Inside AdWords

A fast start to 2017 for click-to-call ads

Wednesday, March 08, 2017

call-only adsimported call conversions

Simplified workflows so you can set up click-to-call ads faster

Better ad experiences that make it easier for people to call you

Detailed call reporting that shows which parts of your campaigns drive the most valuable calls

Get your call extensions up and running more quickly
Account-level call extensionsautomated call extensionscall reporting New year, new look for click-to-call ads

“Introducing business names to call-only ads has improved the quality of calls we drive from Google Search for clients across our agency. We’ve been able to showcase their brands more clearly and increase user trust, which has led to significantly higher clickthrough and call conversion rates."-Kevin Quinlan, President of wommster.com

New reporting for keyword and ad-level call details
useful insightsconversionsnew call detailsHelp Centerbest practicesoptimizing the caller experiencePosted by Manas Mittal, Product Manager, Mobile Search Ads

“Level up” your gaming business with new innovations for apps

Wednesday, March 01, 2017

Big1Games Developer Conference (GDC)

New playable and video ad formats to get more people into your game

Integrations to help you create better monetization experiences

Measurement tools that provide insights about how players are interacting with your game

Let more users try your game with a playable ad format
Universal App Campaigns

Jam City's playable ad for Cookie Jam

"Jam City wants to put our games in the hands of more potential players as quickly as possible. Playables get new users into the game right from the ad, which we've found drives more engagement and long-term customer value."Google Web Designer Improve the video experience with ads designed for mobile viewing
2

Jam City Cookie Jam horizontal video and vertical-optimized video created through auto-flip technology

3 Unlock new business with rewarded video formats, and free, unlimited reporting
AdMob's platform to mediate rewarded video adsFirebase AnalyticsUnity

C++ and Unity developers can now access Firebase Analytics for real-time player insights

Posted by Sissie Hsiao, Product Director, App Promotion Ads, Google
Last played Fire Emblem Heroes for Android
1. App Monetization Report, November 2016, App Annie
2. More than 80% of video ad views in mobile apps on the Google Display Network are from devices held vertically video, Google Internal Data
3. Google Internal Data

Google Manufacturer Center opens self-sign up, letting even more manufacturers elevate their brands online

Monday, February 27, 2017

Google Manufacturer Centerset up their accounts Johnson & Johnson drives a premium brand experience with high-quality product images
Johnson & Johnson

A 22% increase in impressions, helping even more customers discover their brand through search results

A 27% increase in clicks, engaging more potential customers with their retailers’ Shopping ads.

Safavieh gains impressions and qualified clicks by uploading better product data
Safavieh

A 46% increase in impressions, improving product discoverability on Google

A 35% increase in clicks, with users spending more time on retailer’s sites

Getting started with Manufacturer Center
partner pagevisit our websitePosted by Christian Santiago, Strategic Partner Development Lead, Google Shopping

Discover the new AdWords experience

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

introducedearly lookwe’re rolling out the new AdWords experience to more of you within the next few months

Examples of Overview cards**

Posted by Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management, AdWords* Invites are sent based on a number of factors, including the features you use
** Campaign performance, Auction Insights, and Locations cards are coming soon

A new guide to driving sales with Gmail Ads

Thursday, January 26, 2017

1Gmail adsnew guide

Showing your Gmail ads to the right people

Enticing people to click on your collapsed ad

Designing an expanded ad that converts

Optimizing your Gmail ads for success

Want to stay on top of even more Best Practices? Sign up to receive our monthly newsletter.
Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing1. Google Q4 2015 Earnings Call.

How we fought bad ads, sites and scammers in 2016

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

policiesOver the yearsin JulyIn the six months since launching this policy, we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads. In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015. Ads for illegal productsWe disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.

17M ads removed for illegal gambling violations

Misleading adsIn 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.

1,300+ accounts suspended for tabloid cloaking

Bad ads on mobilein 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year. Ads trying to game the systemLast year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.tabloid cloakersIn 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking. Promoting and profiting from bad sitesbad sites

We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.

We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.

And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts removed for attempting to sell counterfeit goods

AdSense misrepresentative contentCoalition for Better Ads
Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads

Making YouTube Better in a Mobile, Cross-Screen World

Friday, January 20, 2017

Next generation insights and reporting Improved ways to reach your audienceCustomer Match User controls built for the mobile worldMy Account Paving the path for the future
Posted by Diya Jolly, Director, YouTube Product Management

Four resolutions for Shopping success in 2017

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Retailers like you are always looking for the best ways to promote your products and reach shoppers online, right when they’re looking to buy -- and throughout the past year, our mission with Google Shopping was to help you do just that.

In 2016, we introduced a handful of new setup, feed, and campaign management features to help you make the most of your Shopping ad investments. In the spirit of self-betterment, we invite you to make this year your best Shopping year yet! Kick off 2017 by checking out a few of our most impactful new features, and resolve to put them into practice for the new year, and beyond.

Get up and running on Google Shopping faster than ever before with e-commerce platform integrations. Screen Shot 2016-10-17 at 9.17.11 AM.png

Screen Shot 2016-10-17 at 9.17.11 AM.png

Last year, we announced partnerships with three major ecommerce platforms -- BigCommerce, PrestaShop, and Magento -- to make it easier than ever to get started on Google Shopping. If you’re using any one of these platforms (or if you’re thinking of using one of these platforms), these partnerships let you easily and automatically submit your product information to Google Shopping and quickly reach millions of new customers searching for what you sell. To learn more about how we work with these ecommerce platforms, visit our Help Center, or visit the BigCommerce, PrestaShop, and Magento sites.

Show more of your products on Google by using high quality data. We know that creating and maintaining a complete and compliant data feed can be one of the most challenging parts of succeeding with Google Shopping. To make feed management easier, we’ve launched a variety of solutions to help connect your products to new customers -- whether you’re already running Shopping campaigns or you’re just getting started.

Feed Rules help you make product data changes directly in Merchant Center without the hassle, like adding custom labels or transforming attributes into the correct format.

Using the Google Sheets Merchant Center add-on and structured data markup on your site, you can automatically populate, update, and submit your product data to Merchant Center, making feed management a breeze.

Merchant Center received a brand new look with a comprehensive Diagnostics dashboard that processes more quickly to give you a better snapshot of your product data across Shoppings ads, Dynamic Remarketing, Local Inventory Ads and other programs.

We made updates to the Product Data Specification with the goal of helping you understand what product data Google needs to run your Shopping ads, including new structured data markup and GTIN specifications. Merchants who added correct GTINs to their product data saw conversion rates increase up to 20%.

Grow sales and save time with a routine to keep up with daily campaign management. Using recent features to Shopping campaigns, you can actually spend less of your time making adjustments to focus on other priorities. Enable product status insight reporting columns and smart bidding strategies in your campaigns today.

Product status insights and disapproval notifications in the products tab are your go-to columns to check on the health of your products. Did you have many out-of-stock items after holiday clearances? Some of those could still be disapproved. See which of your top performing products are no longer selling and how to fix them. Avoid missing out on missed traffic by keeping these top products eligible year-round.

Adopting a smart bidding strategy like enhanced CPC (eCPC) to enable the flexibility for Google to adjust bids on individual queries. Just set your max CPC and have eCPC do the rest of the heavy lifting. eCPC adjust bids for individual queries with a high likelihood to convert all while balancing out bids for underperforming products, maximizing possible conversions. When first adopting a bid strategy, we recommend giving two weeks to let algorithms learn about your campaign before it can reach the peak optimization and performance.

Reach even more customers by enabling shopping across borders.

These days, shopping is truly global. To make shopping more efficient for shoppers and merchants alike, we launched a tool in Merchant Center to perform currency conversions in select countries, allowing you to convert the currency in your product data locally. For example, a person shopping in the UK can see products sold by a US retailer, listed in British pounds. To see where currency conversions are available, check out our Help Center article.

Happy New Year from the Google Shopping team!

Reminder: Transition to expanded text ads before January 31, 2017

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

This is a friendly reminder that starting on January 31, you’ll only be able to create and edit text ads using the expanded text ads format. You’ll no longer be able to create standard text ads. While this will be the last date to create them, existing standard text ads will continue to serve.
Expanded text ads can deliver great results, particularly with a commitment to testing new creatives.

As one of the top places people go online to search for apartments, Apartments.com knows the importance of having a strong digital presence. Wanting to provide renters with even more information about its listings, Apartments.com added expanded text ads to its Search campaigns. Apartments.com's results were strong across its campaigns. It saw 15% and 10% increases in CTRs for expanded text ads on mobile and desktop, respectively.
While making similar improvements to your ads, keep these best practices in mind:

Implement multiple versions of your ads. Aim for at least 3-5 per ad group.

Leave your standard text ads running. You can’t create new ones, but the old ones can still serve. Don’t delete them until they stop receiving impressions on their own or the message is no longer accurate.

Plan to optimize your ad rotation for clicks or conversions. These options give preference to ads that are likely to perform better.

Focus your testing on headlines. They’re the most important part of your ads.

Consider shorter headlines on things like brand terms where someone might not need more info.

Iterate new ads based on previously successful creative. Learn from what already works.

Add terms from user queries and your keywords in your longer headlines whenever appropriate.

Along with those best practices, remember that after January 31 you can pause and resume standard text ads, but it’s best to create new expanded text ads. As you prepare for expanded text ads to become the only way to create new text ads, check out our best practices guide for creating effective ads or our previously-hosted Hangout-on-Air for more advice. Take advantage of AdWords Editor, the AdWords API or the ETA Transition Helper to make these changes across your entire account.

Posted by Senthil Hariramasamy, Senior Product Manager, Ad Formats

A new guide to using audiences on Google Search in AdWords

Thursday, January 12, 2017

link intent with contextnew guide

Powering search campaigns with audience insights

Maximizing engagement when applying your lists

Taking full advantage of other AdWords tools that work well with audiences

Learn how to supercharge your search campaignsSign up
Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Inside AdWords

A fast start to 2017 for click-to-call ads

“Level up” your gaming business with new innovations for apps

Google Manufacturer Center opens self-sign up, letting even more manufacturers elevate their brands online

Discover the new AdWords experience

A new guide to driving sales with Gmail Ads

How we fought bad ads, sites and scammers in 2016

Making YouTube Better in a Mobile, Cross-Screen World

Four resolutions for Shopping success in 2017

Reminder: Transition to expanded text ads before January 31, 2017

A new guide to using audiences on Google Search in AdWords

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