Author Archives: Nicole Burgan

Celebrate the most creative, engaging, and unique ads of 2014

1 billion minutes watched. 425 million views. 2 million likes. These are just a few of the massive numbers driven by the top ten ads on YouTube in 2014. It’s been an amazing year for digital advertising, with some of the most popular content on YouTube coming from brands. Even in the age of the skip button, viewers are now choosing to watch ads more than ever before. That’s because brands are making entertaining, original, and inventive videos—ads that are truly worth watching.

Think with Google is celebrating the best of the best with its year-end recap—featuring the top 10 ads and top 10 movie trailers of the year, along with the annual YouTube Ads Rewind video, which identifies the biggest themes from the year in digital video advertising, and shows a few ways that brands are breaking the traditional advertising mold:

  • Creating longer videos. The rising length of successful ads is a remarkable new trend, counterintuitive to advertising of the past. Conventional wisdom tell us brands must be brief—but when people choose to watch an ad, there’s no time limit. The top 10 ads on YouTube this year averaged 3 minutes in length—that’s 47% longer than the videos on the Leaderboard in 2013.
  • Shaping the cultural conversation.  While yesterday’s ads reinforced social norms, today’s top ads often rethink them. For instance, when Always embraced the phrase “Like A Girl” in its 2014 video, they earned 300,000 likes, shares and comments in 30 days on YouTube alone. Today's viewers are looking for bold, provocative campaigns. Brands are responding with content that makes people think.
  • Utilizing live events. Brands are increasingly trying to reach consumers online before, during and after live sporting events. And for good reason—the top 10 Super Bowl and World Cup ads this year earned a remarkable 14 million hours of watch time, with 75% of those hours consumed before or after the events themselves. 
  • Collaborating with creators. Marketers are looking to partner with experienced YouTube creators to develop original content that best suits the platform. Friskies, for instance, teamed with BuzzFeed (no stranger to adorable cat videos), to create its “Dear Kitten” ads—which is now the most-watched video on BuzzFeed’s channel.

See more of the year’s top ads on Think With Google, and learn how to create content that people actually choose to watch.

Making mobile easier: Lightbox ads now available across screens

Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog

Creating ads that can run -- and look beautiful -- across the ever-expanding universe of the world’s more than 2 billion smart phones and tablets1 is complex to say the least. Last month, we announced that we'd be bringing our popular Lightbox format to mobile devices. Today we're happy to share that these reinvented Lightbox ads are now available for all AdWords advertisers globally.

Bringing Lightbox Ads Across Screens

With Lightbox ads, it's easy to use existing creative assets to create beautiful, engaging ads that look great on any screen size. These ads pull assets from your YouTube channel, can use uploaded images, or your Google Maps listings to build full screen experiences within a standard Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) ad size. The ability to integrate content from other Google products - like Shopping listings, G+ pages -  is coming soon. Because these ads are built in HTML5, using responsive design, the assets dynamically fill the publisher site, mobile app, screen, or device -- desktop and mobile.

Lightbox ads are great at driving brand consideration because they’re billed on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) basis. This helps your digital display dollars go further because your brand’s experience automatically finds a qualified audience -- and you don’t pay if people don’t expand and engage with the creative experience. This expansion happens when people hover over your ad for two seconds to expand it on a desktop, or tap to expand it on a mobile phone or tablet. Plus, the optimization engine behind Lightbox ads learns over time so your campaigns get better at reaching the audience most likely to engage with your message as your campaign runs. Like all of Google's display ad offerings, Lightbox ads work seamlessly with our audience solutions and can be measured using Brand Lift reporting.

See how seamless it is to build Lightbox ads with images, videos, and maps, by watching the video below.



Testing Lightboxes with Important Purchases

For 12 years, Universal McCann and Sony have been working together to tell the stories of everything from the newest box office releases to cutting edge consumer technology. They joined our beta test for Lightbox ads to market both.

Sony Electronics is using Lightbox ads to advertise their 4K Ultra TV, their Xperia smartphone, their Playstation, their soundbar, and more. Sony Pictures is offering people the preview of their new movie, Annie, in theaters on December 19th, featuring the trailer as well as an awesome emoji inspired sing-along video.

"We chose to use Lightbox ads for our Q4 campaigns because we needed our content to achieve scale across the web. Our clients spend a lot of time, money and energy creating video assets and making sure they get seen by the most qualified, engaged users is our top priority. Google’s new Lightbox ads help us make sure that happens." said Deborah Gaudette, Senior Vice President, Digital, Universal McCann.




Kate Spade, Ford Italy, Boots UK, Jabong India and Pepsi Australia are also running successful Lightbox campaigns.

By launching this update to Lightbox ads, our goal is to free brand marketers to spend less time dealing with mobile  complexity, so you can do what you do best -- engage users with a compelling brand story. We’ll be adding more functionality to this format over the course of 2015. Stay tuned for more enhancements to Lightbox ads in the near future!

Learn more about building your own Lightbox ads in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by James Beser, Group Product Manager, Display Ads
1http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Smartphone-Users-Worldwide-Will-Total-175-Billion-2014/1010536

Join us as we click through AdWords in 2014

Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog

Whether you’re building out new campaigns or making critical budget decisions, we want to help you start off the new year with everything you need to connect with your customers, wherever they may be online: across the web, on mobile-sites, and in apps.

On December 10, 2014 at 12:30pm PT / 3:30pm ET, AdWords product managers and I will be hosting a half hour livestream to review product innovations that were announced in April that are now fully available for advertisers to use in the AdWords UI.


Join us to:

  • Understand how app developers are driving installs and re-engagement across search, display, and YouTube on all those shiny new devices people will unwrap this holiday season.
  • Learn how LendingTree and Blinds.com are making more informed business decisions by measuring cross-device conversions and phone calls.
  • Discover essential best practices for automated bidding and app promotion.
  • Wrap up the year with an announcement you won’t want to miss. We think you’ll like it.

We hope you’ll join us December 10th, here on the Inside AdWords blog as we click through AdWords in 2014.

Posted by Jerry Dischler, Vice President, Product Management, AdWords

How many ads are actually seen? New benchmarks for viewability

Yesterday, we revamped DoubleClick Verification to provide marketers a robust solution to understand and control where their campaigns appear, including if they were viewable. Today, we’re releasing new data from our ad platforms to shed light on the state of ad viewability.

With the advancement of new technologies we now know that many display ads that are served never actually have the opportunity to be seen by a user. In fact in a recent study of Active View data by Google, we found that 56.1% of all ads served were not measured viewable.(footnote) Yet, the average publisher’s viewability is 50.2%. This means a small number of publishers are serving the majority of non-viewable impressions and dragging down the served impression viewability average by almost 6%.


As advertisers shift to paying for viewable, rather than served impressions, it’s more important than ever to understand what drives the viewability of ads. To see all “5 factors of viewability” check out the full infographic and study at thinkwithgoogle.com.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager

Protect your brand and budget: 8 major updates to DoubleClick Verification

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick blog

Today we’re excited to announce a complete revamp of DoubleClick Verification to help marketers protect their brand and budget, and empower them with confidence to invest in digital.

As a digital marketer today, you can deliver the right message to the right user at the right time and place. But with the rich options in formats, inventory sources, and types of buys, it’s crucial that your messages reach your audience as intended, and that you're getting what you planned and paid for.

We launched DoubleClick Verification in 2012 to ensure just this. Seamlessly integrated into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, DoubleClick Verification was built to give advertisers more confidence with their  digital investment. It’s designed to be a natural extension of campaign workflow, to be a part of every campaign to ensure that brands and budgets are protected. Today we’re excited to share with you 8 major new features in DoubleClick Verification.

Robust insights: Verification covers all the potential brand safety and waste issues that can hamper a digital campaign. This means you get insights about contextual and geographic issues, viewability, and spam and fraud.
  • Custom classifiers allow you to create custom categories based on what’s suitable for your brand. DoubleClick Verification has always reported on a rich set of predefined, industry-standard categories that give you contextual insight into where your ads served - like adult, violence, alcohol, politics, etc.  Custom categories go beyond this by allowing you to specify more granular categories. For example, an airline may want to avoid advertising next to content about plane crashes specifically.
  • Digital Content Labels: Just as movies are given ratings such as PG, PG-13, and R, websites, videos, and mobile apps are classified according to the brand safety of the content. You can now target inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager with labels that range from "DL-G", which corresponds to content that's suitable for general audiences, to "DL-MA", which corresponds to content suitable only for mature audiences. Digital Content Labels provide a consistent definition for brand safety across all Google advertising products - including DoubleClick, YouTube, GDN & AdMob.
  • Viewability and Report Builder integration: Active View, Google’s solution for measuring and buying viewable impressions, is now built directly into DoubleClick Verification, as an important part of the solution to analyze and eliminate all potential waste. In addition, you can now add Verification data to Report Builder reports, allowing for more customization and the ability to schedule reports.
Coverage across formats, screens, and channels: DoubleClick Verification works in all the ways your campaigns work - protecting your brand in all scenarios across formats, screens, and channels.
  • Video verification (coming soon): With double-digit growth predicted for digital video advertising for the next four years*, video verification is critical for marketers. You will now have access to insights unique to video like player size and location. This means you’ll know whether your video ads are mostly displayed in large players, front and center, or in little players off to the side.
Objectivity and transparency: We’ve built DoubleClick Verification to ensure utmost objectivity and  transparency.
  • Updated spam filtering & fraud detection: At Google, we take fraud protection very seriously. With over 100 engineers committed to this effort, we removed more than 350 million bad ads from our system last year**, and in February, we acquired spider.io, a company that has built a world-class ad fraud fighting operation. DoubleClick Verification draws from Google’s extensive spam and fraud expertise, and we’ve recently updated spam filtering with pre- and post-bid filtering capabilities. With a growing set of sophisticated filters, pre-bid blocking avoids buying fraudulent impressions in the first place, and post-bid filtering automatically purges fraudulent impressions from reporting and billing, so you get accurate reporting and don’t have to pay for these impressions.
Action in real-time: DoubleClick Verification empowers action in real-time through automation.
  • Ad blocking automatically prevents ads from serving in unwanted locations and contexts across display, mobile web, and video inventory. Serve-time blocking protects your reservation-based campaigns in real-time. Pre-bid blocking protects your programmatic buys by blocking the bids on impressions that would serve in undesired contexts. And your settings are synced between your reservation and programmatic buys.
  • Custom alerts and notifications deliver straight to your inbox exactly the information you need to know to ensure that your campaigns are running as expected and that you're getting what you paid for. For example, you can set a preference to receive an alert if more than 5% of your ads appear on violent content, or if more than 3% of your campaign is serving in off-target geographies.
MEC, one of the world’s leading media agencies, has been testing many of these features - including ad blocking - and has already seen great success. Nick Foord, Analytics Consultant, told us, "Buying digital media is much more complex today than it used to be. Transparency into where ads are serving is critical to ensuring our ads are being served in the right place, and next to the right content.” Steve Richards, Digital Technology Manager added, “Appearing in an inappropriate place online could really damage a brand’s reputation. Ad blocking has removed a huge amount of risk for us, and allowed us to take a proactive approach to protecting our clients’ brands.” Look for more details on MEC's success story in the coming weeks.

To learn more about DoubleClick Verification:
  • Download the new whitepaper, “5 Keys to Protecting Brand and Budget,” which guides marketers through the process of evaluating a winning verification solution.
  • Watch the training videos on Ad Blocking and Active View in Verification, and look out for additional deep dives on the blog in the coming weeks.
Stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

*“US TV Ad Market Still Growing More than Digital Video,” eMarketer, June 12, 2014. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-TV-Ad-Market-Still-Growing-More-than-Digital-Video/1010923
**“Busting Bad Advertising Practices — 2013 Year in Review,” Google, January 2014. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/01/busting-bad-advertising-practices-2013.html

Richer mobile shopping experience this holiday season

Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog

More than ever, people are searching on their devices at all hours and places. As a result, we’ve seen a 3.5X increase in shopping searches coming from smartphones year-on-year, and this continues to grow.1 And we’re currently sending more mobile traffic to retailers per week from Google Shopping than we did during the peak of last holiday season.2 So we're making it easier to find the information and images people need to make shopping better on mobile.

Providing richer mobile shopping experiences

Shoppers often want to see more detailed information about a product before making a purchase decision. Now, when they search for a specific product on their smartphone or tablet, we show an expandable product card with rich product content such as reviews and details for that item. For example, on a query such as the Nexus 10, results will show the image of the product along with merchants who carry this tablet, detailed information on the product, and product reviews from customers.

Product card on mobile

And for shoppers who procrastinate buying gifts until Christmas Eve (or can't wait for presents to arrive in the mail) we’re bringing the local shopping experience to more people with local inventory ads on tablet. Shoppers can now find products nearby using any device, which means that advertisers can promote their local products throughout the holiday season - even after the holiday shipping cutoffs have passed.

Local inventory ad, local storefront and related items on tablet

We're also helping to bring products to life on Google Shopping by allowing people to view images from multiple sources and explore products from any angle. Shoppers can now rotate selected products in 360 degrees to see them in more detail on mobile.

Nexus10_3D@2x.gif
360 degree views on mobile

To ensure your products are visible to smartphone shoppers this holiday season, be sure to take advantage of Auction insights segmented by device. Evaluate how you stack up against your competition, identify missed opportunities and refine your bid modifier strategy to gain a greater share of voice on mobile. Check out our recent post on new reporting launches for more information on new insights now available in Shopping campaigns.

Post Posted by Jennifer Liu, Product Manager, Google Shopping


1Global Google Internal Data, Week of 10/25-10/31 ‘13 to ‘14. Shopping searches are defined here as queries from a smartphone that trigger a Product Listing Ad.
2 Global Google Internal Data, Week of 12/2-12/8 ‘13 compared to 11/1-11/7 ‘14. Mobile traffic is defined here as traffic from smartphones.

New ways to rev up your Shopping campaigns

Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog

Want to get more impressions and clicks for your Shopping campaigns? Or want to know how to spot missed opportunities in your bidding strategy and find your mobile share of voice? We introduced competitive landscape data last year so you can start answering those burning questions, and today, we’re excited to announce a handful of additions that’ll help you find new ways to optimize your Shopping campaigns and engage shoppers on all devices.
  • Auction insights report lets you compare your Product Listing Ad (PLA) performance to other advertisers participating in the same auctions as you are. With impression share, overlap rate and outranking share, you’re able to see trends amongst your peers and strategic opportunities to improve your bidding strategies.


    • Search impression share has been revamped to be more useful and aligned with text ads. You can now analyze your share of voice at the granularity you want with Search impression share in the Dimensions tab. You’ll know which campaigns are limited by a low budget with Lost IS (budget) and which ones need further optimization with Lost IS (rank). Note that we now calculate Search impression share at account level so you may notice a change in impression share between October and November.


      • Device and time segmentation are available to help you refine your bid modifier strategy. You can see if your peers received more mobile impressions than you over the weekend with the Auction insights report segmented by device and day.

      • Bid simulator columns show you what your advertising results could’ve been had you set different bids. You can add these columns in your Product groups tab and, for example, find product groups that’ll drive the most incremental clicks.

      • Flattened view of your product groups presents another way to analyze your performance. It allows you to sort your product groups within an ad group based on performance data and easily identify which to optimize. For example, you can sort by impression share, find a few product groups with the lowest impression share, and fine-tune those bids within a matter of clicks.

      We hope these additions will help you identify easy-wins for the holidays and unlock new, more actionable ways to optimize your Shopping campaigns. We’ll continue to explore other reporting needs so you have relevant and useful data at your fingertips. Visit our help center articles for more information on Auction insights, Search impression share, bid simulator columns, and the flattened product groups view.

      Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager, Google Shopping

      New Study: The Impact of Digital On In-Store Shopping

      Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog

      We've all heard the theories that people who do research online no longer care about the in-store experience … or don't even go to physical stores any more. Or that shoppers who use a smartphone in a store are looking to buy elsewhere.

      Google decided to find out how much of this is true. We've just run a research study with Ipsos MediaCT and Sterling Brands with the goal of discovering how smartphones and online information have changed the in-store experience.

      The results, as they say, may surprise you.

      The full details are available at Think With Google. But here's a sneak peek at what we learned.

      First, the study confirmed two things most of us have suspected:
      • Yes, today's consumers are better-informed than ever before. 
      • They crave information throughout the shopping process, and often use smartphones to get it.
      But we also learned that three pieces of "common wisdom" were really more like myths:

      Myth #1: Search results only send consumers to e-commerce sites.

      The reality: The things people find in search results actually can send them to local stores. In fact, 3 in 4 people who said they found local information in search results helpful also said what they learned made them more likely to visit a store.

      Myth #2: Once an in-store shopper starts looking at her smartphone, the store has lost her attention and her sale.

      The reality: In-store smartphone moments are actually a good opportunity for brick-and-mortar stores to connect with shoppers and to help them make a decision. 46% of those shoppers say they look at the retailer's own site or app for information. Only 30% look up details from a different retailer’s web site or app.

      Myth #3: With so much information available online, shoppers only go to stores to transact.

      The reality: Shoppers actually want more, not less, out of their in-store experience. They want informed, customized experiences. 69% of shoppers said they gathered information from physical stores at some point in their shopping cycle. The catch is that 2 out of 3 shoppers said they didn't find all the info they wanted.

      What does it all mean? Simply this: smartphones are a friend, not an enemy, to in-store shopping.

      There are new opportunities for brands and stores to engage with customers in creative ways before, during, and after the customer’s shopping journey — one that may begin online and end up in-store. Search results, mobile ads, and mobile sites and apps can be magnets that draw consumers into stores and engage them while they're there. Smartphones and online information can also be a powerful way to create customized experiences for the consumer.

      We discovered plenty of surprising insights in our study. See all the details at Think With Google. Plus, check out videos of Macy's, REI, and Sephora marketing execs sharing their approach for linking digital to store here.

      Posted by Bao Lam, Product Marketing Manager, Adwords


      1Google/Ipsos MediaCT/Sterling Brands, Digital Impact on In-Store Shopping, October 2014.

      Fighting Fraud: Protecting advertisers from buying hidden ads with DoubleClick Bid Manager

      Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

      Ad fraud is a serious threat to the advertising ecosystem. It’s one we’ve been deeply committed to solving over the years, investing significantly in technology and expertise to keep bad ads and bad traffic out of our ads systems. Today we’re adding to those investments with a new feature in DoubleClick Bid Manager that automatically prevents advertisers from buying hidden ad slots, built from our spider.io technology.

      What is a hidden ad?
      Many in the industry are familiar with ad viewability, which is a measure of whether an ad was actually shown on a screen. The vast majority of non-viewable ad impressions are legitimate ads that are intended to be seen by a user, but were not viewed due to various ways people interact with content on the web. Products like Active View help advertisers and publishers address this by giving actionable reporting on ad viewability.

      However, some bad actors deliberately hide ads to boost their ad impression numbers, resulting in advertisers paying for ads that have no chance of ever being seen. Below are some of many different methods employed by bad actors who create these “hidden” ads, one type of fraud identified in the IAB’s Anti-Fraud Principles and Proposed Taxonomy:

      Bad actors often create sites and stack multiple ads in a single ad slot (like a pile of magazines), where only the top ad is visible. Or, they may adjust the styling of page content to make ads completely invisible. The typical approach, however, is to create a very small iframe to serve ads into that’s impossible for a user to see.


      Even worse, some bad actors create adware that can inject hidden ads into a web page, without the publisher even realizing it:




      What we’re doing
      Practices like these have always been against our policies on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Thanks to the technology we’ve been investing in, we can detect this practice across the web. Our systems proactively blacklist suppliers of hidden ads, filtering them before they’re ever bid on, so advertisers won’t buy hidden ads.

      Customers of DoubleClick Bid Manager don't have to make any changes to benefit from these new defenses against hidden ad slots. We currently blacklist 2.6% of the inventory accessed by DoubleClick Bid Manager across exchanges. However, we’ve found this percentage varies widely by provider. Below is a breakdown showing the filtered percentages across some of the largest exchanges:



      It doesn’t stop here. Ad fraud is perpetrated by organized groups that constantly change tactics to defraud the industry for their own gains. That’s why we’re always researching and updating our defenses to ensure advertisers are getting the media they intend to purchase. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue refining our tools to promote a healthy, safe advertising ecosystem.


      Posted by Payam Shodjai, Group Product Manager

      How Local Retailers Can Use Digital to Connect With Consumers

      Some have claimed that the rise of digital is making in-store shopping obsolete, but new research from Google, Ipsos MediaCT and Sterling Brands suggests a far more nuanced relationship between the two. In fact, the data suggests that consumers’ digital behavior can help retailers increase in-store business.

      Our report debunks three common myths about the impact of digital on in-store shopping. Retailers can use these insights to find ways to connect and engage with customers, utilizing technology not just to drive shoppers to the store but also to assist them once they’re there.


      Myth: Once in-store consumers start looking at their smartphone, the retailer loses their attention.
      Reality: Retailers can grab consumers’ attention through search results and their mobile site or app.

      Our research shows that 42% of in-store shoppers search for information online while in-store. While most are using search engines, almost half of shoppers use the retailer’s own site or app.


      See the full report on Think with Google for more statistics and insights to learn how retailers can reshape and optimize the in-store shopping experience with digital technology.