Category Archives: AdWords Agency Blog

Tips and tools for agencies

Measuring the Impact of YouTube Ads on Brand Metrics

For online video platforms like YouTube, engagement metrics (such as views, likes, shares, comments, and watch time) provide a basic barometer to how an audience responds to videos. While these metrics are important to inform strategies and creative direction, when it comes to measuring effectiveness views and shares are often a proxy for brand metrics such as awareness, perception, and audience interest.

In the past, gaining insight into brand metrics has been tricky. While you could get instant feedback in the form of clicks and views, it was difficult to measure brand impact without expensive, time-consuming testing, and sometimes those results wouldn’t come in until the campaign was over. When it comes to YouTube ads, that’s no longer the case: our Brand Lift solution allows you to gather brand metrics about YouTube ads in a matter of days. Advertisers across a variety of verticals have used the tool to test and optimize their online video content.

To understand how our Google Preferred offering performed for advertisers, we conducted several different meta-analyses using Brand Lift data. After analyzing around 50 campaigns from Fortune 100 brands and category leaders running on Google Preferred (some of YouTube’s most popular channels), we found that 94% of the campaigns drove a significant lift—an average of 80%—in ad recall. We also found that 65% of Google Preferred ads saw an increase in brand awareness, with an average lift of 17%. This is particularly impressive considering that the brands in the study were already well-known.

We also measured YouTube’s impact on what we call “brand interest,” or interest in a brand as measured by an increase in organic searches for it on Google. Looking at more than 800 Brand Lift studies, we found that 65% of YouTube TrueView campaigns drove a significant lift in brand interest, with an average lift of 13%. These numbers tell a compelling story. YouTube advertising is about more than lean-back impressions; after YouTube viewers see ads they love, they lean in and search for those brands and products.

Content may be king, but brand metrics play an integral role in everything from planning quarterly media spend to creative direction. With tools like Brand Lift, brands can now have access to brand metrics that matter in near real-time. See how brands are using Brand Lift to move the needle, and get tips on how to drive impact with Brand Lift on YouTube in our YouTube Insights report for March.

How are music fans engaging with SXSW online

Hundreds of buzz bands and under-the-radar artists are in Austin this weekend for the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival—along with tens of thousands of music fans. But you don’t need to attend the festival to engage with SXSW. New data reveals that millions of passionate, interested music lovers are watching the festival on YouTube and on mobile devices.

Driven by mobile, U.S. viewership of SXSW content on YouTube grew by 62% in 2014. This presents a perfect opportunity for brands to reach SXSW fans beyond Austin’s city limits. As soon as people hear the festival buzz—the most surprising performances, the hottest new artists—they’re looking for content on YouTube, pulling out their smartphones more than ever before. Compared with viewership immediately after SXSW 2013, watchtime of video content from last year’s festival increased by 137% on mobile.


So brands know how fans are watching, but they also need to know who’s watching. You may not be surprised to learn that a large audience of young millennials watches SXSW content—but an older audience is beginning to follow the festival as well. In the last year, the 35–55-year-old age group has more than doubled its watchtime of SXSW videos.

Head to Think with Google for more stats about SXSW trends on YouTube, and find out how to reach these devoted music fans throughout the year.

Toward Viewability: You Can’t Count What You Haven’t Measured

Cross posted from Think with Google.

Last month at the IAB’s annual leadership meeting, viewability—a metric that shows whether an ad was actually viewed—was the topic on everyone’s mind. This is hardly a surprise. According to the “5 Factors of Viewability” research that we published in December, more than half of ads online today never even have a chance to be seen—something we can and must change.

As many of you know, we’ve long been advocates of the industry adopting viewability as a currency, a common metric to help both marketers and publishers improve their business results.

And we’ve already come a long way. Forward-thinking publishers are introducing ad units designed for maximum viewability, and thousands of advertisers have taken advantage of viewability-based buying on the Google Display Network since we rolled it out last year. Brands and agencies are prioritizing viewability in their buys, and are seeing that doing so drives better results. 

In fact, in tests we ran this month, advertisers measuring viewability based on the MRC standard for display ads with our Active View technology found that viewable ads saw conversion rates improve by as much as 50%. These viewable ads, with a minimum of 50% in view for a minimum of one second, drove a brand lift of 10.3% while non-viewable ads didn't contribute to lift at all. The business impact to buying based on the MRC standard is real.

While we have made some progress, there is still significant work for us to do as an industry to establish viewability as a currency. The conversation has started to devolve from a collective agreement to tackle the viewability issue to debates over viewability rates and how to value viewable buys. It’s a bit like arguing over whether a recipe needs one egg or two while ignoring the fact that the oven has caught on fire. We are so close to effecting real change on this issue; let’s not lose our nerve now.

It is imperative that we, as an industry, take three major steps:

1. Focus on counting viewable impressions; viewability rates don’t matter

Marketers are not saying that they want a percentage of their campaign to be seen; rather, they are saying they want to pay only for viewable impressions. In this request, viewability rates don’t matter, but the actual number of measured viewable impressions does.

We believe the industry needs to aspire to 100% viewability, full stop. This means buying and selling only viewable impressions. I understand this is a significant challenge, one we're working to solve on our own media properties; without a solution, however, viewable impressions cannot become a currency for the industry.

2. Adopt a single standard for viewability

It’s critical that our industry accepts a single viewability standard, common to all. Without that, it will be impossible to determine the true value of a viewed impression; create scale; or optimize, pace, and forecast inventory effectively.

Through collective discussion and analysis, our industry and the MRC worked hard to build and agree on a standard definition of viewability, one that we support. But since doing so, not all of us have supported it, with some advertisers and publishers recently suggesting new definitions. What we cannot do as an industry is resort to building around multiple standards.

The way to move forward now is to accept the long-discussed, hotly debated, yet proven standard set by our industry. There will be plenty of opportunities for our industry to make adjustments and updates as our understanding of viewability evolves, but we’ll never have that opportunity if we don’t collectively take this first step and establish a true currency.

3. Resolve discrepancies in measurement

Discrepancies and low measurability rates are not acceptable, yet today they exist when publishers and advertisers compare viewability vendors. To put an end to these discrepancies, we must not only adopt a common standard but also ensure a shared process and method of measurement. A liter of water is always the same regardless of who does the measurement. The same should be true for viewable impressions.

To get here, we must integrate measurement technology directly into ad serving, with viewability data appearing directly alongside other campaign metrics, accurately reconciled for buyers and sellers.
Looking ahead at viewability

As a technology, viewability is still in its earliest stages; there are many exciting opportunities for us to solve collectively. For example, viewability on mobile will be crucial as consumers spend more and more time on their smartphones. Secondary engagement metrics such as viewable time and audibility (after all, video is about sight, sound, and motion) can start to offer an even fuller picture of an ad’s effectiveness. But our industry won’t get there if we’re still debating the standard itself.

The best technologies are those that delight their users and then just get out of the way. We’ve come to expect this, for example, in instantly mapping out a route in a new city on our phones or having lunch delivered with just a few taps. My hope is that a year from now, viewability will be a true currency—and just as expected and as simple for everyone.

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Neal Mohan,
Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products

For March Madness 2015, more fans and moments than ever

Is your bracket ready? Better yet: is your marketing strategy ready? Because this year the Big Dance is a bigger opportunity than ever.

Last year, 30% of people in the U.S., an estimated 90M, filled out a bracket for the NCAA Tournament. The best-rated game of 2014 reached 4.7M people. March Madness interest level is absolutely massive, with more fans than ever before following along.

Since this huge audience is increasingly engaging on the web (and on smartphones), there are major opportunities for brands to connect with fans at key moments, in deeper ways. As the games tip off, we have a few tips of our own:
  • Focus on second screens. During March and April 2014, 40% of searches related to brackets were on mobile. As mobile searches continue to rise, marketers should increase their focus on second-screen habits, optimizing campaigns for smartphones.
  • Include casual fans in your marketing. Top search questions about college basketball come from entry level fans: “How long do college basketball games last? and “how many quarters in college basketball?” dominated during the tournament last year. With more fans to reach than ever before, marketers shouldn’t just focus on fanatics—make sure to consider newbies in your strategy.
  • Capitalize on the moments that matter. In 2014, the peak day for highlight searches was the day between the Final Four and the National Championship—a day when no games were scheduled. Take advantage of moments like these that only happen online.
  • Add to the action; don’t be a distraction. A Google Consumer Survey revealed that while second-screening during games, fans are most likely to (in order): check other scores, watch highlights, search for information about players, and post on social. Join the conversation in a way that complements what they’re doing rather than take them out of it.
Read more March Madness tips and stats on Think with Google, and enjoy the wild month of basketball to come!

Google Play’s Real-Time Marketing at the Oscars

Huge cultural events such as the Oscars are too big for just one screen. According to Nielsen research, 84% of smartphone and tablet owners are watching TV with a second screen in hand. For marketers, this presents an incredible opportunity to reach consumers in real-time.

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During the Oscars, Google Play used hyper-relevant marketing to connect with movie fans in real-time. Just before the award for Best Picture winner was announced, there were eight separate, film-specific ads ready to go live. The moment that Birdman won, ads congratulating the film were pushed to second-screen devices. What used to take hours to scale took mere seconds, and viewers could go directly to the Google Play Store to buy or rent the winning film.
This real-time strategy brought huge rewards. There was a 59% lift in searches for Google Play movies among those who saw the ads, according to Google’s Brand Lift measurement tool.

As we continue to rethink real-time, we’re writing the rules as we go. Here are four solid lessons marketers can learn from this Oscars experience:
  1. Start with data and insights. Data revealed that consumers watch television with a second screen in hand, and that searches for award-winning films spike immediately after the award is announced. 
  2. Build creative with flexibility in mind. Make sure you can update and adapt your creative in real-time to be as relevant and timely as possible.
  3. Make real-time purposeful and additive. It’s important that your brand is adding to the user’s experience, not just interrupting the moment.
  4. Measure the impact of real-time efforts. Real-time marketing requires significant advance planning. Was it worth it? Google Play ran a test and control experiment to find out. The test versions were the real-time ads that congratulated the winners as they were announced. The controls were a group of generic ads that featured all Oscars movies on Google Play. Our test proved successful: Click-through rates of the test/real-time ads were 19% higher than the control ads.
Learn more about this real-time marketing play at Think with Google.

How To Stay Relevant Throughout Awards Season

On Sunday night, the Oscars will last for about 4 hours. On the web, they will last for months. Google and YouTube data reveals that today’s audiences are engaging with the awards show well before, during and after the actual event.

Before Oscar night, people are searching for red carpet looks, Oscar pools, party tips, nominees, and movie trailers earlier than ever. From 2013 to 2014, search interest for "Oscar pool" and “Oscar party” grew 28% and 10% respectively. And when the nominated films are announced in January, they get an instant boost on YouTube.
During the actual Oscars ceremony, brands get a huge opportunity to connect with consumers in real time. Last year, nearly half of all Oscar-related searches on awards night came from smartphones and tablets. To capture that in-the-moment interest, marketers can go big on small screens. Explore our playbook on real-time marketing to find out how.



After the show ends on Sunday night, the after-party starts on YouTube. Last year, there were 25X more YouTube searches for the Oscars the Monday after the awards than on the day itself. And the interest lasts for months—60% of views for behind the scenes Oscar videos in 2014 came in the eight months after the event.

Explore more Oscar stats on Think with Google to stay relevant throughout this huge cultural moment.

Evolution of TV: Reaching audiences across screens

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

This post is part of the Evolution of TV series. In this series we identify the risks and opportunities around 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape as TV programming shifts to delivery over the Internet.

The lines between TV and the web are blurring, as people increasingly watch TV online on all their devices and watch online video on their TV’s.

In part 1 of our Evolution of TV series, 7 Dynamics Transforming TV (article, PDF of whitepaper), we introduced the increasing shift of TV to delivery over the internet.

Here, in Part 2, we dig into the first dynamic — reaching fragmented audiences spread across hundreds of screens and devices — and explore how scale, measurement, technology and brand safety come together to address the challenges and create huge opportunities for broadcasters, distributors and advertisers to grow their audiences and increase brand engagement.






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Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing, DoubleClick Video & Brand Measurement

Rich Media Gallery redesign: Simplifying complexity and optimizing for mobile

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

We’re excited to unveil our redesigned Rich Media Gallery website, Google’s destination for digital creative inspiration and education. The new design provides a seamless experience across screens, and makes it easier to find the right product and ad format you need to build your campaign. 

Two and half years of content:
The original website launched two and half years ago, in September 2012, and since then, we’ve added over 1000 creative examples to the gallery and seen 50% year over year growth in unique viewers.
Why the redesign?
The new design optimizes the website experience for every device and removes complexity, allowing users to quickly reach the right answers. 

Seamless, cross-device experience: We used Google’s Material Design Principles to create a consistent look and feel across smartphones, tablets, and desktops. The site incorporates mobile-friendly elements, such as easy scrolling, full-screen interactive gallery examples, and clever transitions.

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The Rich Media Gallery website is now fully responsive, resizing content automatically based on the size of the device you’re viewing it on.

Get to the right answer quickly: We want the Rich Media Gallery to be an intuitive guide to Google’s creative solutions, to help you identify the best tools and ad formats for your campaign.
  • Filter the gallery by ad type or feature, to see the most relevant creative examples for your campaign. 
  • Check out the Creative Recommendation Tool, which provides a recommendation for the best product to use for your campaign, based on your answers to a few questions.

Start Exploring:
  • The new homepage offers a curated set of the best creative examples from the gallery. You can “deconstruct” these ads to uncover which formats and features were used to build it. (See below)



    • The new Ad types section will provide an overview of each format type, and then aggregate the build guides, gallery examples, and other relevant resources in one place, so you have everything at your fingertips to build your own version. 

      • Make sure to check out the new HTML5 Lightbox format. It's Google’s first truly responsive framework that allows you to build your creative once and deploy it on any device or screen size. Think of these like a DoubleClick Studio Layout, except that the expanded state of the Lightbox is completely responsive to screen size. (Overview video here.) 

      • If you’ve already downloaded Google Web Designer, you have the option to open HTML5 templates from the website directly in Google Web Designer, so you can immediately get started on a project.


    Interested in building your own mobile-optimized website?
    Read the behind-the-scenes scoop from the Rich Media Gallery design and development team to better understand their strategy and approach to this redesign. They discuss how they applied Material Design principles to create a mobile-optimized experience, and they walk through the various challenges they faced as they built the new site.

    Posted by the Rich Media Gallery Team

Reframing Creative Constraints: Firestarters in NYC

Creative work increasingly requires doing more with less—but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

At the second Firestarters event in NYC, we brought together smart thinkers from inside and outside the ad world to share how they framed their creative constraints and turned them into advantages. About 200 strategists and planners came to Google’s office to hear what the panel had to say.

The discussion centered around A Beautiful Constraint, the new book from renowned planners Adam Morgan and Mark Barden. In just 15 minutes, the duo explained the 3 core concepts at the heart of their work:
  • Ask Propelling Questions. To get to the Propelling Question, you must ask yourself: What is the biggest ambition you have, and what are the limitations that keep you from achieving it?
  • Engage in Can-If Thinking. This means framing answers to your Propelling Questions in a specific way. Instead of beginning every sentence with "we can't do that because..." you’re forced to start with: “We can do that if..."
  • Create Abundance. Essentially, look around to see what resources are available and where your strengths lie. What unlimited resources can you put to work?
These three steps are meant to take creatives out of habitual behaviors and lead to bold, unconventional thinking. On Think with Google, read more more about the Firestarters event in NYC and learn how to turn creative constraints into advantages.

Join Forrester and Google for a conversation about the real-time opportunity in retail SEM

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog

There’s no doubt that technology continues to transform the pace of business. In the past, it wasn’t possible to track online conversions back to ads in real-time. You couldn’t always be sure you were advertising only in-stock items or immediately traffic out seasonal assortment changes.

But now advanced digital marketers are able to take advantage of real-time conversion and product data in their advertising campaigns to great effect.

Forrester recently completed a global study of 240 retailers’ search campaigns. What they found was… opportunity. Most retailers still don’t take advantage of existing real-time capabilities in digital marketing, and leave a significant opportunity for savvy marketers who do.

Come hear Forrester and Google talk about: 
  1. Results from Forrester’s retail search study 
  2. Insights about the retail search market, and where you can take advantage 
  3. How to become more “real-time” in your own digital advertising 

Speakers:
Shar VanBoskirk, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Henry Tappen, Retail Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Time: 
Wednesday, February 18th at 11AM PST/2PM EST

Register now on the event site. 

We look forward to seeing you there.