanced campaigns through DoubleClick Search you additionally gain holistic measurement, a streamlined, easy workflow, and better bid decisions based on your Floodlight conversion data.
Track all the metrics for your Trueview in-stream video ads in DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA). Thanks to one new trafficking tag, even though the ads aren’t served through DFA, you can still pull the metrics back into DFA and compare them with the rest of your placements.
With an integrated platform of DoubleClick products that work better together, you not only benefit from top-notch individual products, but you also benefit from the efficiencies, insight, and performance gained when all of your campaign’s assets and data exist in one spot.
For more information about our DoubleClick platform, visit our website.
Posted by: Jason Miller, Director of Product Management for DoubleClick Sources: 1 eMarketer: Data is from the January 2013 J.P. Morgan report titled "U.S. Internet." 2 ThinkEquity, comscore and Google proprietary data
This past holiday season, homes were aglow with the twinkling lights of large screens (like laptops, desktops and tablets) and mobile phones alike. In our holiday consumer survey, conducted in partnership with Nielsen, we found that consumers relied on their devices more this holiday season, moving fluidly between devices based on their setting and context. 63% of consumers frequently used more than one digital device to shop for gifts this holiday season, and 67% of consumers believe that “having access to multiple devices makes it easier to shop”.
Another important finding was that more screens means more shopping. People using one device to research and shop made online and offline purchases across an average of six product categories (like electronics, apparel, auto parts, etc), while those that used two devices purchased across eight categories, and people who used all three devices shopped across an average of nine categories.
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In many cases, consumers discovered a business on one device, for example on their smartphone while in a store, and would then engage further with that business on another device at a later time. We saw that 65% of holiday shoppers were frequently engaging in this sequential behavior throughout all of their shopping. For multi-screen shoppers, different devices fulfill specific objectives. For example, smartphones were the preferred device for contacting or navigating to a business with 71% of shoppers using a store locator on their phone, while 82% of shoppers used a larger device like PC or tablet for making online purchases.
These same multi-screen trends carried us into 2013 as people used multiple devices to make and keep new years resolutions. Looking at search query behavior around New Years, we saw an interesting twist on the classic resolution of becoming more healthy. People used their smartphones on January 1st to look up things like gym memberships, diets, or cleanses, and then the following day, searches for those same words spiked on tablets and desktop as people continued their research on these devices at home or at work. This behavior demonstrated the growing trend of using multiple devices in combination to help make everyday decisions.
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Implications for businesses This multi-screen consumer behavior doesn't fade away with the holiday. In fact, better understanding how people searched, shopped and seamlessly moved between multiple screens during the holiday can give us insight into this new constantly connected consumer. So what can businesses do about it?
One good answer is to think context. All these new search patterns have created new opportunities for businesses to be more relevant to people’s context. Context signals like time of day, general location, and the kind of device a person is using, provide powerful insights into what they may be looking for and where they are in the buying cycle.
Within AdWords, advertisers now have the opportunity to use enhanced campaigns, which help them reach people across all devices with smarter ads that are relevant to their intent and context. Learn more about enhanced campaigns here.
This multi-screen behavior will only continue throughout the year. As device penetration grows and multi-screen behavior becomes the norm, those businesses that evolve their marketing strategy along with it will remain the most relevant and see the greatest results.
Posted by: Adam Grunewald, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
Today, people are constantly connected and searching from all kinds of devices. Advertisers are looking for ways to reach people with ads that are relevant to their context, like their location, the time of day and the device they are using. With an enhanced campaign, you can easily vary your bids across devices, locations, and time of day – all within a single campaign.
Example: A multichannel retailer wants to reach people close to their stores searching for “party supplies.” Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 50% higher for people searching up to a mile away, 20% lower for searches on weekdays, and 25% higher for searches on smartphones.
In this post and a Learn with Google webinar this Thursday, February 21st, at 10am PST (sign-up here), we’ll look more closely at the new bidding tools and mobile bid adjustments. This Thursday’s webinar will also dive deeper into some of the improvements with mobile ads.
Bid adjustments With an enhanced campaign, you start by setting default bids that reach all devices. You can then set bid adjustments to increase or decrease your bids for mobile devices and different contexts – like location and time of day. Setting higher bids when and where you’re more likely to satisfy a customer’s intent can boost your ad’s visibility and potentially lead to more visits and sales. Setting lower bids for contexts where your lead quality or average order value is lower can improve your ROI, although you may see fewer visits and lower total sales.
Bidding for devices with larger screens, like desktops, laptops and tablets, is grouped together in enhanced campaigns. We and others in the industry see that users’ search behavior on these larger devices is very similar, and likewise, overall advertiser performance is very similar across these devices.
Bid adjustments combine using multiplication. If you set multiple location-based bid adjustments, only the most specific adjustment will apply.
Continuing the example above: The retailer’s max CPC bid for the keyword [party supplies] is $1. When someone searches for “party supplies” on a smartphone within a mile radius from the store on Wednesday, then the location, time, and mobile bid adjustments set will apply. So this retailer’s CPC bid for this particular search would be adjusted to $1.50 ($1 x (100% + 50%) x (100% - 20%) x (100% + 25%) = $1.50).
The AdWords interface provides a calculator to show you how multiple bid adjustments might combine to affect your bids.
Valuing mobile and setting a mobile bid adjustment People can take a wide range of actions on smartphones. Beyond purchasing directly from your mobile site, customers might call your business, click on driving directions to visit a store, download an app, or even convert on another device later. But traditional online conversion reporting may not show the full consumer journey across devices and can therefore lead to undervaluing mobile. Savvy marketers are looking deeper to consider the full value that mobile brings to their business. Check out how Radio Shack, a large multi-channel consumer electronics retailer, approaches their mobile bidding and measurement strategy here as an example.
With an enhanced campaign, you can choose a mobile bid adjustment to influence your ad position, clicks and cost on mobile devices. For a bit of perspective, here are a few of examples of how advertisers set their mobile bids as a percentage of desktop over the course of the last several months (actual CPCs may differ).
On average, advertisers in the Australian retail sector set mobile bids to 103% of desktop.
On average, advertisers in the US real estate sector set mobile bids to 91% of desktop.
On average, advertisers in the Canadian travel sector set mobile bids to 88% of desktop.
With each campaign you upgrade to an enhanced campaign, you’ll see the estimated change in impressions, clicks and cost depending on your selected mobile bid adjustment. The suggested bid adjustment shows you how similar advertisers bid on mobile compared to other devices.
Experienced search marketers know that bids are one of many factors that influence overall campaign performance, along with keywords, ads, extensions, and landing pages. So after setting a mobile bid adjustment, periodically measure your results and make changes as needed to better meet your campaign goals.
Feedback We want you to succeed with AdWords, so we’re very interested in hearing your feedback. As you begin using enhanced campaigns, please share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.
Posted by: Surojit Chatterjee, Group Product Manager
Last week we announcedenhanced campaigns, which let you more easily adjust your ads and bids depending on your customers’ location, device, and time of day - all within a single campaign.
We’ll be hostingseveral Learn with Google webinars about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks. This Thursday, February 14 at 10am PST, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering, and Jason Spero, Global Sales Director, will provide an overview of enhanced campaigns and Q&A. Pleasesign up here to attend. Also look for more information and details about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks here on our blog. Posted by: Mark Martel, the Google Ads team
Today we’re upgrading AdWords, by rolling out enhanced campaigns. This is a first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.
Why enhanced campaigns?
People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices - PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.
This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.
With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.
Key features Here’s an overview of some key features.
1. Powerful marketing tools for the multi-device world
People want search results that are relevant for the context they are in for example - their device, location and the time of day. Enhanced campaigns help you better manage your campaigns and budgets for this multi-device world. With bid adjustments, you can manage bids for your ads across devices, locations, time of day and more - all from a single campaign. Example: A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for [coffee] or [breakfast] on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.
2. Smarter ads optimized for varying user contexts
People on the go or near your store may be looking for different things than someone sitting at their desk. With enhanced campaigns, you’ll show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.
Example: A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC - all within a single campaign.
3. Advanced reports to measure new conversion types
Technology is enabling people to take action on your ads in new ways. Potential customers may see your ad and download your app, or they may call you. It’s been hard for marketers to easily measure and compare these interactions. To help you measure the full value of your campaigns, enhanced campaigns enables you to easily count calls and app downloads as conversions in your AdWords reports.
Example: You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads.
Upgrading to enhanced campaigns Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the next few weeks, and we plan to upgrade all campaigns in mid-2013.
Enhanced campaigns are designed to help you succeed in a multi-screen world, but we know that transitioning may involve some initial changes. Here are some resources to help you:
Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the new features with tips and best practices on the Inside AdWords blog and on our G+ page. We’d love your feedback.
Posted by: Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering
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