Digital Marketing Ideas

People are constantly connected and are moving between devices throughout the day to shop, connect and stay entertained. This creates great opportunities for advertisers to use context – like location, time of day, and device – to show the right ad and bid more efficiently.  In February, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you reach people with ads based on their context as well as their intent. Since then, advertisers have already upgraded over 1.5 million campaigns and have shared many success stories.

We’ve also continued to build new features on the enhanced campaigns foundation.  Today, we are introducing two additions.

Enhanced campaigns and social annotations

People are looking for relevant information, and sometimes the most helpful signals are recommendations from people who know a brand or business well.  Social annotations in AdWords show endorsements from people following your Google+ page on your search ads.  Many businesses such as Red Bull, National Geographic and H&M are using social annotations as part of their broader Google+ strategy.  On average, search ads with social annotations have a 5-10% higher click-through rate.

Starting today, enhanced campaigns will include social annotations when they can improve ad performance, without additional edits to campaign settings.  All you need is a Google+ page with a significant number of followers and a linked website that matches the URL in your search ads.  Learn more about how this works.

Social annotations on AdWords work hand-in-hand with your Google+ page to build community, conversation and engagement with your business on Google.  Learn more about getting your business started on Google+.

Enhanced campaigns for mobile app advertisers

Apps have become a significant part of people’s everyday mobile experiences. In fact, US consumers spend an average of 127 minutes per day using mobile apps.  Advertisers can now reach app users, with ads in apps, based on people’s context like location, time of day and device, with enhanced campaigns.  For example, if a certain mobile app has the most usage on Saturday evenings, you can increase your bid adjustments for mobile and this time of day to reach these users. You can also adjust bids across the key display signals like demographics, interests, topics and remarketing at the ad group level.  All of these powerful bidding tools will enable you to reach the right people with the right ads.

Upgrading strategies webinar tomorrow

After upgrading, you’ll be able to start using all of the new features in enhanced campaigns.  Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 10am PDT,  for a Learn with Google webinar about upgrade strategies (sign up here).

Feedback

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Posted by: Christian Oestlien, Director of Product Management, Google Display Network

The following is a guest post by the Analytics Team at Loves Data, a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

• Integrated measurement and analysis of in-store POS systems along with desktop and mobile e-commerce platforms
• Measuring offline macro and micro conversions through physical buttons or integration with CRMs
• Measuring physical interaction for example at display booths at conventions or artworks at major exhibitions through to online engagement on associated websites

We live in a world of constant connectivity, where mobility is bridging the digital and physical worlds. With smartphones in hand, people are taking a variety of online and offline actions, like calling a business, downloading an app, looking for directions to a store, or starting research that leads to a purchase on another device. We’re working hard to account for these new paths to purchase in AdWords, like the recent addition of calls as conversions to AdWords reporting. Still, with more work to be done to improve measurement tools, most marketers still account only for sales happening on a mobile site and aren’t seeing the full picture. Today we’re introducing the Full Value of Mobile initiative to help marketers begin this discussion and better understand mobile’s impact online and offline. 

This new consumer behavior is now the norm, with a recent study showing that nearly three of ten mobile searches result in visiting a store, calling a business, or making a purchase online. Some smart marketers are already investing in understanding how mobile drives sales through these new customer paths. For example, adidas, in partnership with their agency iProspect, felt that mobile was converting in ways beyond their mobile website, so they created a simple yet powerful attribution model to understand how mobile is driving customers into stores. As a result, adidas found that each click on their store locator button was worth $3.20, which has changed the way they view their digital investment. See their full case study here.  

While savvy marketers like adidas are already defining the full value of mobile, most marketers have struggled to get started. To help marketers better understand mobile attribution, we’re launching the Full Value of Mobile initiative, which includes:

• A calculator tool
• Videos that illustrate each mobile conversion path
• Case studies highlighting successful mobile strategies
• Tips for measurement

The Full Value of Mobile Calculator provides simple equations and benchmarks to help you estimate of the value that mobile drives for your business through calls, apps, in-store, mobile site and cross-device. In about 30 minutes, you can follow the step-by-step wizard to upload data from AdWords and your mobile website, and make some key assumptions to create your Full Value of Mobile estimate. Through the exercise, you’ll see the total value, value per click, and ROI that mobile is driving for your business across all mobile customer paths, not just your mobile website. You’ll also see how cost-effective your mobile CPAs are.

Many of you told us you’re looking for ways to go faster with tools that streamline and automate your workflow across large search campaigns. Especially for marketers with large product inventory, staying on top of changing products, promotions, and seasonal trends can be cumbersome. At SMX West, we demoed inventory-aware campaigns, which integrates with your Google Merchant Center Feeds to automatically update search campaigns, based on your physical inventory. We got great feedback on the seamless workflow that cuts out repetition.

We also heard your growing need to measure digital marketing holistically — within search, as well as across channels. So, on the SMX floor, we highlighted the different ways DoubleClick Search powers your business with the insights you need:

• Integration of Google Analytics metrics (beta), which incorporates statistics including bounce rate, page views, transactions, and revenue from Google Analytics, to get a clear picture of how search influences customer interaction on your website.
• Fast and accurate cross-channel reporting thanks to native integration with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, to enable faster decision making, without reconciling reports or worrying about potential data drop-off from reporting on disparate tools.
• Enhanced campaigns support, which makes it easier for you to promote marketing messages across varying user contexts like location, time of day and device type, within a single campaign. In addition to basic support, we’ll soon help you take advantage of enhanced campaigns in unique and powerful ways, through bulk tools, custom-tailored mobile bid adjustments, and consultative services offered only by DoubleClick Search.

Get better results with tools that drive performance

As a performance marketer, you know it’s ultimately all about results. Over the past few months, we’ve focused on enhancing our Performance Bidding Suite for automated bidding — understanding that smart bidding technology is the engine that drives campaign performance. At SMX West, we demoed our intuitive bidding UI, which lets you easily express flexible goals that align with your business objectives, and highlighted how fresh data, smart algorithms, fast operations, regular software updates, and the right transparency and controls help you achieve those goals.

To extend the conversation, DoubleClick Search will be at SES New York next week, and we look forward to another great opportunity to show you how we can help make search marketing faster, smarter, and better. We hope to see you there!

A typical consumer today uses multiple devices to surf the web and interact in many ways with your business. For most large businesses, already swimming in many sources of data, it’s an enormous challenge, but also an incredible opportunity. 

• Understanding how customers interact with your businesses across many devices and touch-points, 
• Insights into the performance of your mobile apps, 
• Improvements of lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions so you can understand which channels drive the best results,
• Improved latency on your site by reducing client-side demands.

A typical consumer today uses multiple devices to surf the web and interact in many ways with your business. For most large businesses, already swimming in many sources of data, it’s an enormous challenge, but also an incredible opportunity. 

• Understanding how customers interact with your businesses across many devices and touch-points, 
• Insights into the performance of your mobile apps, 
• Improvements of lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions so you can understand which channels drive the best results,
• Improved latency on your site by reducing client-side demands.

Last month we announced enhanced campaigns to help advertisers more simply and scalably reach their customers in a multi-screen world.  Today, we’ll look more closely at how enhanced campaigns work with your display campaigns.

Why Enhanced Campaigns For Display
In this constantly connected world, our customers are accessing information across multiple devices, and might look at 10 different sources – online reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, recommendations from friends and more – before making a purchase. Display advertising captures these signals and is an important part of connecting with consumers in this multi-screen world.  But determining the best way to reach the right person with the right ad is more complex than ever. Enhanced campaigns for display help you reach people with the right ads, based on people’s context like their location, time of day and device type — all from a single campaign.

Key Features
Search and display use very different signals. In search, we use keywords to capture users’ intent. For instance, a travel booking website knows that a user searching for ‘Rome Vacation Packages’ is looking for a vacation in Rome. In Display campaigns, advertisers use a variety of other signals to reach their target customers with the right ad. In this example, a travel website may use:

• Interest Categories: to reach customers interested in “Rome”
• Demographics: to reach people 35-44, who have historically spent 3x the average
• Topic Targeting: to reach people browsing travel websites
• Remarketing: to reach customers who booked a vacation with them last year

In today’s constantly connected world, someone’s intent and the actions they’re looking to take may differ depending on their context, signals such as time of day, location and device:

• Time of day: Travelers typically book between 9am and 6pm
• Location: “People in the US” who may convert more often than people in Italy
• Device: Mobile users tend to browse on their smartphones, then book on their desktop

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to create multiple campaigns, this travel website can easily manage all of this in one place. In a single campaign they can adjust bids across these various signals to reach the right people with the right ads.

Learn More
More tips on how to use enhanced campaigns for display are available in the AdWords Help Center. To learn more on how you can take advantage of Enhanced Campaigns for Display, register for our upcoming webinar this Thursday March 21st, at 10am PST.

Posted by: Christian Oestlien, Product Management Director for the Google Display Network

In a multi-screen world, it’s increasingly important for advertisers to show relevant ads based on a user’s context: location, time of day, and device. We launched enhanced campaigns to help advertisers take full advantage of user context, maximizing the effectiveness of their ad campaigns.

We’ve been listening to your feedback, and in the next few weeks we’ll be launching new ValueTrack features for advertisers using keyword level URLs.  These features will help advertisers achieve specific conversion and ROI goals, and make the upgrade to enhanced campaigns easier by:

1. Directing users to a device-specific landing page at the keyword level.
2. Enabling measurement of the effectiveness of campaigns by device.

What’s new

We’ve added a new parameter, {ifnotmobile:[value]}, where you can replace [value] with text that will then show up in your URL when the user clicks on your ad from a computer or tablet. We’re also changing the existing ValueTrack parameter {ifmobile:[value]}.  This parameter will now insert the specified value into the URL only if the user clicks from a mobile device.

In this post, we will discuss using the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters to direct users to a device-specific landing page.  We will also discuss performance tracking by device, and how the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters differ from the existing device parameter.

Example 1: Redirecting users to device-specific landing pages

Responsive web design is often a good fit for advertisers who provide device-optimized experiences to their users. If you must specify different landing pages depending on device, you have two options. If the landing page varies by creative, you can simply create mobile-optimized ads by setting the device preference to “Mobile.”  If the device-specific landing page varies for each keyword, then you can use the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters in the keyword-level destination URL.  It is important to remember that if you are using the ifmobile parameter today, it will no longer insert a value into the URL for tablet clicks.  The new parameter ifnotmobile will now insert a value into the URL for tablet and desktop/laptop.

Let’s say you want to send mobile users to “m.example.com/widgets,” and desktop and tablet users to “www.example.com/widgets” for the keyword “widgets.”  In this scenario you could set the destination URL for this keyword to:

{ifmobile:m.example.com/widgets}{ifnotmobile:www.example.com/widgets}

Example 2: Tracking performance by device

If you want to track performance by device, the existing device parameter will work for most cases.  Using device inserts an “m”, “t”, or “c” into the destination URL, depending on whether the user clicked from a mobile device, tablet, or desktop/laptop computer. If your tracking system requires different internal ids for the same keyword on different devices, then you may need to use the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters.

For the keyword “widgets”, let’s say you have assigned an internal keyword id of “df32” for desktops and tablets and “df33” for mobile devices. You can set the keyword-level destination URL to:

www.example.com/widgets?kwid={ifnotmobile:df32}{ifmobile:df33}

Then, if the user clicks from a desktop or tablet, the landing page is:

www.example.com/widgets?kwid=df32

and for a mobile click:

www.example.com/widgets?kwid=df33

Success in action

Advertisers are upgrading to enhanced campaigns and seeing strong results.  VivaStreet in France, the 4th largest free classified website in the world, upgraded all of their campaigns within the two weeks after launch.  When they upgraded, they increased their mobile bid adjustment to 125% and saw overall conversions increase by 34%.  After seeing the positive results, VivaStreet went on to increase their mobile bid adjustment to 140%.  By using ValueTrack parameters, you can also direct users to device-specific content and measure the effect it has on conversions.

We appreciate the feedback we have received on enhanced campaigns and encourage you to continue helping us understand how to make a great product.  Please join us on March 21st at 10:00AM PST (1:00PM EST) for the latest in our enhanced campaigns webinar series, EC 205, covering enhanced campaigns and the Google Display Network.

Posted by: Karen Yao, Senior Product Manager, AdWords