Author Archives: Nicole Burgan

Breaking Down the #1 Barrier to Brand Building Online

As I’ve shared in the past, brands are starting to embrace digital in a big way, but there still remains one big hurdle to digital becoming the medium of choice for brands: measurement. This unsexy topic doesn’t win any awards at Cannes, but it is top of mind for marketers and we hear about it from our partners all the time. In fact, according a survey we conducted last year, only about half of marketers consider their current brand measurement metrics effective.

Our ultimate goal continues to be offering measurement for brands that is as meaningful as the click has become for performance-driven marketers. I’m incredibly excited to see this start to come to fruition across the industry. Today at the Digital Media Summit, I focused on one of our efforts I’m particularly excited about, Brand Lift.

Brand Lift
We started testing Brand Lift earlier this year as a way for marketers to measure their video and display campaigns against objectives like brand awareness and ad recall - in near-real time at significant scale. We’re gradually rolling out this service across both YouTube and the Google Display Network. We’ve also improved Brand Lift: advertisers can now measure whether their ads drive greater interest in their brands, as indicated by increases in organic, brand-related searches on Google. Here are two examples of how brands have deployed Brand Lift in their campaigns:

eHealth
eHealth, the country’s largest health insurance marketplace, has traditionally been a direct response oriented advertiser, but wanted to try a brand-building display campaign. Through Brand Lift, they uncovered a 45% increase in branded searches and a 33% lift in all health insurance-related search terms for consumers who saw the eHealth display campaign. Rather than having to wait until the campaign had completed to find out what drove results, eHealth was able to find out mid-flight, and as a result, expanded their display campaign.

Oscar Mayer
Oscar Mayer recently pushed the envelope from traditional CPG creative and debuted this funny, sophisticated ad to promote their bacon. Brand Lift showed that this ad generated a 19% lift in brand awareness (notable because this brand is already well known) and 112% lift in ad recall among those who saw the ad. Perhaps most amazing, searches for their brand increased more than 1000% and searches for their product went up 2000%. Not only did the data validate their bold and risky creative direction, but it also provided some invaluable insights. For instance, lift in ad recall for women was twice as high as for men. And, lift in brand awareness was more than ten times higher for 45-54 year olds than it was for 55-64 year olds. Oscar Mayer was able to adjust their audience targeting and media strategy based on these insights in real time, while the campaign was still running.

The Road Ahead
Having spent my career in digital, working with brands, I’ve seen the barriers to digital branding fall down, one by one. From audience scale and targeting, to creative freedom and flexibility, and now, the ability to measure and act on audience behaviors and campaign performance in near real-time - the needs of brands can finally be fully realized online.

-- posted by Neal Mohan, VP, Display Advertising

Infographic: 4 Ways Brands Win with Programmatic

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog

It is an exciting time to be a brand marketer. In today’s world of constant connectivity, there has never been a greater opportunity for brands to reach their target audience in meaningful ways. But brand building in a multi-screen age has its challenges, causing brands to search for new solutions to meet their marketing objectives. Leading brands are turning to programmatic to cut through the clutter and make one-to-one connections with consumers, at scale.

In this infographic, “Programmatic: The Brand Era,” we explore 4 ways that programmatic makes it possible for brands to run more effective digital marketing campaigns - connecting them 1:1 with their audiences, helping them embrace cross-screen, engage with rich formats like video, and measuring exactly what matters.

All of these factors are helping brands embrace programmatic buying as the technology evolves from a “nicety” to a “must-have”.

Programmatic helps brands win in the moments that matter.

See the full infographic here.

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Diapers to Diplomas: What’s on the Minds of New Parents, on Think with Google

Having a baby is a big event, and many new and soon-to-be parents turn to the web to find out what they should expect when they’re expecting. According to a recent survey, they do twice as many searches as non-parents. With Mother’s Day just behind us and Father’s Day fast approaching, Think with Google looked into the data to see what we can learn from the search habits of new parents.

Read the full story on Think with Google.

Join us for a conversation on the future of digital advertising

Cross- posted from the DoubleClick for Advertisers Blog

Digital is no longer just another marketing channel. It’s a medium that’s changing the art of storytelling and reinventing the way companies connect with consumers.

How will digital advertising evolve next? You’re invited to tune in live as industry leaders tackle the question at DoubleClick’s annual event on digital trends.

Speakers include:
  • Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation
  • Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer at Google
  • Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising at Google

Wednesday, June 4
9:30 am PDT - 10:45 am PDT / 12:30 pm EDT - 1:45 pm EDT

Time not convenient? When you register you’ll receive a link to watch the recording on demand.

We hope you can join!

Here’s footage from last year’s event to give you a taste of the 2014 live stream:


Insights at your fingertips, for more effective campaigns

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog

Today we are excited to announce Insights, a brand new, beautiful reporting tool that provides marketers and agencies with auto-generated insights about campaign performance across channels to help optimize future campaigns.

To ensure their messages are seen by the right users, today, advertisers spend hours analyzing data, or digging through spreadsheets to find meaningful campaign insights. It shouldn’t be this way. In today’s constantly connected world, where we reach consumers across many screens and channels, real-time, actionable insights are more critical than ever. However, fragmented tools and reporting are major pain points that prevent this, according to a study conducted with the Boston Consulting Group.

Actionable insights at a glance

The Insights tool allows advertisers to view campaign performance at a glance, without having to dig through data or build complex reports manually. You can learn about campaign factors that you undervalued, or ones you may have overlooked. This new tool helps you answer questions like:

  • Which publisher had the lowest cost-per-action (CPA) in previous campaigns for the same advertiser?
  • What time of day generates the highest cost-per-click (CPC)?
  • How does campaign performance vary by mobile platform?
  • Do certain creatives perform better on certain browsers?
  • Am I maximizing exposure on high-performing placements?
Interactive design for faster and more efficient media planning

Real-time visualizations and graphs replace manual spreadsheets, showing you detailed information faster. The new Insights tool in reporting is highly interactive, with the ability to drill down based on the following:
  • Dimensions
    • Publisher; Placement; Creative; Geo; Platform type; Browser
  • Goals
    • Click-through rate; Cost per click; Conversions per impression; Conversions per click; Cost per activity; Rich media interaction rate; Rich media click rate; Video completion rate
Over the coming weeks and months, you will see more and more dimensions added into the tool that will help you surface key insights for smarter campaign management.

Insights across channels

This new tool includes data across both reservations and programmatic buys. Today, the data is presented together across channels, and in the coming months, we will provide data that is broken out between your reservations and programmatic buys.


Matthew McIntyre, Senior Media Manager at Unique Digital, told us about the benefits they are seeing with the new tool:
“The new Insights tool is really exciting for us as an agency because it lets us see where and how we can make improvements in our campaigns almost immediately. The customizable goals and visualizations allow us to tailor the dashboard for every campaign and instantly make decisions which will drive better results for our clients. The insight provided on performance gives our planners more time and clearer data to make future media plans faster and with more clarity on how to drive the best performance.”
Our goal with DoubleClick Digital Marketing is to integrate your digital marketing efforts seamlessly, so your teams can effectively manage your cross-channel campaigns. With data that is fresh, de-duplicated, and auto-generated, the Insights tool takes us a step closer to this goal.
Insights is available to all DoubleClick Campaign Manager customers, globally, so if you’re still using DoubleClick for Advertisers, ask your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

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Introducing Video Advertising advanced certification on Google Partners

We’re excited to announce that the new Video Advertising advanced certification is now available to members of Google Partners in the United States – and coming soon to other countries.

In October 2013 we launched Google Partners – a program that provides agencies with the resources, training and support to help businesses succeed online. Over the last few months, we’ve been looking for more ways to recognize agencies’ specialized knowledge in certain areas of digital advertising.

This new certification is designed to recognize users with expertise in video advertising on YouTube and the Google Display Network and help them share that knowledge with their clients.

Starting today, AdWords certified members of Google Partners in the U.S. can take the Video Advertising exam to earn advanced certification.

To learn more about this advanced certification, please visit the Partners Help Center.

Posted by the Google Partners team

New upgrade option for Shopping campaigns

Earlier this month, we shared a few success stories on Shopping campaigns, our new campaign type for Product Listing Ads (PLAs), and that the regular PLA campaign type will retire in late August 2014.

To upgrade to Shopping campaigns, we encourage you to create a Shopping campaign from scratch and then customize your product groups and bids from there. That way, you can choose how granular you’d like to get and ensure all your inventory is included in your Shopping campaign.

However, if you would like to base your Shopping campaign on a regular PLA campaign, we’re introducing an option today to help you upgrade.


After setting up your Shopping campaign, you’ll be taken to a new page to create ad groups. Here, you’ll see two options: the ability to start fresh with one ad group or create one or many ad groups based on a regular PLA campaign.

Note that some parts of a regular PLA campaigns aren’t transferable to a Shopping campaign, like product targets that use AdWords labels or groupings. If none of your PLA campaigns are transferrable, you might not see this option.

Keep in mind
With Shopping campaigns, you no longer need to create separate ad groups or product targets to track your impressions, clicks and cost. You can analyze and report on your PLA performance by product attribute or by individual items in the Dimensions tab, regardless of your campaign structure.

As a reminder, all PLA advertisers will need to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining regular PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to share more information and tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale.

To learn more about Shopping campaigns and how to upgrade, here are a few resources:

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

How Search Insights Can Shape Your Event Strategy

The Olympics. Bonnaroo. “Adele Dazeem.” Events and key moments from these events take on a life of their own in the digital realm. Every search, social post, website visit, download and video view provides a window into consumer interests and needs. Think with Google looks at how analyzing search data before, during and after an event can help guide marketers towards a thoughtful event strategy. Read the full article.
For tips on how to harness more search-driven insights, check out the full collection on Think with Google.

Who Made the Cut? March YouTube Ads Leaderboard

March 2014 had no shortage of great ads with big talent, with Keira Knightley vamping for Chanel and Terry Crews going wild for Old Spice. But there’s only room for one at the top of our YouTube Ads Leaderboard.

See who made the top 10 and watch the videos on Think with Google.

Ads are determined for the YouTube Ads Leaderboard by an algorithm that factors in paid views, organic views and audience retention (how much of a video people watched). For additional coverage of the YouTube Ads Leaderboard, go to Adweek.com.