Enhanced Campaigns for Display: Powerful Bidding Tools for a Multi-Device World

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

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

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Enhanced campaigns: Improving online and offline results with location bid adjustments and offer extensions

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

April 11 update: Offer extensions are now available and can be shown in the UK.

With AdWords, you’ve been able to run campaigns in targeted geographic locations and attach your local business address to your search ads using location extensions. Now, new location-oriented features in enhanced campaigns are rolling out globally to help you achieve even better results with AdWords – online and offline. Read on to learn how to:

• Improve campaign results using location bid adjustments, whether your customers buy online or offline.
• More easily reach customers that are near your business locations. 
• Drive more offline purchases and measurable in-store traffic with search ads using offer extensions.

For a guided walkthrough, tips and Q&A on using these new location-based features and offer extensions, please register and join us at this week’s Learn with Google webinar on enhanced campaigns this Thursday, March 7, at 10am PST.

Geotarget broadly with selective bid adjustments for improved results

Whether your business is online-only, offline-only, or multi-channel, you can improve your overall results by using a broad location target to cover your entire potential market while refining your bids in select areas. With legacy campaigns, you’d need to set up a new campaign for every location you wanted to bid differently on. Now, with enhanced campaigns, it’s simple to increase or lower your bids by a certain percent for any location target in your campaign.

In the AdWords interface, click Locations on the Settings tab, and then click on the bid adjustment column to the right of a location target to increase or decrease your bid. You can also make location bid adjustments with the latest version of AdWords Editor.

Setting a location bid adjustment (click to expand)

To optimize with selective bid adjustments using the AdWords interface:

1. Click on the “Location details” button and select “What triggered your ad.” 
2. Toggle the View button to slice your campaign performance data, including conversion data, by different geographic levels (example screen).
3. Sort or filter to focus on the locations you want to optimize. 
4.  Select one or more locations. 
5. Click the “Add targets and set bid adjustment” button.

For more advanced optimization, you might pair your AdWords reporting with your company’s data on customer value by geography to adjust bids for different locations.

Example 1: A commercial maintenance company targets a 20 mile radius around downtown Denver. The marketing director might know that it costs 20% less to sell to and service customers who are within 10 miles of downtown. He can improve his results by increasing his bids by 20% for customers within 10 miles of downtown Denver, since these leads are more profitable. 

Example 2: An online-only financial services company has modeled its average customer lifetime value by zip code. The company’s search specialist has been asked to achieve an average 8:1 return on ad spend (ROAS), which they define as average lifetime value divided by average cost per lead. The specialist downloads data from AdWords with cost per lead by zip code and pairs it with lifetime value for each matching zip code (example data). She looks for opportunities to improve her results by lowering bids in zip codes where ROAS is below the target and increasing bids in zip codes where ROAS is above the target. She makes her bid adjustment decisions in the spreadsheet and implements them in her enhanced campaign, re-checking the ROAS and volume impact for a few weeks and making changes as necessary. With legacy campaigns, she would have to set up a new campaign for every zip code with different bids, increasing the level of campaign management complexity and effort required.

Experienced search marketers know that bids are an important contributor to campaign results, along with ads, extensions, keywords, and landing pages, so they’re sure to measure periodically and make adjustments. Remember, targeting too narrowly can limit your reach, clicks and conversions, so consider using selective location bid adjustments while targeting broadly. More tips on optimizing your campaigns using location are available in the AdWords Help Center.

Reach customers near your offline business locations more easily

If you operate an offline or multi-channel business, you can use the new location extensions targeting to reach potential customers or increase your bids when they're near your locations with just a few clicks. It uses the location extensions you’ve already created and a radius that you specify to create targets around your businesses.

Setting a location extension target (click to expand)

You can then assign a bid adjustment to your location extension target to increase your ad’s visibility when customers are near your business, and potentially more likely to shop and buy from you (step-by-step directions).

Example 3: A national multi-channel retail business has been running AdWords campaigns to sell directly online and to drive people to its 400 local stores. The account has already set up location extensions, but it wants to improve its ad visibility even more when customers are searching within a short distance from its stores. With just a few clicks, its search agency adds a single “2.0 mile around each location extension” target and sets a +25% bid adjustment.

 Setting a bid adjustment for a location extension target (click to expand)

Drive measurable offline purchases and in-store traffic with offer extensions

Showing a potential customer the right offer at the right time can be the difference that brings them into a local business to buy from you. Offer extensions help you drive offline purchases and in-store traffic with a redeemable offer shown with your search ads across devices. You can use them whether you’re a retailer, manufacturer, or other type of business (currently shown to users in the U.S. only).

Desktop offer extension example

Mobile offer extension example

When customers click your offer, they'll see your offer details, business logo, and nearby stores (see example below). They can print your offer or save it to their Google Offers account for in-store redemption. At the point of sale, customers redeem the offer using either a text code or a bar code.

Offer details example on desktop (click to expand)

You pay for clicks on an offer just like a click on your ad headline – there are no fees for each redemption. We’ll also remind customers about unused offers through email to improve the redemption rate. Offer extensions are available at the campaign or ad group level. Check out more details and tips on offer extensions usage and reporting in the Help Center.

Please stay tuned for more details on the availability of offer extensions in other countries and improvements with offer redemption reporting. We welcome your feedback on these features and others in enhanced campaigns using this form.

Posted by Smita Hashim, Group Product Manager

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Enhancing AdWords for a constantly connected world

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

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 — 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:

• Website
  
• Help Center
  
• Upgrade videos and guides
  
• AdWords Community forum
  

Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the new features with tips and best practices on the Inside AdWords blog and on our Google+ page. We’d love your feedback.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering

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Boost your results with Dynamic Search Ads, now available to all

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Last October we introduced Dynamic Search Ads, an efficient new way to target relevant searches with ads generated directly from your website. Now, after a year of refinements and successful beta testing, we’re making Dynamic Search Ads available to all advertisers in the next few days.

Boosting Results, Efficiently
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) generate incremental leads and sales by promoting your business on more commercial queries than you’re reaching today. After all, even well-managed AdWords campaigns containing thousands and thousands of keywords can miss relevant searches, experience delays getting ads written for new products, and get out of sync with what's actually available on your website.

If you’re not already familiar with how Dynamic Search Ads work, you may want to read about the targeting controls available, reporting and optimization features, and support for third-party PPC tracking.

Successful Beta Test
Many of our beta testers set up DSA to run alongside their existing large-scale search campaigns. And DSA delivered.

• Incremental and efficient results. On average, Dynamic Search Ads boosted beta testers’ traffic and conversion volume from AdWords by 10% and outperformed their non-exact keywords by 10% on clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and cost per action (CPA).
• Success. A few examples of successful DSA beta testers include:
• Jonathan Meager, Marketing Manager at Gear4music (.pdf case study)
• Matt Wilkinson, Director of Search and Media at Rosetta and Steve Baruch, VP of eCommerce at MSC Industrial Supply (.pdf case study)
• Larry Cotter, GM at Apartment Home Living (video case study).

We also made numerous product improvements during the beta test including:

• Bid auto-optimization. Since one of our chief goals for DSA was more results with less work, we devised a system to automatically ratchet bids downward whenever specific queries for an advertiser produce lower conversion rates or user engagement levels. As a result, your ROI for Dynamic Search Ads can improve over time automatically. 
• Website crawl frequency. Any indexed page with a matched DSA impression will be crawled at least once daily (update: please see clarification below). Pages with more impressions and clicks may be crawled more frequently. So DSA will now better reflect the latest products and inventory conditions on your web site. That means more clicks, higher conversion rates and better ROI.
• Mobile and tablet support. Given the growing importance of mobile campaigns, we developed full support for DSA on mobile and tablet platforms.
• Extension support. Dynamic Search Ads support the same ad extensions as other search ads.  
• Conversion Optimizer compatibility. Once enabled, many beta test participants reported success using the combination of DSA and Conversion Optimizer to simultaneously expand their campaign reach while automatically optimizing bids to meet their average CPA goal.

Get Started
Now any business interested in boosting their AdWords results can try DSA. You can find starting points on creating a DSA campaign and setting up dynamic targets in the AdWords help center.

If you’re interested in learning even more about Dynamic Search Ads, please stay tuned to our blog. More information and an invitation to join us for a Hangout on Air will be coming soon.

Posted by Tarun Jain, AdWords Product Manager

Update (10/29/12):
Because of our own prioritization to crawl pages with more impressions and clicks more frequently, as well as other potential limitations on crawl frequency determined by your web host or internet service provider, there may be some indexed pages with a matched DSA impression that are not crawled each day. We’re sorry for any mixup this may have caused.

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Make better decisions in AdWords with your Google Analytics data

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

If you’re already using Google Analytics, you know how useful it can be to help you make better decisions and improve your online marketing. Now, we’re making it possible to use your Google Analytics data right in AdWords. After setting up AdWords to import your Google Analytics data, you’ll have access to Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit, and Average Visit Duration columns directly in the AdWords interface. With more performance data available right where you’re managing your campaigns, you can make better informed decisions and improve your AdWords ROI.

Using your Google Analytics data
With Google Analytics you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in AdWords to improve your results.

• Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
• Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
• Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting. Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it. Since you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily set up A/B testing on the landing page using a Content Experiment.
  

Success in action
Casamundo, the biggest vacation rental listing service in Europe, has been an early tester of this new feature. They've used Google Analytics since 2008 and over the past 5 years they've grown and refined their AdWords campaigns to over 50 million active keywords across 10 languages. Their analysis shows that converting visitors research vacation rentals over an average of 7.4 visits, so understanding whether their ads and keywords can create strong engagement is vital to their business and how they optimize their AdWords campaigns. Seeing high bounce rates and low average time on site for a keyword means that the offer or destination page might not be a good match for that keyword.

Having easier access to Google Analytics data right in AdWords has helped Torge Kahl, Online Marketing Manager, at Casamundo make better decisions and make optimizations more quickly. According to Torge:

“The combination of using both Google AdWords and Google Analytics has proved to be the perfect set of tools for us to achieve our goals, and we're very happy to see this combination get more integrated and powerful. Using Analytics data right within AdWords has let me better optimize our account and significantly improve the return on our AdWords investment."

More details
Please visit the AdWords Help Center for step-by-step directions on how to connect your Google Analytics profile data to your AdWords account and for more details.

To exchange tips and ask questions of others, please visit the AdWords community. You can always contact AdWords support for help if you need it.

Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

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