Tag Archives: AdWords

It’s faster and easier to use Ads Data Hub

Advertisers tell us that understanding the business impact of their marketing is more important than ever. But they also report that it’s becoming more difficult as the industry—in response to growing concerns about privacy—changes its practices around how data is collected and used. Ads Data Hub enables customized analysis of your Google ad campaigns while protecting user privacy and upholding Google’s high standards of data security.

Today, we’re providing an update on improvements to Ads Data Hub that help you analyze data more quickly and easily, better understand the way that people interact with your ads, and use insights from your data to reach the right customers. With these updates, you can tailor your measurement to your unique business needs, understand how your marketing is performing, and drive the greatest business impact.

Improvements to help you analyze your data faster and easier

Over the past year, we’ve been investing in the infrastructure that underlies Ads Data Hub to make it available to a larger number of customers and simplify the process of writing queries. Over 200 brands, agencies and measurement partners are actively using Ads Data Hub today. And usage continues to increase, with successful queries up over 145 percent in 2019 compared to 2018. But we’ve heard from customers that we need to make it faster and easier to run analysis.

In the coming weeks, we’ll add self-service account linking for Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, so you can more easily access your Google ad campaign data across multiple products in a secure, privacy-centric environment. This includes allowing you to create multi-tier account structures, which adds flexibility to how brands and agencies can configure ads data within Ads Data Hub to address unique account hierarchies and user access requirements.

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Link your Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360 accounts to Ads Data Hub

We’re making it easier to run analysis with a Sandbox environment, which recently rolled out to all customers. This environment includes a test dataset and can be used to experiment with data and query development, which can help make execution faster by giving you a better understanding of the types of queries you can write and insights you can get in Ads Data Hub.

We’ve also launched a new query library that gives you access to over 20 templates for the most common types of analysis run in Ads Data Hub. For example, the All events template can be used to get impressions, clicks, conversions and Active View stats for a specific account. Ads Data Hub users can also suggest new templates directly via the in-product feedback form.

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    Query templates help you write and run queries for the most common types of analysis


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    Query templates help you write and run queries for the most common types of analysis


  • E02547721-Google-GMP-Resize-Blogpost-Screenshot-Mar20_DisplayVideo_v2.png

    Query templates help you write and run queries for the most common types of analysis


  • E02547721-Google-GMP-Resize-Blogpost-Screenshot-Mar20_YoutubeReserve_v2.png

    Query templates help you write and run queries for the most common types of analysis


A frequent request we’ve heard from customers is to be able to access and analyze ad data closer to real-time. To address this, we’ve brought latency down from 24-48 hours to 6 hours for display and YouTube ads data from Google Ads, as well as for data from YouTube ads bought via Display & Video 360. That means, if an impression was served at 8am, you can query data associated with that impression from 2pm on the same day.

New ways to understand the consumer journey

Manually stitching together event-level data from Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 to reconstruct the path to purchase is possible today in Ads Data Hub, but it can be time-consuming and difficult. That’s why we’ve introduced consumer journey paths, a set of pre-processed data that automatically join impression, click, and conversion events together if they’re part of a single journey. This will help advertisers get valuable insights about the consumer journey faster and with higher quality output than manual approaches, and is available to all Ads Data Hub customers that have Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 data enabled in their account.

To cover more of the ways people interact with media and your brand, we’re expanding beyond computer, mobile and tablet device measurement to include TV screens. This includes coverage for connected TV and gaming consoles. These devices are becoming a bigger part of many media plans, so understanding their role in delivering value for your business is also becoming more important.

Today, Ads Data Hub includes key advertising metrics such as viewability, impressions, clicks, and conversions from display and video ads in Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360. And in the coming months we’re enabling more measurement use cases by adding advanced Active View metrics for YouTube—including viewability and audibility metrics—that allow you to uncover deep insights into creative performance and user attention.

Reach the right customers with customized audience list creation

Beyond measurement, one of biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from customers is that they’d like to take action on the insights they uncover in Ads Data Hub, while protecting user privacy. We’ve begun a test to allow a limited group of customers to build audience lists based on clicks or conversions from Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, and use these audience lists to inform who sees display ads in Google Ads and Display & Video 360. For example, you could create an audience list in Ads Data Hub of users that have already purchased your product, then use that as an exclusion list to ensure you don’t continue to show them your ads served via Google Ads and Display & Video 360.

User privacy protections are deeply embedded across all of these features, and—as always—there’s an aggregation requirement of at least 50 users for output of any data from Ads Data Hub. Over time, we'll continue to evolve the capabilities of Ads Data Hub by providing access to additional ads datasets and developing deeper integrations across our ad platforms.

Source: Google Ads


Video creation is fast, easy and free with YouTube Video Builder

Given the current environment, many businesses are shifting how they're communicating and interacting with their customers and are turning to videos to make and maintain connections.


For businesses who don’t have resources to create videos from scratch, Video Builder can help. It’s a free beta tool that animates static assets—images, text and logos—with music from our library. You can choose from a variety of layouts based on your message and goals, customize colors and font and quickly generate a short YouTube video (6 seconds or 15 seconds). 


Because businesses of all sizes are strapped for time and resources and in-person video shoots are no longer practical in many countries, we are accelerating the next stage of Video Builder availability. With this tool, any business who needs a video can create one that helps connect with their customers and keep them informed—whether through an advertising campaign, website or email. 


You may be surprised by what you can create from your laptop in a few short minutes. To see how it works, watch this video or read this guide.
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Mock of a Video Builder layout

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Mock of a Video Builder layout

Different businesses have different creative needs. A restaurant may want to communicate changing hours or promotions, while a supermarket may highlight new services like curbside pickup. For brands or agencies with existing video resources, Video Builder can help bring agility and experimentation to the creation process by generating supplemental, lightweight videos. For smaller businesses and those with less creative experience, it can provide an efficient, low-resource way to create videos, perhaps even for the first time.

Havenly, an online platform offering affordable interior design services, has been using Video Builder to support their team’s video creation needs. "Video is an integral part of our media strategy because our business demands visual context,” says Stang Gappa, Senior Manager of Growth. “Historically, video development has been a slow and labor intensive process. With Video Builder, our small team is able to spin out high quality creative with increased velocity. Given the current situation, where many of us are sheltering in place, free tools like this can help us continue to keep in touch with our customers.”


If you’re interested in trying the Video Builder beta, sign up for access here. We’ll process requests as soon as we are able given tool capacity and email you once your access is granted. If you have a Google team, please request access through them. 


Through tools, insights and resources, we are committed to helping you navigate change and uncertainty.

Source: Google Ads


Grow your games business with a player-first approach

As an avid gamer, every year I look forward to spending time with developers at GDC to celebrate together and learn from their successes. We are all disappointed that this year's conference was postponed, but we applaud the organizers for taking steps to protect our global community. 

Although we won’t be gathering in person this year, the Google team is hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC. We still wanted to share these updates with you because we think these new products will help developers succeed and are a direct response to feedback from our developer community. 

As we study emerging gaming trends one of the most consistent things we've noticed over the years is that those who build a strong games business always put players first. That means deeply understanding players at every stage of their app journey. Today, we’re announcing new solutions that help you launch a game people love, improve it based on player insights, and earn more during the time that someone is engaged with your game. 

Launch a game players love with scaled user testing

Appealing to players at launch is essential to the success of your game. Based on recent Google internal data, more than half of installs come within the first 8 weeks of an app’s release. To make the most of this influx of users, leading developers like Big Fish Games test their apps in beta before releasing them publicly.  That’s why last year we introduced open testing in the Google Play Console to help you get early feedback from real users before your full release. 

To get even more testers into your app, you’ll soon be able to promote Android games with open testing in Google Ads as well. By running open testing ads in App campaigns, you can drive early users to your app to test things like app stability, user retention, monetization, and effectiveness of ad creatives—then use the learning to improve your results when you launch. 

In one example, Chinese developer NetEase used open testing ads to reach more beta users that helped them optimize in-app purchase behavior based on open testing data.  For their new game, Dawn of Isles, Netease was able to double in-app purchases which ultimately led to higher lifetime value (LTV) at launch.

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Improve your game by learning from your players

Many developers use Google Analytics to understand how people are playing their game. Now, we’re taking it a step further by introducing a gaming-specific Analytics experience to help you get relevant insights even faster. Starting today, App + Web properties in Google Analytics will proactively surface gaming-specific user funnel metrics like acquisition, retention, engagement, and monetization in one place.


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With games reporting, you can see how players move through the lifecycle. Then, you can use that insight to improve the game experience and drive more revenue using both ads and IAPs. For example, you could group the players that have dropped off after one week in your game and share that audience to Google Ads to re-engage them with a tailored message and offer. There’s no extra work to set up games reporting in your Google Analytics App + Web property. Learn more to get started.  


In addition to Google Analytics games reporting, coming soon are a few other new ways for you to use Google tools to unlock more valuable insights about your players. 

  • Updated Google Ads asset report: Understand how your App campaign creatives are resonating with new users and optimize campaign performance more easily. 

  • AdMob cohort report: Understand the LTV of your players across their user journey.

  • AdMob mobile app:Quickly access ads monetization reports on the go via a new mobile app.

Earn more from your game

In addition to using player insights, another way to earn more from your game is with AdMob mediation. Leading developers like GameHouse, Playdots, and StickyHands, who use AdMob mediation have seen revenue increases of up to 30%—and now they can earn even more. 

We’re introducing a new tool called Mediation A/B testing, so you can test and refine your ads monetization setups directly in your AdMob account. For example, you’ll soon be able to run a test to see how much more you could earn by using Open Bidding compared to waterfall mediation. 

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Disclaimer: revenue results may vary. 

Using Google’s internal A/B testing engine, mediation A/B testing will split your traffic to run on your control group and the variant at the same time. This approach provides unbiased results that can help you maximize the value of every ad you show to players. 

To learn more about how these solutions will help you build a strong games business, tune into our broadcast keynote of the Google for Games Developer Summit on Monday March 23 9AM PT. Get all the details on the digital event at g.co/gamedevsummit. 

Source: Google Ads


Join us for the digital Google for Games Developer Summit

Last month, Game Developers Conference (GDC) organizers made the difficult decision to postpone the conference. We understand this decision, as we have to prioritize the health and safety of our community. GDC is one of our most anticipated times of the year to connect with the gaming industry. Though we won’t be bringing the news in-person this year, we’re hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC.  

Google for Games Developer Summit

The Developer Summit kicks off on March 23rd at 9:00AM PT with our broadcasted keynote. Immediately following, we’ll be releasing a full lineup of developer sessions with over 10 hours of content to help take your games to the next level. 

Here are some types of sessions to expect:

  • Success stories from industry leaders on how they’ve conquered game testing, built backend infrastructure, and launched great games across all platforms. 
  • New announcements like Android development and profiling tools that can help deploy large APKs to devices faster, fine tune graphic performance, and analyze device memory more effectively.
  • Updates on products like Game Servers (currently in alpha)—a fully managed offering of Agones, letting developers easily deploy and manage containerized game servers around the globe.

Sign up to stay informed at g.co/gamedevsummit. 

Support for the game developer community

We recognize every developer is impacted differently by this situation. We’re coordinating with the GDC Relief Fund to sponsor and assist developers who’ve invested in this moment to further grow their games.

We also understand many developers were looking forward to sharing their content with peers. To help with this, developers can use YouTube to stream events from small to large using tools like Live Streaming andPremieres. 

We can’t wait to share what we have in store for gaming. Discover the solutions our teams have been building to support the success of this community for years to come.

Source: Google Ads


Join us for the digital Google for Games Developer Summit

Last month, Game Developers Conference (GDC) organizers made the difficult decision to postpone the conference. We understand this decision, as we have to prioritize the health and safety of our community. GDC is one of our most anticipated times of the year to connect with the gaming industry. Though we won’t be bringing the news in-person this year, we’re hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC.  

Google for Games Developer Summit

The Developer Summit kicks off on March 23rd at 9:00AM PT with our broadcasted keynote. Immediately following, we’ll be releasing a full lineup of developer sessions with over 10 hours of content to help take your games to the next level. 

Here are some types of sessions to expect:

  • Success stories from industry leaders on how they’ve conquered game testing, built backend infrastructure, and launched great games across all platforms. 
  • New announcements like Android development and profiling tools that can help deploy large APKs to devices faster, fine tune graphic performance, and analyze device memory more effectively.
  • Updates on products like Game Servers (currently in alpha)—a fully managed offering of Agones, letting developers easily deploy and manage containerized game servers around the globe.

Sign up to stay informed at g.co/gamedevsummit. 

Support for the game developer community

We recognize every developer is impacted differently by this situation. We’re coordinating with the GDC Relief Fund to sponsor and assist developers who’ve invested in this moment to further grow their games.

We also understand many developers were looking forward to sharing their content with peers. To help with this, developers can use YouTube to stream events from small to large using tools like Live Streaming andPremieres. 

We can’t wait to share what we have in store for gaming. Discover the solutions our teams have been building to support the success of this community for years to come.

Source: Google Ads


Data Privacy Day: seven ways we protect your privacy

Keeping you safe online is a top priority at Google, especially for the thousands of Googlers who work on privacy and security around the world. Today on Data Privacy Day, we’re sharing some of the many ways we keep you safe online and across our products—from built-in protections to easy tools that keep you in control of your privacy.

1. Keep your passwords safe

Password Manager in your Google Account helps you remember and securely store strong passwords for all your online accounts. With Password Checkup, one click will tell you if any of your passwords are weak—whether you’ve reused them across multiple sites, or if we've discovered they’ve been compromised in a third-party data breach—and we’ll give you the link to change them.

2. Let Google automatically delete your data

With auto-delete for Location History, Web & App Activity and YouTube History, you can choose to have Google automatically and continuously delete your activity and location history after 3 or 18 months. You can also control what data is saved in your account with easy on/off controls in your Google Account, and even delete your data by date, product and topic.

3. Use your favorite Google apps in Incognito mode

Incognito mode has been one of our most popular privacy controls since it launched with Chrome in 2008, and last year we added it to YouTube and Google Maps. Tap from your profile picture to easily turn it on or off. When you turn on Incognito mode in Maps, your activity—like the places you search or get directions to—won’t be saved to your Google Account. When you turn off Incognito mode, you’ll return to a personalized Google Maps experience with restaurant recommendations, information about your commute, and other features tailored to you.

4. Try hands-free privacy controls with the Google Assistant

You can also manage your privacy settings with help from the Assistant. Just say, “Hey Google, delete everything I said to you last week” to delete Assistant activity from your Google Account, or “Hey Google, that wasn’t for you,” to tell the Assistant to forget what it heard if the Assistant responds to something that wasn’t actually a question or request. And to learn how Google keeps your data private and secure, just ask, “Hey Google, how do you keep my data safe?” 

5. Browse the web safely with Chrome

Safe Browsing in Chrome automatically protects you from malicious ads and warns you before you visit dangerous sites or download suspicious files. If you use Chrome, your password protections are automatically built-in. We’ll warn you if your username and password have been compromised in a known breach as you log into websites.

6. Check in on your privacy settings across your apps and devices

Data Privacy Day is a great time to check in on your privacy and security settings. Take a Privacy Checkup and we’ll walk you through key privacy settings step-by-step. You can do things like choose what data—such as your location and search history—gets saved to your Google Account or control what ads you see. When you’re finished, head over to Security Checkup for personalized recommendations to help protect your data and devices, like managing which third-party apps have access to your account data.

7. Control what ads you see from Google

We do not sell your personal information to anyone and give you transparency, choice and control over how your information is used. If you’re curious about why you’re seeing an ad, you can click on Why this ad for more information. If you no longer find a specific ad relevant, you can choose to block that ad by using the Mute this ad control. And you can always control the kinds of ads you see, or turn off ads personalization any time in yourAd Settings.  

No matter how you use our products, it’s our responsibility to keep your data private and secure. That’s why we work every day to build the best privacy experiences and strongest protections, and we’ll continue our ongoing efforts to make privacy and security simpler for you. 

Source: Google Ads


2019 holiday checklist: help shoppers find local stores

The holidays are a critical time of year for your stores, as shoppers stop in to get an item quickly or see it in person. Online research to find local stores continues to surge—search interest in local shops hit a record high last year, and we’re seeing 350 times more search interest in "local" + "near me" than there was 10 years ago. 

When holiday shoppers are deciding where to shop–to buy items for multiple people or for last-minute gifts after shipping cutoffs have passed–how can you help them find your store? 


You can do it in two ways:

  • Local campaigns help businesses with physical locations drive more visits to retail stores, restaurants, auto dealerships, and more. They also include new ways to promote your business on Google Maps.

  • If you’re a retailer, Shopping campaigns help you promote your entire ecommerce and local product inventory to drive sales across both your website and stores. Retailers should use Local campaigns to maximize store traffic and combine them with Shopping campaigns, which help you increase omnichannel reach and sales.

See our latest solutions to help advertisers with a physical presence, from big retail chains to small businesses, showcase your stores and give holiday shoppers more convenient ways to buy.

New ways to promote your locations with Local campaigns

Local campaigns are specifically designed to help businesses drive visits to your physical locations. We’re also making Local campaigns available for smaller businesses by allowing you to optimize for other local actions like calls or directions, even if you don’t have store visits reporting. To help you dial up foot traffic for the holidays, we’re introducing new ways to showcase your locations across Google Maps and other channels.

Whether people want to visit a neighborhood park, museum, local store, or restaurant, Google Maps connects them with the places they’re interested in. In fact, people tap on location pins in Maps hundreds of millions of times per week to explore and get information about the physical world around them. In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to feature your locations as users get directions to a destination. In just a few taps, they can add you as a convenient stop along their route to grab lunch, stop in for shopping, and more. 

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You can also promote your locations as shoppers browse content across over 3 million websites and apps in our Display network. They can now explore a curated selection of the products your store carries in a visual, catalog-like experience.

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Saks Fifth Avenue is a luxury retailer increasingly using digital to achieve its in-store performance goals. The brand has successfully leveraged other Google solutions like local inventory ads to drive foot traffic. As a result, it was eager to become an early adopter of Local campaigns last holiday season to focus specifically on store visits. Using a randomized controlled geo-experiment, Saks Fifth Avenue saw a statistically significant, incremental lift in store sales and an incremental offline return-on-ad-spend of 7.7x. It’s now expanding Local campaigns to promote more of its store locations.

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Fun, a toy retailer in Belgium, also relied on Local campaigns last holiday season to bring more shoppers into its 29 locations. Local campaigns drove 24,000 additional store visits on top of its existing Google Ads campaigns at a strong 19x ROI. This helped lift total store sales and completely reversed a year-to-date decline.

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Sephora, a multinational retail chain, knows that customers who browse and buy in-store are more valuable. With a randomized controlled geo-experiment, the brand found that Local campaigns helped drive a statistically significant, incremental lift in store sales. For every dollar invested, Sephora generated a positive incremental return-on-ad-spend.

More flexible ways to buy and pick up purchases with Shopping campaigns

Shopping campaigns–which include both Shopping ads and local inventory ads–help you increase sales both online and offline, and highlight details about all of your product inventory. Through local inventory ads, we have over 2 billion offers mapped to physical stores across 12 countries. We’ve recently expanded to Sweden, Norway and Denmark to help more shoppers see which products are in stock at nearby locations. 


Now, we’re also giving consumers more flexible ways to collect the products they find through local inventory ads. 45 percent of global shoppers have used “buy online, pick up in store” to get their items from a local store. To make this process easier, we’re expanding store pickup on Google and showing consumers what fulfillment options you offer from your ad:


  • Pick up today:show which products are available for immediate store pickup, with the option of paying online first.

  • Pick up later: promote products that may not be available in store now, but can be quickly shipped to a nearby store within a few days. Reach out to your account team if you’d like to join the beta. 

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Local inventory ad in the U.S. highlighting the “Pick up today” option

We have other stocking stuffers for retailers. In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to pick the Shopping campaigns where you’d like to include store visits as a conversion goal alongside online sales. If you have products that are especially effective at driving consumers to stores—such as high-consideration products like furniture or luggage—you can add store visits bidding to your Standard or Smart Shopping campaigns. Store visits in Smart Bidding is also fully available for Search campaigns to help you maximize conversion value across your website and stores.

Whether you’re a small business or a major retail chain, holiday shoppers will be looking for nearby stores with the most compelling offers and products. We look forward to helping you capture the local holiday spirit to drive success during the biggest shopping season of the year.

Source: Google Ads


2019 holiday checklist: Inspire shoppers with gift-giving ideas

Whether they’re shopping for themselves or for others, 48 percent of today's shoppers say they're open to buying from new retailers during the holiday season. And increasingly, they’re leaning into videos and inspirational imagery to help them decide. Below, we’ll dive into how Google solutions can help you tap into and create shopping intent, and capture the attention of those undecided shoppers with richer, more interactive experiences

Make YouTube more shoppable 

Video has also become a favorite research tool for holiday shoppers. Nearly two-thirds of shoppers say online video has given them ideas and inspiration for their purchase. And more than 90% of these folks say that they’ve discovered new products and brands via YouTube. To tap into this shopping intent, we’re introducingShopping ads to the YouTube home feed and YouTube search results, making YouTube more shoppable and extending the reach of your Shopping campaigns. 

Shopping ads on the YouTube home feed


Shopping ads on YouTube search results

Shopping ads on the YouTube home feed (top) and YouTube search results (bottom)

Retailers like PUMA are excited to reach new customers on YouTube in advance of the holiday season to help them continue the shopping journey. “Consumers are continuing to watch more content on the YouTube platform and we want to be where they are, to reach and engage them,” said Rick Almeida, Vice President of eCommerce at PUMA Group. “This new opportunity will enable PUMA to extend our shopping strategy into a new property and inspire consumers.”

Now, people coming to YouTube to browse and research products may see visual Shopping ads, based on their interest. This means if a consumer expresses an interest in running, they could see ads from retailers that offer running apparel, like PUMA, highlighting different products and prices.  If you’re already using standard Shopping campaigns today and are opted-into YouTube on Display Network, you are eligible for this experience.

In addition, we’ve made YouTube video ads more interactive, giving viewers useful and actionable information like store location, interest forms and additional calls-to-actions to help you drive more conversions.  In the coming months, sitelink extensions will become available for TrueView for action ads. This makes it easy for viewers to navigate to additional landing pages like your holiday catalogs, your store hours, and more. In a beta test with 30 advertisers, adding sitelinks showed a 23% increase inconversions1.

YouTube Ads Sitelink Extensions

Example of how Sitelink extensions will work under your TrueView for action video

You can get started with these new extensions by heading to the extensions tab in Google Ads, and clicking on the extension you’d like to get started with. You can learn about these YouTube updates and more here.


Inspire more customers with rich imagery

In a recent Google / Ipsos study, we found that 85 percent of consumers will take action within 24 hours of discovering a product: reading reviews, comparing prices or purchasing the product—sometimes all at once! We offer multiple solutions to help you convert digital window shoppers into satisfied customers. 

Showcase Shopping ads, for example, are expanding to Google Images -- helping shoppers explore your brand and product selection. When people search for broader terms like “holiday party dresses”, they’ll see Showcase Shopping ads that group related products together, displaying a diverse range of offerings. They’re great for attracting new customers; on average, we see that about 85 percent of traffic from Showcase Shopping ads to retailer websites come from new visitors. In addition, these ads are now expanding to new search categories like beauty and electronics, when they’ve mainly appeared for apparel and furniture-related searches previously. 


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Urban Outfitters is one example of a retailer using Showcase Shopping ads to get into the consideration set and inspire those new to their brand. Urban Outfitters expanded their Showcase Shopping ads to 50 key categories across apparel, home decor, and beauty. Overall, they saw a 241 percent CTR lift across campaigns running Showcase Shopping ads, with 52 percent of those customers being new. Moreover, Urban Outfitters saw a 186 percent increase in sales from new customers via Showcase Shopping ads (compared to reactivated customers).

Urban Outfitters Showcase Shopping ad for beauty

Urban Outfitters Showcase Shopping ad for beauty

Scrolling through personalized feeds like news, video and social is a bigger part of today's consumer journey. And with Discovery ads (beta), you now have a new canvas to inspire hundreds of millions of people with your products as they explore their interests  across the feeds in Discover, YouTube and Gmail. 

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Nectar is one brand updating its Discovery ads with holiday-focused creatives to show off its mattress line and special offers, like its free 365-Night Trial and Forever Warranty™. To drive engagement, Nectar used a variety of high-resolution image assets featuring its mattress in well-lit, realistic settings, while also highlighting promotions in its ad text. Nectar has used custom intent audiences to connect with the right customers, like consumers in the market for bedroom furniture or interested in adjustable bed frames. And during testing, the brand saw an 8% lift in total sales at a 70% lower cost-per-acquisition compared to its paid social campaigns. As a result, Nectar’s parent company, Resident, plans to roll out Discovery ads across its full portfolio of home retail brands.

Reach out to your Google account team to join the global Discovery ads beta.

Discovery Ad Nectar

A Discovery ad for Nectar by Resident as shown on Discover, YouTube, and Gmail

Ready for more tips? Tune in next week to learn how you can drive more shoppers into your local stores.

1. Compared to the same ad without sitelinks. Source: Google data, US, June 2019. Beta experiment with n=30 TrueView for Action advertisers

Source: Google Ads


Investing in the next generation of measurement on YouTube

Ad reporting and measurement is an important part of getting digital advertising right. We invest a lot to help our advertisers understand the value of running ads on services like YouTube. 

Advertisers use different tools to understand the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. One type, called pixels, has played an important role across the web for over a decade, but was built for a world of single screens, not for the ways many people watch YouTube today. While more than 70 percent of time spent watching YouTube globally occurs on mobile devices, pixels can’t report on the effectiveness of ads that appear in mobile apps. And many third-party pixels lack the privacy controls and user protections of newer technology. That’s why, for the past several years, we’ve been taking action to limit the pixels we allow on YouTube while investing in a cloud-based measurement solution called Ads Data Hub that allows our advertisers to understand the effectiveness of their ads in a secure, privacy-safe environment. 

Over the last year, we've been working with key measurement companies including Nielsen, comScore, DoubleVerify, Dynata, Kantar and Integral Ad Science to migrate their services to Ads Data Hub. Once the migrations are complete early next year, we will stop allowing third-party pixels on YouTube.

Unlike pixel-based measurement, Ads Data Hub allows advertisers to understand how their advertising is performing across screens, including mobile apps, through aggregated insights from Google ad platforms, including YouTube, Google Ads and Display & Video 360. Because Ads Data Hub limits the use of user data, it adds another layer of privacy protection for users while still enabling marketers to measure their YouTube ad campaigns. 

Ads Data Hub


Over the past year, we’ve invested significantly in infrastructure improvements to Ads Data Hub to make it faster, easier to use and more reliable. This has allowed us to dramatically increase the number of advertisers and technology providers we can serve and the use cases supported in Ads Data Hub. Advertisers have run millions of successful queries to date. 

While there is still more work to be done, we think this change will be beneficial to consumers and advertisers. With the migration from pixels to Ads Data Hub, our third-party measurement partners will be able to provide YouTube advertisers with more comprehensive reporting and measurement, using technology that’s built to enhance user privacy. 


Source: Google Ads


Simpler ways to drive growth across the customer journey with video

Consumers are moving faster, jumping from channel to channel, and researching more often in unexpected ways. This explosion of touchpoints means more opportunities—and more complexities—for marketers. But just because today’s customer journey is more complicated, doesn’t mean orchestrating your advertising campaign has to be. At Advertising Week New York, we’re sharing new ways to help marketers use video to more efficiently and effectively connect with consumers across their purchase journey.

A simpler way to drive reach

We’re constantly working on better ways to help you achieve your marketing goals—whether you want to build awareness for a brand, shift perceptions, or drive a specific action. But while it’s great to have options, mixing and matching these solutions takes time and can add complexity. Today we’re announcing Video reach campaigns—a simpler, more efficient way for marketers to achieve their brand awareness goals with YouTube. 

Rather than managing separate campaigns for 6-second bumper ads, skippable in-stream ads, and non-skippable in-stream ads, now you can upload multiple video creatives into a single campaign. From there, Google’s machine learning will automatically serve the most efficient combination of these formats to help you reach your audience at scale.

Early adopters like Ford are already seeing strong results using Video reach campaigns. In alpha tests, the automaker lowered their campaign cost over 20 percent compared to their previous YouTube benchmarks. "Ford is using data and machine learning technology, like Video reach campaigns, to drive a learning culture across all of our media. The positive results of the Video reach campaign not only provided cost efficiencies while maintaining effectiveness but also the confidence to implement this tactic across additional campaigns” says Lisa Schoder, head of U.S. media.

A complete solution across the journey

For brands looking to build a full-funnel video strategy, we recommend complementing Video reach campaigns with TrueView for action to drive whatever online action is important to your business. Soon TrueView for action ads will seamlessly extend to the YouTube Home feed, a tremendous opportunity for any advertiser looking to drive more, high value conversions. The Home feed has long been a great place for users to discover their next favorite creator, and now it can be a great place for them to take action with your brand.

TrueView Home feed

A TrueView for action ad on the YouTube Home feed seen on a mobile device

Reach audiences where they are watching 

 In addition to Video reach campaigns, we’re also bringing the YouTube Masthead to our fastest growing surface—the TV screen, where daily watch time tops 250 million hours per day. This means advertisers have a unique opportunity to reach people who are increasingly cutting the cord, right where they are watching their favorite content. 

Through the globally-available beta, marketers can purchase the YouTube Masthead on TV screens on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis, and customize the audiences they want to see it. Like CPM-based Mastheads on the desktop and mobile home feed, it will be available as a reserved placement to ensure brands can drive the visibility they need on the dates that matter most. It can be purchased as part of a cross-screen or single-screen Masthead buy.


Masthead A

Creative featured from one of our early testers, Ford.

And, we know the rich audio and visual experience of YouTube on TV screens means the potential to drive upper-funnel impact is greater than ever. According to a recent experiment we conducted with Media Science, YouTube ads on TV screens drive a 10 percent greater lift in recall than ads on linear TV. See what your creative will look like on the TV screen with our preview tool.

By focusing on marketing objectives rather than media tactics, we believe we can be a more strategic partner to help you sustainably grow your business. We hope these new solutions help you make it easier for you to get ahead of the pack and drive real results across the entire customer journey.

Source: Google Ads