Smartphones and tablets can be great creative canvases for brand advertisers, and many agencies are helping brands go big on mobile. But it’s hard for agencies and advertisers to experience the full interactivity of mobile rich media -- mobile video and HTML5 ads -- through static images alone. Last night at our annual Creative Sandbox event in New York, we unveiled the new Mobile Ads Showcase App, which lets you experience mobile ads exactly as your users will.
The app lets you explore what best-in-class advertisers are doing with mobile rich media, and learn about all that’s possible with Google Mobile Ads. Additionally, agencies can use the app as their mobile portfolio by coding, testing and uploading their HTML5 ad examples to the MRAID-compliant “My Ads” screen. The app is now available for Android smartphones and tablets through the Google Play Store.
See the app in action and learn more about how it works on the Creative Sandbox site.
Posted by: Jessica Sapick, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
In July, we shared some of the secrets behind smartphone game developer Chukong’s success with promoting their game Fishing Joy using AdMob. Recently Chukong CEO Haozhi Chen shared some perspective on AdMob’s role in their marketing strategy.
Since launching, AdMob has comprised 70% of Chukong’s promotional budget and has already served 1.5 billion impressions and 1.7 billion ad queries for Fishing Joy, helping build a user base of over 80 billion downloads to date at a conversion rate of over 5%.
For more information, read the full case studyhere.
Posted by Kevin Otsuka, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
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.
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
Mobile technology is making it easier than ever for people to research products and connect with businesses while they’re on the go. But we all know that sometimes it helps to speak to a real person before making a purchase decision. In fact, research shows that 52% of smartphone users have called a business after looking for local information on their mobile devices. Calls are key in helping consumers connect with businesses in the digital age, so incorporating a click-to-call strategy on mobile is crucial for any company that does business over the phone.
Companies big and small have put click-to-call functionality front and center in their mobile ads to reach customers on the go, and have seen impressive results. For instance, Comcast incorporated click-to-call ads into their mobile strategy, and now find mobile drives more than 10% of online sales. Esurance also reduced their cost per acquisition by 20-30% compared to other channels by using Google mobile ads with click-to-call. With more than 20 million calls made through Google click-to-call ads each month, it’s clear that mobile works when driving calls to businesses. In fact, our studies have shown that adding Call Extensions to mobile ad campaigns have improved advertisers’ average click-through rates by about 6-8%.
But as any business knows, getting customers to call is only half the battle. That’s why we’ve invested in features like Google call forwarding numbers, which show detailed reporting on calls generated from your ad campaign such as call start and end time, duration and caller area code. Having this valuable information can help advertisers understand how effective their ad campaigns are at driving calls as well as the quality of those calls. Advertisers using Google call forwarding numbers see calls last over six minutes on average.
We’re working hard to continually improve the click-to-call experience for advertisers and consumers. Here are a few of the things that our team has recently been hard at work on:
Click-to-call button - We recently introduced a new click-to-call button for ads leveraging Call Extensions, which people can easily tap to call businesses. Early results indicate that this new design positively impacts advertiser click-through rates and call volume.
Expanding availability of Google call forwarding numbers - We’re also focused on bringing Google call forwarding numbers to more advertisers so they can better measure the full value that mobile is driving through calls. Already available in US and UK, we recently expanded availability to Germany and plan to expand availability to additional countries in the coming months.
Call Extensions for in-app ads - We also recently introduced Call Extensions for ads showing in apps on the Google Display Network. Now in addition to click-to-call ads across the mobile web, advertisers can also drive calls from ads in more than 300,000 mobile apps.
New click-to-call button
If you haven’t yet tried Call Extensions in your mobile campaigns, you can find instructions for enabling in our Help Center. We will also be hosting a webinar on December 5th focused on tracking call performance in your AdWords campaigns. To register for this webinar, click here.
Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Mobile Search Ads
