Google Analytics Solutions: AdWords

Deliver more relevant experiences with Optimize and AdWords

May 30, 2018

Search is one of the most important acquisition channels in a marketer’s toolkit. But it’s not enough to just optimize search ads. It’s essential to consider the entire customer journey and keep people engaged once they reach your site. That’s why we introduced an integration between Optimize and AdWords to make it easy for marketers to test and create personalized landing pages.

How Spotify boosted conversions with Optimize and AdWords

Spotify, one of the world’s leading audio streaming services, is just one example of a company that has successfully used the Optimize and AdWords integration to drive more conversions from their search campaigns. Spotify discovered that the most streamed content in Germany was actually audiobooks, not music. So they wanted to show German users that they have a wide selection of audiobooks, and also that the experience of listening to them is even better with a premium subscription.

Using the AdWords integration with Optimize 360 (the enterprise version of Optimize), Spotify ran an experiment that focused on users in Germany who had searched for "audiobooks" on Google and clicked through on their search ad. Half of these users were shown a custom landing page dedicated to audiobooks, while the other half were shown the standard page. The custom landing page increased Spotify’s premium subscriptions by 24%.

”Before, it was a fairly slow process to get all these tests done. Now, with Optimize 360, we can have 20 or more tests running at the same time. It’s important that we test a lot, so it doesn’t matter if we fail as long as we keep on testing,” said Joost de Schepper, Spotify’s Head of Conversion Optimization.

Watch Spotify's video case study to learn more.

Driving your own results

Today, we’re announcing three new updates to make it easier for all marketers to realize the benefits that Spotify saw from easily testing and creating more relevant landing pages:

1. Connect Optimize with the new AdWords experience

You can connect Optimize to AdWords in just a few steps. Follow these instructions to get started.

Not using the new AdWords experience yet? Make the switch to gain access to more actionable insights and faster access to new features.

2. Link multiple AdWords accounts at once

For advertisers that have many AdWords accounts under a manager account, individually linking each of those sub-accounts to Optimize can be time consuming.

Now, you can link your manager account directly to Optimize. This will pull in all your AdWords accounts at once, allowing you to immediately connect data from separate campaigns, ad groups, and more. To get started, switch to the new AdWords experience, and then you’ll see an option to link your manager account in your Linked accounts, learn more.

3. Gain more flexibility with your keywords

You can now run a single experiment for multiple keywords, even if they’re across different campaigns and ad groups. For example, test the same landing page for users that search for “chocolate chip cookies” in your “desserts” ad group and for users that search for “iced coffee” in your “beverages” ad group.

With the Optimize and AdWords integration, driving results through A/B testing is fast and simple. Sign-up for an Optimize account at no charge and get started today.

Happy Optimizing!

Posted by Rotimi Iziduh, Product Manager, Google Optimize

Google Optimize now offers more precision and control for marketers

October 26, 2017

Savvy businesses review every step of the customer journey to ensure they are delivering the best experience and to find ways to offer more value. Today, we’re releasing two new features that will make it easier for you to improve each of those steps with the help of Google Optimize and Optimize 360.

AdWords integration: Find the best landing page

Marketers spend a lot of time optimizing their Search Ads to find the right message that brings the most customers to their site. But that's just half the equation: Sales also depend on what happens once people reach the site.

The Optimize and AdWords integration we announced in May gives marketers an easy way to change and test the landing pages related to their AdWords ads. This integration is now available in beta for anyone to try. If you’re already an Optimize user, just enable Google Optimize account linking in your AdWords account. (See the instructions in step 2 of our Help Center article.) Then you can create your first landing page test in minutes.

Suppose you want to improve your flower shop's sales for the keyword “holiday bouquets.” You might use the Optimize visual editor to create two different options for the hero spot on your landing page: a photo of a holiday dinner table centerpiece versus a banner reading "Save 20% on holiday bouquets." And then you can use Optimize to target your experiment to only show to users who visit your site after searching for “holiday bouquets.”

If the version with the photo performs better, you can test it with other AdWords keywords and campaigns, or try an alternate photo of guests arriving with a bouquet of flowers.

Objectives: More flexibility and control

Since we released Optimize and Optimize 360, users have been asking us for a way to set more Google Analytics metrics as experiment objectives. Previously,
Optimize users could only select the default experiment objectives built into Optimize (like page views, session duration, or bounces), or select a goal they had already created in Analytics.

With today's launch, Optimize users no longer need to pre-create a goal in Analytics, they can create the experiment objective right in Optimize:

Build the right objective for your experiment directly in the Optimize UI.

When users build their own objective directly in Optimize, we’ll automatically help them check to see if what they’ve set up is correct.

Plus, users can also set their Optimize experiment to track against things like Event Category or Page URL.

Learn more about Optimize experiment objectives here.

Why do these things matter?

It's always good to put more options and control into the hands of our users. A recent study showed that marketing leaders – those who significantly exceeded their top business goal in 2016 – are 1.5X as likely to say that their organizations currently have a clear understanding of their customers' journeys across channels and devices.¹ Testing and experimenting is one way to better understand and improve customer journeys, and that's what Optimize can help you do best.

>>> Check out these new features in Optimize now<<<

¹Econsultancy and Google, "The Customer Experience is Written in Data", May 2017, U.S.

Posted by Rotimi Iziduh and Mary Pishny, Product Managers, Google Optimize

Google Optimize and Surveys 360 Join Forces with AdWords

May 24, 2017

Meet two new ways to understand and better serve your customers

Here's good news for marketers: as you heard yesterday at Google Marketing Next both Optimize and Surveys 360 will soon be integrating with AdWords. The Surveys 360 integration is now live in the U.S. and Canada; the integration with Optimize will be available in the coming weeks.

Optimize is an A/B testing and personalization tool that makes it easy to see which changes to your web pages work best for your users and your business. Surveys 360 is a market research tool that helps enterprises gather fast, reliable insights from real people online and on mobile.

Why the new integrations? To make it easier than ever to understand and better serve your potential customers. Here's some detail on both.

Better landing pages, better results

Advertisers naturally spend a lot of time thinking about their ads. What gets people to click? Will the words "free shipping" sell more than "10% off"? AdWords has always made it easy to create many different ad campaigns to see which performs best. But the ad is only part of the experience.

The new integration between Optimize and AdWords makes it easier than ever to take the next step: to improve and personalize the landing pages those ads lead to. The integration gives marketers a fast way to create and test custom landing pages based on the keyword, ad group, or campaign associated with an ad – with no need to deal with destination URLs or messy query parameters.

It's worth it. 90% of organizations that invest in personalized consumer experiences agree that they contribute significantly to more business profitability. ¹

Suppose a hotel wants to improve its landing page for the keyword family friendly hotels. Using Optimize, the hotel can create and test a new variation of the landing page, one that features an image of a family enjoying themselves at the hotel pool, instead of a generic image of the hotel exterior. If the new page leads to more reservations, they've got a win. Then it's easy to keep testing headlines and images that might also do well.

Target any combination of your AdWords account, campaign, ad group, and keywords directly in Optimize.

The AdWords integration will be available for both Optimize and Optimize 360 and will be available to start using in the coming weeks. If you haven’t tried Optimize, you can get started for free here.

Why not ask your customers?

We all need faster insights these days. That's one reason we added Surveys 360 to the Google Analytics 360 Suite last year. Surveys 360 lets you ask questions directly to a pool of 15 million real people as they browse the web or use their smartphone. The results arrive in days, or sometimes in just hours.

Now, what if you could combine that kind of speedy real-world feedback with the wealth of data that you already have in AdWords? Then you could understand both what users do and why they do it.

That's what we're announcing today: remarketing lists published in AdWords are now available in Surveys 360 for surveys targeting. That means you can survey the users on your remarketing lists to find out what worked best for them (or didn't).

Want to know why shoppers abandoned their shopping carts? Ask them! Curious about how many customers converted due to your new free shipping offer? Ask them!

Easily target your survey to remarketing audiences published in AdWords.

Then change your marketing message on the spot to match what you learn. If your survey shows that the words "family friendly" are what brought customers to your hotel, you can build new ad groups to take advantage of this information. (You might even use Optimize to test new landing pages with that phrase!)

Here's an early report from the online shopping site Jet:

"Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) have been an effective way for Jet.com to drive website traffic, but we needed to optimize for conversions. Surveys 360 connected us directly to our customers through remarketing audiences to determine which factors influence their purchase decisions most. The results were clear: customers care most about free, fast shipping and our free returns. We used this insight to revise our messaging in PLAs and across Jet.com which quickly improved performance."
–Ben Babcock, Director of UX Research at Jet.com

Getting started is easy: Just log into your Surveys 360 account with the same credentials used for your AdWords account. When you select "remarketing audience" for survey targeting, your AdWords remarketing lists will be automatically pulled into Surveys 360 and ready for use. Learn more.

All together now

These new integrations are one more way for Optimize and Surveys 360 users to make the most of their AdWords investments. We hope you'll find them a fast and simple way to understand what works for your customers and give them more of what they want.
¹Econsultancy and Google, Marketing and Measurement Survey, March 2017

Posted by Michael Cumberbatch, Product Manager, Surveys 360 and Rotimi Iziduh, Product Manager, Optimize

Making marketing easier with new tools for productivity

May 23, 2017

This post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords blog.

Mobile continues to raise the bar for marketers - as consumers increasingly reach for their smartphones to get things done, they expect fast and frictionless assistance. And to help them in these moments with more useful and personalized ads, you need scalable, easy-to-use tools that allow you to manage your marketing in smarter ways.

This morning at Google Marketing Next, we shared the next generation of AdWords, DoubleClick and Google Analytics tools, each of them shaped by your feedback and built to help you work as productively and efficiently as possible.

Below is a round-up!

The new AdWords experience will be available to all advertisers by the end of the year

The new AdWords experience marks the most powerful change we’ve made to how advertisers visualize and manage their campaigns in over 15 years. The redesign makes AdWords significantly easier to use to help you reach your unique marketing goals and get things done.

Earlier this year, we previewed a few of the new tools and features in the new AdWords experience. This includes the new Overview page, which automatically surfaces relevant insights about your performance so you can take action more quickly.

Here are some other new things to check out:

Campaign creation

Build campaigns designed around your marketing goals

Performance estimates

View performance estimates to help plan your display campaigns

Landing page report

See how your landing pages are affecting campaign performance

Since rolling out the new AdWords experience, we’ve seen some inspiring results. We see that pages load much faster -- on average, 20% faster. Customers like iProspect North also reported that the new design and layout saves them 30% more time when completing everyday tasks.

Starting today, we’re rolling out the new experience to millions of additional AdWords accounts and it will be available to all advertisers by the end of the year. Get started by reviewing our Best Practice guide.

Better together: Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 integrate with AdWords

Your marketing workflows should be seamless and integrated, from managing media to optimizing your site and collecting performance insights. This allows you to easily apply learnings from one step to another and take action faster. With new integrations for Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 with AdWords, you'll be able to test landing pages and gain insights about your ads more efficiently.

Available globally to all advertisers at no cost, Optimize helps marketers test and deliver custom site experiences to improve performance. With the Optimize and AdWords integration, you can quickly and easily create new versions of your landing pages and then apply them to any combination of AdWords campaigns, ad groups, and keywords – no coding or webmaster required. For example, on a summer beachwear campaign, test whether a landing page that features an image of beachgoers performs better than one that showcases your latest swimsuit styles. Optimize will figure out which variation works best for your business and help you get more value from your AdWords campaigns.

Surveys 360 makes it easy for anyone to create a survey, find a specific audience sample across the web, and generate results in just a few days. With the Surveys 360 and AdWords integration, you can easily target surveys to people in your remarketing audiences to help you understand the “why” behind how consumers react to your marketing. For example, ask customers what they thought was the most compelling part of your ad. Or, if you want to know what customers thought of the landing pages you tested on your summer beachwear campaign, quickly launch a survey and ask site visitors what stood out to them on the page.

Smarter planning in DoubleClick Bid Manager

The programmatic revolution has focused on combining data, machine learning and automation to drive better performance. However, few of these benefits have carried over to the world of media planning. To help save you time and improve performance, we’re bringing the power of machine learning to campaign planning with a new workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Bid Manager uses machine learning to analyze your past campaigns and understand what's performed well for you before. With these insights, it will recommend the right inventory and targeting to reach your audience based on your unique marketing goals. The result is an optimized media plan tailored to your business, which you can then tweak, approve and activate with one click.

“Planning in DoubleClick Bid Manager helps us find the right inventory and strategies in a matter of seconds. Now we can invest even more time in understanding our audience rather than how we should reach them.”- Louise Lévesque, Vice-President, Marketing & Sponsorship, National Bank of Canada

Unique Reach arrives for AdWords Display campaigns and DoubleClick

Once your ads are up and running, you want to know how many people are seeing them. Reach and frequency are hallmark metrics to measure the impact of display and video campaigns today. At the same time, you need to be thoughtful about how often you connect with a single user to avoid overloading them. 30% of people today use 5 or more devices¹ - that means if you reach someone three times on each screen, you could be showing them fifteen ads!

We launched Unique Reach for YouTube in AdWords earlier this year and are soon expanding availability to Display campaigns in AdWords. We’re also bringing Unique Reach to DoubleClick for all your video and display ads, no matter where they run. Unique Reach helps you measure the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user you get from video and display ads. Metrics are de-duplicated across devices, campaigns, inventory and formats so you can see how many people you reached and how often you reach them.

We can’t wait to get these new tools into your hands to hear what you think and help you work faster and smarter. To get the full replay of new innovations at Google Marketing Next, watch the keynote here. Until next year!

Posted by Paul Muret, Vice President of Display, Video and Analytics

1. Google / TNS Connected Consumer Survey, US population 18+, n=1000, Q1 2016

How to Apply Holiday Shopping Insights to Your Analytics Strategies

October 24, 2016

The Year of the Supershopper
We all have that friend — the one who somehow knows the latest brands, the season’s must-have products, and where to find the best deals at the snap of a finger. In years past, this friend was an enigma, making us wonder how does he or she do it?

Today, we can all be that friend. With the ability to instantly discover, research, and purchase, shoppers around the world are more informed and more efficient than ever before - they’ve transformed into supershoppers seemingly overnight.

But what defines supershoppers? And what does this mean for retailers trying to win them over this holiday season? Let’s find out.

They Keep Their Options Open
Last year, more than 50% of holiday shoppers said they were open to purchasing from new retailers¹. This is especially true online. More than three-quarters of smartphone shoppers who usually go to the same physical stores when they shop for products are very open to new retailers and brands online². Why? Mobile makes it easy to explore all of your options no matter when or where you’re shopping. In fact, after searching on Google, 76% of mobile shoppers have changed their mind about which retailer or brand to purchase³.

Mobile is Their Muse
It used to be that shoppers would thumb through catalogues or stare longingly at the holiday window displays, but mobile is now the super shopper’s go-to source for inspiration. Sixty-four percent of smartphone shoppers turn to mobile search for ideas about what to buy before heading into a store⁴. And 1 in 4 mobile video viewers in the U.S. have visited YouTube for help with a purchase decision while they were at a store or visiting a store's website⁵.

But shoppers aren’t only making purchase decisions, they’re discovering new brands and products along the way: more than half of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their phones⁶.

They Want the Best - Not the Cheapest
In July we learned that shoppers are on the quest for the best — and this still rings true more than ever today. Last holiday, mobile searches related to “best gift” grew 70% year over year while mobile searches related to cheap or inexpensive gifts grew about 35%⁷. They’re also willing to do the research to the make the best decision: on YouTube, mobile watch time for product review videos has grown 60% year over year⁸.

But supershoppers don’t only want the best - they want personalized, unique, cool gifts. Mobile searches related to “unique gifts” grew more than 65% while mobile searches related to “cool gifts” grew a whopping 80%⁹.

Mobile is Their Door to the Store
Although more and more people are willing to buy on mobile, we know that mobile is still used predominantly as a door to the store. In fact, 76% of people who search for something nearby on their smartphone visit a related business within a day, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase¹⁰.

Once they’re inside your store, they expect the experience to be a seamless one: more than 40% of smartphone shoppers want retailers to automatically surface relevant information such as the location of the item in the store, a special deal or related products¹¹.

They Shop ‘Til they Drop
Supershoppers live up to their name as the holiday season progresses. From November through mid-December we see online conversion rates increase across devices. Last year, on mobile alone, they jumped 30% on Black Friday and 50% on Cyber Monday when compared to November 1¹².

Tips to Using Analytics to Reach Today’s Shopper
Analytics is a critical marketing tool all year long. But that importance is amplified during the holiday season. Here are five ideas on how you can use analytics to get the most out of the holiday shopping season.

1. Understand which days drive the most sales — be there. In order to develop a successful holiday retail strategy, it’s important to first understand the days that drive the most sales for your business. Once you understand this, you can craft strategy — across mobile, desktop, and tablet — that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.
For example, adjust bids for auction-based media and use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier. Use Smart Bidding in AdWords or DoubleClick Search to maximize your performance.

2. Get personal when engaging with window shoppers. The great thing about the holidays is that you can start shopping at any time — and then wait for discounts. Many consumers may already be browsing your site looking for gift ideas. This is an audience that may convert at a higher rate. Use Google Analytics to create remarketing lists including these shoppers, and then customize your marketing campaigns to better suit their needs.

But don’t stop there: Remember, supershoppers crave personalization. Test different variations of your website with this same audience to offer more customized experiences. Try Google Optimize, our free site testing and personalization tool, to get started.

3. Act fast: Create a culture of optimization. Your holiday marketing plans are set long before the holiday season starts. It’s very important to monitor your activities to ensure they’re driving business growth. And if they’re not you need to take action by immediately identifying areas of opportunity and improvement.

Google Analytics offers a number of ways to help simplify reporting, sift through data, and spotlight insights for you. Custom reports, dashboards and shortcuts all let you customize reporting so you spend less time looking for data and more time analyzing important information. Or better yet, try Google Data Studio and create a holiday shopping dashboard for different teams in your organization.

4. Analyze your performance against your competitors. Benchmarking your business against your competitors helps you see the big picture. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking reports. The benefit of using those reports is that they will provide you a comparison between your data and your competitors, using characteristics such as website traffic, country and detailed vertical information.

5. Start developing your New Year marketing strategy. With so many new shoppers entering your stores, sites, and apps, data and analytics are critical to helping you convert first-time shoppers into long-term, loyal customers. Use your website data to create lists of first-time customers during the holidays, and deliver personalized communication across channels to build relationships. With Google Analytics you can create remarketing lists and easily connect with this audience.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Julie Krueger, Retail Managing Director, Google and Casey Carey, Director of Analytics Marketing, Google

Google/ Ipsos, Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study - Total Shoppers Report, Jan 2016, Base: US Holiday Shoppers, n=1,500

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000, Same store shoppers = 801

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000

Google-commissioned Ipsos Brand Building on Mobile Survey, U.S., December 2015 n=1000, 18-54 year olds

Google/Ipsos, "Consumers in the Micro-Moment," Wave 3, U.S., n=1291 online smartphone users 18+, August 2015

Source: Google Search Data, Apparel, Home & garden, Beauty & personal care, Computers & electronics, Gifts, Toys & games, Photo & video, Nov-Dec 2014 vs Nov-Dec 2015, United States

YouTube data, U.S., Classification as a “Product Review" video was based on public data such as headlines and tags, and may not account for every such video available on YouTube, Nov - Dec 2014 and Nov - Dec 2015

Google Search Data, Apparel, Home & garden, Beauty & personal care, Computers & electronics, Gifts, Toys & games, Photo & video, Nov-Dec 2014 vs Nov-Dec 2015, United States

Google/Purchased Digital Diary: How Consumers Solve Their Needs in the Moment, May 2016, Representative sample of US Smartphone users = 1000. Local searchers = 634, Purchases = 1,140

Google/Euromonitor International, Micro-Moments Survey, US, July 2016, Smartphone shoppers = 1000

Google Analytics Shopping category data, Nov 1, 2015–December 14, 2015, United States

Data Studio: New, Simplified, AdWords Connector

July 25, 2016

Google Data Studio is our new Business Intelligence product that makes it easy to connect, visualize, and share data. Today we updated the Google Data Studio AdWords connector to be more flexible and easier to use.

The AdWords connector allows AdWords customers to access their AdWords account data in Data Studio, build visually stunning reports, and share those reports to business stakeholders across their organization.

Report built with the AdWords connector in Google Data Studio

With our recent update, the new AdWords connector now unifies over 100 AdWords dimensions and metrics as a single list, making it easier select the data you want to visualize.

20 of over 100 dimensions and metrics available in the new connector

The new connector also supports many more combinations of dimensions and metrics, dramatically simplifying building reports.

Customizing a table with AdWords data in the Report Editor

Of course, when you build AdWords reports with Data Studio, all the existing Data Studio features are compatible with this data including: calculated metrics, derived fields, custom visualizations, rich styling and custom branding, simplified sharing through Google Drive and realtime collaboration.

These new changes are available today in both Data Studio 360 and Data Studio versions. To use the new connector, you must create a new Data Studio Data Source. Data Source using the previous connector will continue to work. Please read our help documentation on how to migrate to the new version.

We’re excited to see all of the new reports customers will create with this enhancement.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Data Studio team

Google Ads & Analytics Innovations Keynote

May 24, 2016

Welcome to the Google Performance Summit livestream! Tune in now to hear about Google’s latest mobile-first innovations, the moment they’re announced. Let us know what you think by joining the conversation at #GoogleSummit.

Move beyond last click attribution in AdWords

May 10, 2016

People often see many ads across different devices before making a purchase, booking a flight, or signing up for an account. Because of this, advertisers know that last click attribution may not always tell the full story. In 2014, we released the Attribution Modeling Tool in AdWords to share insights about how users interact with your ads. Later this month, you’ll be able to integrate the attribution model of your choice with your conversion data and bidding.

For each conversion type, use a simple dropdown menu in Conversion settings to select one of six different attribution models last click, first click, linear, time decay, positionbased, or data driven. When you pick a new model, credit will be reassigned across the conversion path for all search or shopping ad clicks on Google.com, and your conversion stats will change moving forward. You can adjust bids based on your new way of counting conversions, and if you’re using automated bidding for search ads, your bids will be optimized automatically to reflect your new model. To learn more, visit our Help Center.

For the first time, AdWords advertisers with sufficient data will also be able to select the new data driven attribution model as a public beta, which is also available in Analytics 360, Attribution 360, and DoubleClick. Unlike rulesbased models, data driven attribution uses machine learning to evaluate all the converting and nonconverting paths across your account and identifies the proper credit for each interaction. The model considers the number of ad interactions, order of exposure, ad creative, and many other factors to determine which keywords and clicks are the most effective at driving results.

To help advertisers succeed with attribution, we’ve created a new best practices guide: “Beyond LastClick Attribution.” The guide will show you how to:

Determine how important moving beyond lastclick attribution is to your business
Choose a model that best fits your needs
Value early influencer keywords appropriately
Act on attribution
Evolve your approach to attribution as measurement gets better

We hope the new functionality and guide will help you optimize your marketing campaigns and drive stronger results, and our goal is to expand beyond search soon.

Posted by:
Joan Arensman, Product Manager
Wilfred Yeung, Product Manager

Join us as we announce the latest Ads and Analytics innovations on May 24th

April 20, 2016

Tune in live to the Google Performance Summit Keynote on Tuesday, May 24 at 9am PT / 12pm ET to hear the latest Ads and Analytics innovations.

We live in exciting times when technology seems to upend everything as we know, every few years. And nothing has changed consumer behavior and business innovation as much as the mobile phone. People are attached to their phones, tapping and swiping their way through places to go, stuff to buy, and things to do. This presents a tremendous opportunity for marketers to connect with customers in more meaningful, relevant ways. And Google is a key partner for advertisers, providing the media and tools to help you make those connections and measure the results.

To ensure we are building the right products for consumers and businesses all around the world, my team and I make it a priority to regularly visit our ads and analytics customers. Last year, we met with advertisers in India, Japan, China, the UK and Germany, and gained new insights from every country.

For example, in Europe, we learned that universal app campaigns are effective at growing installs across a broad range of app users. Now, advertisers want the ability to reach very specific audiences. In Asia, home to three of the five top smartphone markets, advertisers asked for more control and flexibility on mobile devices for both creatives and bidding. And in every country we visited, we saw customers working hard to integrate data from across their organizations and transform it into actionable insights. Marketers want better data to understand the customer journey across devices, contexts and channels.

We were all grateful for these insights and have been using them to build a whole new generation of Ads and Analytics products. We look forward to sharing many new innovations with you at the Google Performance Summit on Tuesday, May 24, 2016 at 9am PT / 12pm ET.

Register for the livestream here.

Until then, follow us on our +GoogleAds page for sneak previews of what’s to come.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Use Smart Goals, powered by Google Analytics, to optimize in AdWords

December 10, 2015

To advertise smart, you have to measure smart. And a key metric for almost any business is conversions, also known as “that moment when users do the thing that you want them to do.”

Many AdWords advertisers are already measuring their website conversions, using either AdWords Conversion Tracking or imported Google Analytics Ecommerce transactions. Measuring actual conversions is ideal, because it allows you to optimize your bids, your ads and your website with a clear goal in mind.

However, hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses aren't measuring their website conversions today. Some businesses may not have a way for users to convert on their website and others may not have the time or the technical ability to implement conversion tracking.

The Google Analytics team is committed to helping our users use their data to drive better marketing and advertising performance. So, for businesses that don’t measure conversions in AdWords today, we’ve created an easy-to-use solution: Smart Goals. Smart Goals help you identify the highest-quality visits to your website and optimize for those visits in AdWords.

"Smart Goals helped us drive more engaged visits to our website. It gave us something meaningful to optimize for in AdWords, without having to change any tags on our site. We could tell that optimizing to Smart Goals was working, because we had higher sales than usual across our channels during the testing period."

- Richard Bissell, President/Owner, Richard Bissell Fine Woodworking, Inc

How Smart Goals Work

To generate Smart Goals, we apply machine learning across thousands of websites that use Google Analytics and have opted in to share anonymized conversion data. From this information, we can distill dozens of key factors that correlate with likelihood to convert: things like session duration, pages per session, location, device and browser. We can then apply these key factors to any website. The easiest way to think about Smart Goals is that they reflect your website visits that our model indicates are most likely to lead to conversions.

Step 1: Activate Smart Goals in Google Analytics

To activate Smart Goals in Google Analytics, simply go to the Admin section of your Google Analytics account, click Goals (under the View heading) and select Smart Goals. The highest-quality visits to your website will now be turned into Smart Goals automatically. No additional tagging or customization is required; Smart Goals just work.

To help you see how Smart Goals perform before you activate them, we’ve built a Smart Goals report in the “Conversions” section of Google Analytics. The behavior metrics in this report indicate the engagement level of Smart Goals visits compared to other visits, helping you evaluate Smart Goals before you activate the feature.

Click image for full-sized version

Step 2: Import Smart Goals into AdWords

Like any other goal in Google Analytics, Smart Goals can be imported into AdWords to be used as an AdWords conversion. Once you’ve defined a conversion in AdWords, you’re able to optimize for it.

Click image for full-sized version

Step 3: Optimizing for Smart Goals in AdWords

One of the benefits of measuring conversions in your Adwords account is the ability to set a target cost per acquisition (CPA) as opposed to just setting a cost per click (CPC). If you aren’t measuring actual conversions today, importing Smart Goals as conversions in Adwords allows you to set a target CPA. In this way, you’re able to optimize your Adwords spend based on the likelihood of conversion as determined by our model.

Smart Goals will be rolling out over the next few weeks. To be eligible for Smart Goals, your Google Analytics property must be linked to your AdWords account(s). Learn how to link your Google Analytics property to your AdWords account(s) in the Analytics Help Center or the AdWords Help Center. Note that your Google Analytics view must receive at least 1,000 clicks from AdWords over a 30-day period to ensure the validity of your data.

Posted by Abishek Sethi (Software Engineer) and Joan Arensman (Product Manager)

Share Google Analytics data and remarketing lists more efficiently using manager accounts (MCC)

November 12, 2015

The following was originally posted on the AdWords Blog.

From monitoring account performance at scale to making cross-account campaign changes, manager accountshelp many of the most sophisticated AdWords advertisers get more done in less time. To deliver more insightful reporting and scale your remarketing efforts, we’re introducing two new enhancements to manager accounts: Google Analytics account linking, and remarketing tag and list sharing.

Access your data with a single link

You can now link your Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium account directly to your AdWords manager account using the new setup wizard in AdWords under Account Settings. This streamlined workflow for linking accounts eliminates the need to link each of your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts individually.

Click image for full-size version

Now when you import your goals, website metrics, remarketing lists, or other data from Google Analytics, you'll only need to do it once. And whenever you add a new AdWords account to your manager account, it will automatically be linked with the same Analytics properties.

These enhancements save time so you can focus on optimizing your campaigns. You can learn more about linking your Google Analytics account into your manager account in the AdWords Help Center.

Scale your remarketing strategy

Many advertisers are seeing tremendous success re-engaging customers and finding new ones using Display remarketing, remarketing lists for search ads, and similar audiences. To help scale these efforts across the AdWords accounts you manage, you now have options for creating and sharing remarketing lists directly in your manager account from the new “Audiences” view, including any lists imported from Google Analytics or Customer Match.

You can also create remarketing lists using a manager-level remarketing tag and use them across your managed accounts. This eliminates the need to retag your website and manage multiple lists in each AdWords account. If any of your managed accounts have their own lists, they can be made available for use in your other managed accounts.

These enhancements make it easier and faster than ever before to get your remarketing strategy up and running. You can learn more about sharing remarketing tags and lists in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Vishal Goenka, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, Powered by Google Analytics

June 25, 2015

Today we’re excited to announce you can use audiences (previously remarketing lists) created in Google Analytics to reach your customers on Google Search, with no tagging changes required.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) allows you to tailor your search ads and based on your visitors' past activity on your website. Now you can leverage more than 200 Google Analytics dimensions and metrics to create and activate your audiences for remarketing, then use those audiences to reach and re-engage your customers with a consistent message across both Google Search and Display.

TransUnion cuts CPA in half with RLSA

In order to find more customers while reducing waste in their search campaigns, TransUnion, a leading financial services provider, used the audience creation capabilities in Google Analytics to spend more efficiently on Google Search.

TransUnion started by creating two audiences. The first was for new customers―those who had visited the site and started, but not completed a credit application. The other included customers who had already converted. Splitting the audience between new and existing customers allowed TransUnion to bid higher on Google search ads for new customers and spend less on converted customers.

The new RLSA capabilities in Google Analytics yielded impressive conversion rates and cost efficiencies for TransUnion's search campaigns. RLSA visitors had a lower bounce rate and viewed twice as many pages per session compared with regular visitors.

By using more tailored text with their remarketing lists, TransUnion increased their conversion rate by 65% and average transaction value by 58%. Meanwhile, CPCs for existing customers dropped 50%, resulting in a roughly 50% drop in their cost per transaction. Read the full case study here.

How to get started

Getting started with RLSA is easier than ever before thanks to Instant Activation. Within the Admin tab, simply click Property, then Tracking Info, and finally Data Collection. Ensure that Remarketing is set to ‘ON.’

Once you’ve enabled this setting, all your eligible audiences will begin to populate for RLSA.

Building Audiences

If you’d like to create new audiences, there are three ways to get started.

First, you can create a new audience using the Audience builder in the remarketing section of the Admin tab. Make sure you select the relevant AdWords account to share your audience with for remarketing.

If you have an existing segment you’d like to turn into an audience, simply click on the segment options and select “Build Audience” right from within reporting. This option will take you directly to the audience builder as above.

Finally, you can get started quickly and easily by importing audiences from the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery.

Activating audiences in AdWords

Once you have shared an audience with AdWords, it will appear instantly in your AdWords Shared Library and will show eligible users in the column List size (Google search). Keep in mind that an audience must accumulate a minimum of 1,000 users before you can use it for remarketing on Google Search. To get started, follow the instructions in the AdWords Help Center.

Support for RLSA with Google Analytics is part of an ongoing investment to provide powerful ways to activate your customer insights in Google Analytics, along with recent features like Cohort Analysis, Lifetime Value Analysis, and Active User Reporting. Stay tuned for more announcements!

Happy Analyzing,
Lan Huang, Technical Lead, Google Analytics,
Xiaorui Gan, Technical Lead, Google Search Ads

Best Practices: Combine AdWords with Google Analytics for Better Insights, Bidding and Results

February 11, 2015

Like sunshine and the beach, or dogs and tennis balls, Google AdWords and Google Analytics are great by themselves but even better together. You'll get high-performance insights into your ads and your website when you link your AdWords and Analytics accounts. Google Analytics does a vital job in this pairing: it shows you what happened after users clicked on your AdWords ads.

We’ve put together a new Best Practices guide, Better Together: AdWords and Google Analytics, to help you get deep insight into your performance. When you analyze performance with the combination of GA and AdWords you can find all sorts of actionable info:

Which parts of your account drive actual on-site engagement
Which keywords attract new users to your site
What messaging and landing pages connect with the different users on your site
How your business compares across your entire industry

To whet your appetite, here’s a rundown of ten useful GA reports included in the guide (with links that lead you directly to these reports in your own GA account). Like what you see here? Download the full version and the condensed one-page checklist to view our complete coverage of GA + AW goodness.

Love Analytics and AdWords being paired together? Please take our survey about your past success and what else we can do to improve the experience.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Start Remarketing with Google Analytics Instant Activation

January 28, 2015

For many advertisers, remarketing is an essential tactic. But remarketing can be a difficult journey, even for the savviest digital marketer. We repeatedly see marketers struggle with tagging hurdles and complex implementation challenges, with the result that only 1 in 5 remarketers successfully completes their setup.

To help make it easier for advertisers to reach their most qualified customers, we’ve enabled remarketing with a single toggle. Instead of manually updating all of your site tags, simply use Instant Activation and get started with remarketing in four easy steps.

Identifying quality visitors and maximizing conversions

GlobalTechLED.com is a producer of LED lighting. Thanks to Instant Activation, John Burns, Director of Marketing, was able to start remarketing quickly. Without waiting for IT to re-tag his site, John successfully launched Global Tech LED’s first remarketing campaign and saw fast results by reaching their highest potential customers.

After enabling remarketing, Global Tech LED leveraged Google’s powerful machine-learning technology in two ways for their online campaigns: Smart Lists for remarketing automatically created lists of visitors who were most likely to engage in a subsequent session on GlobalTechLED.com. Then, Conversion Optimizer instantly adjusted the campaigns’ bids get more conversions at a lower cost, eventually freeing up more time and resources for the company.

As a result, GlobalTechLED.com is currently reaching their performance and outreach goals. To date they’ve doubled their display campaigns’ CTRs and have almost five times more clicks on their remarketing campaign compared to their other campaigns. Website traffic increased by over 100% in the first 30 days of the campaign, and international traffic skyrocketed. They’ve also seen a 75% decrease in CPA for their campaigns.

These kind of results were exactly what the company was looking for. According to John, "We’ve been trying to hit these specific numbers in the account for a couple of months, and Google Analytics Remarketing helped us achieve these in only a couple of days." Read the full case study here.

Four easy steps to get started

Ready to get started with remarketing? You can, with just four steps.

1. In your Google Analytics Property’s settings, choose ‘Audiences’ under the ‘Remarketing’ section.

2. Choose the AdWords account where you’d like to share your Audience and click ‘Next Step’.

3. Click “Enable” to create your first audience of All Users. You can also come back later and create more complex audiences, like ‘visitors who have spent more than six minutes on site’, ‘visitors who visited more than five pages’, or ‘abandoned cart’.

This step automatically activates Advertiser Features if you haven’t done so already, which also enables Audience Demographics and Interests Reporting. You can manage this setting at any time in the Admin tab, under the ‘Advertiser Features’ section in your Property Settings.

4. Click ‘Create Campaign’ and complete the remarketing campaign creation process in AdWords. Congratulations, you are now a Remarketer!

We’re really excited to make Advertiser Features in Google Analytics simpler and enable all Google Analytics users to be more successful across all their marketing channels. Stay tuned for future improvements!

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Avi Mehta and Rosanne Borja, Google Analytics Team

Segmenting Brand and Generic Paid Search Traffic in Google Analytics

June 26, 2014

Many advertisers with paid search campaigns advertise on queries mentioning their brand (e.g., “Motorola smartphone” for Motorola) and also on generic searches (e.g., “smartphone reviews”). Because the performance metrics for ads shown against brand and generic queries can be vastly different, many advertisers prefer to analyze these two groups separately. For example, all else being equal, searches containing the advertiser’s brand name often have higher clickthrough-rates than those that don’t.

Automatic classification

To make analysis of brand and generic performance as easy as possible, we’re introducing a new feature which automatically identifies brand-aware paid search clicks tracked in Google Analytics. We use a combination of signals (including the clickthrough-rate, text string, domain name and others) to identify query terms which show awareness of your brand. You can review our suggested brand terms and then accept or decline each of them. It’s also easy to add additional brand terms that we’ve missed.

With the resulting list of brand terms, we classify your paid search traffic in GA so that you can split your “paid search” channel into two separate channels: “brand paid search” and “generic paid search”. This can be done both for Multi-Channel Funnels (for attribution purposes) and for the main Google Analytics channel grouping. See this straightforward step-by-step guide to get started.

Industry feedback

Back in 2012, George Michie from the Rimm-Kaufmann Group, a leading online marketing agency, called analyzing brand and generic paid search together “the cardinal sin of paid search”. We showed him a preview of our new solution and here’s his reaction:

"I've been arguing for many years that advertisers should look at their brand and generic paid search separately. There are massive differences in overall performance - but also in more specific areas, like attribution and new customer acquisition.

Google Analytics now makes it a lot easier for advertisers to segment brand and generic paid search into separate channels. I'm sure this feature will help many more advertisers measure these important differences - and more importantly, take action on these new insights."

Getting started

Finally: note that this feature works for all paid search advertising, not just Google AdWords. It will roll out to all users in the coming weeks.

To get started, use the step-by-step guide to set up separate brand paid search and generic paid search channels. We’ve already suggested brand terms for every GA view with sufficient paid search traffic.

Posted by: Frank Uyeda, Software Engineer, Google Analytics

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Use Smart Goals, powered by Google Analytics, to optimize in AdWords

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Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, Powered by Google Analytics

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Start Remarketing with Google Analytics Instant Activation

Segmenting Brand and Generic Paid Search Traffic in Google Analytics

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