In 2010, we started showing hotel information in a more useful way with sponsored hotel prices in Google Maps. Since then, we’ve expanded Google Hotel ads to more than 150 countries on Google.com and Google Maps, helping travelers ...Read More

In 2010, we started showing hotel information in a more useful way with sponsored hotel prices in Google Maps. Since then, we’ve expanded Google Hotel ads to more than 150 countries on Google.com and Google Maps, helping travelers browse hotels on mobile devices and spot hotel deals. Our Hotel ad partners are happy with the volume of leads and bookings - in the first six months of 2018, the number of leads to partners grew 65 percent year over year. As Hotel ads has grown, we’ve heard feedback that some partners have a hard time managing their Hotel ads in a separate platform from their other Google Ads, like their search and display campaigns.

To help partners efficiently scale, Hotel ads will become a part of the Google Ads platform with a new campaign type. Hotel campaigns in Google Ads will launch later this year, enabling you to manage your Hotel campaigns alongside your other campaigns in a single platform. We’re also launching a new Hotel Center to simplify the management of your hotel price feeds.

Google Hotel Ads join Google Ads

Yesterday at Google Marketing Live, we introduced a new campaign type in Google Ads called Hotel campaigns. This campaign type will simplify campaign management and optimization. Specifically, the benefits include:

• Hotel groups to organize hotels by important attributes like brand and class
• Robust bidding controls that allow marketers to optimize for bidding dimensions unique to hotels like a traveler’s length of stay or check-in day and audience bidding
• Smart bidding powered by machine learning to maximize bookings at your ROI goal
• Rich reporting and familiar responsive interface available with the newly redesigned Google Ads 

We’re testing this new Hotel campaign type with a few initial partners, and they are excited by the results.

"As the largest travel agent in Latin America we're focused on getting interested online leads to our site and Google Hotel ads have been a great channel for us thus far. As an alpha tester, we're excited by the promise of Hotel ads in Google Ads. We think it'll help us save time, scale our efforts and started to move more of our hotel inventory to the new Hotel campaign type."
- Andrés Patetta, Chief Marketing Officer, Despegar.com

"At Koddi, we have over 400,000 hotels in our global portfolio including large global advertisers. We're always looking for ways to drive more bookings, and Google Hotel ads are a central part of many of our partner's distribution strategy. We've seen Google Hotel ads traffic steadily grow, with our partners experiencing an average 31% increase every year. The upcoming Ads integration will uncover new insights that will allow us to scale our clients' reach and bookings further."
- Deep Kohli, Senior Director of Client Services, Koddi.

New Hotel Center for hotel price feed management

Hotel price feed management can be complex and time-consuming. With Hotel campaign management moving into Google Ads, we’re also redesigning how partners optimize and manage their hotel price feeds in a new Hotel Center. This Hotel Center will:

• Simplify feed troubleshooting with faster and more intuitive in-product guidance
• Quickly optimize your feed’s health with actionable opportunities and one-click fixes
• Use a central hub to power other price feed-based hotel features in the future, like dynamic remarketing creatives.

The existing Hotel Ads Center will be replaced with the new Hotel Center in phases. We’re starting with the basics first, focusing on a better way to submit your hotel inventory and describe your hotel properties.

Learn more

Hotel Ads will launch as an open beta available to advertisers later this year. If you’d like to stay up to date on the Google Ads integration and Hotel Center launch, beta test Hotel ads in Google Ads or learn more about Hotel ads in general, please fill out this interest form.

Whether you’re a hotel owner trying to fill your rooms or an online travel agent wanting to drive more leads, we hope Hotel ads in Google Ads and the new Hotel Center will make it easier than ever to connect with travelers at scale.

Posted by Michael Trauttmansdorff, Senior Product Manager, Hotels

Getting better results from your online ads today requires more than just the right keywords or the right bids. You need to deliver the helpful and frictionless experiences consumers expect from brands. Yesterday at ...Read More

Getting better results from your online ads today requires more than just the right keywords or the right bids. You need to deliver the helpful and frictionless experiences consumers expect from brands. Yesterday at Google Marketing Live, we shared ad innovations powered by Google’s machine learning that help you do just that.

However, even the best ads struggle to deliver results if they’re sending people to slow landing pages, especially on mobile. In retail, we see that for every one second delay in page load time, conversions can fall by up to 20 percent.¹ That’s why we’re making it easier to diagnose and improve your mobile site speed.

See if your mobile pages are slowing you down

Consider this: more than half of all web traffic now happens on mobile. Yet the average mobile webpage takes 15 seconds to load.² And for many brands this equates to missed opportunity, especially when more than half of visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes more than three seconds to load.³ So where does your business land in all of this?

To help you understand how landing page speed affects your ad performance, we introduced the new mobile speed score. Evaluated on a 10-point scale, 1 being very slow and 10 being extremely fast, the mobile speed score lets you quickly see which pages are providing a fast mobile experience and which ones may require your attention.

See your mobile speed score on the Landing Pages page in Google Ads

Mobile speed scores are based on a number of factors, including the relationship between page speed and potential conversion rate. It starts rolling out to advertisers globally today.

Improve your mobile experience with AMP

Now that you know what’s slowing you down, how do you speed up? Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) provide a faster, smoother, and more engaging mobile experience. In fact, AMP pages typically load 85 percent faster than standard mobile pages.⁴ They’re so fast, they appear to load instantly.

Once you’ve sped up your site, you can direct your search ad clicks to those AMP pages and create the super-fast and delightful mobile experiences people expect. Brands like Greenweez, a leading French organic retailer, are using AMP to improve mobile site landing page speed and performance. Greenweez was able to increase its mobile page speed by 5X, resulting in an 80 percent increase in mobile conversions!

Build your case for a faster mobile site

When someone has a negative experience on mobile, they’re much less likely to purchase from you in the future. So if you want to stay ahead of the curve, you need to prioritize speed within your organization. To help you do that, we’ve built two free tools: the Speed Scorecard, which lets you see how your mobile site speed stacks up against your peers, and the Impact Calculator, which lets you estimate the revenue you’re potentially leaving on the table by having a slow mobile site.

You can learn more about these tools and best practices for speeding up your mobile site on Think with Google.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Group Product Manager, Google Ads

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1. Google/SOASTA, “The State of Online Retail Performance,” April 2017
2. Google Research, Webpagetest.org, sampled 11M global mWeb domains loaded using a globally representative 4G connection, Jan. 2018.
3. Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016
4. Google Data, Global, April 2017

People increasingly visit YouTube to learn new things, in addition to entertaining themselves and connecting with others. In many ways, YouTube has become as much an information destination as an entertainment hub. And that quest for information certainly extends to brands, products and services. So what does that mean for marketers?Read More

People increasingly visit YouTube to learn new things, in addition to entertaining themselves and connecting with others. In many ways, YouTube has become as much an information destination as an entertainment hub. And that quest for information certainly extends to brands, products and services. So what does that mean for marketers?

It means video has a role to play in every stage of your consumer’s journey. And in order for you to be effective during each and every interaction, you need options.

This week at Google Marketing Live, we shared the work we’re doing on new ad formats and bidding strategies for YouTube that are designed to align to your campaign objectives—whether you want to build awareness for your brand, shift perceptions or drive a specific action.

For brands with awareness or reach goals, we built TrueView for reach. It brings our primary in-stream format together with the simplicity of CPM buying. In an initial TrueView for reach test, used car retailer DriveTime drove 2,400 dealership visits at a CPM 40 percent below what they were paying for local TV, enabling them to reach 66 percent more people at the same budget.

Beyond reach, many brands rely on YouTube’s attentive audience to shift perception—be it consideration or purchase intent. To help you accomplish and measure this, we’re launching Maximize lift. This new bidding strategy uses Google’s machine learning and continuous brand lift measurement to help you efficiently reach people who are more likely to consider your brand after exposure to an ad. COVERGIRL recently used Maximize lift bidding with TrueView in-stream ads to influence consideration for a new mascara and drove an estimated 2x return on ad spend.

Increasingly, video is also leading people to take action. In fact, globally, conversions generated by YouTube ads are up 150 percent year over year. Using TrueView for action, you can drive any action on your website that’s important to your business, like booking a trip, scheduling a test drive or requesting more information.

Later this year, we'll introduce a new flavor of TrueView for action designed to help you generate high quality leads directly from your video ads. This new form feature enables people to submit their email address or phone number directly from your video ad, making it even easier for them to sign up for your service or learn more about your business. Additionally, you’ll soon be able to choose between Target CPA bidding and Maximize conversions bidding for TrueView for action campaigns, giving you more ways to drive even better results.

While effective on their own, these new ad options for YouTube truly shine when used in concert. That’s what DICK’S Sporting Goods did during last year’s holiday season.

To build awareness and reach a broad audience with an inspirational message showing the brand’s commitment to youth sports, the retailer used TrueView for reach. They built on this momentum with standard in-stream, TrueView in-stream and six-second bumper ads to deliver promotional messaging to in-market audiences. Then, they followed up with TrueView for action ads to drive people to their website to buy.

This strategy moved their customers seamlessly through the full purchase journey, achieving a return on ad spend of 10 to 1.

DICK’S Sporting Goods demonstrated one approach to a full-funnel YouTube strategy, but the possibilities are vast.

We’re excited to see how you use YouTube to deliver results at every stage of your customer’s journey and we'll continue to build solutions that help you do so.

Posted by Vishal Sharma, Vice President, Product Management, YouTube Ads

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1. Google Internal Data, Global, 6/1/16 - 5/1/17 vs. 6/1/17 - 5/1/18

The ways people get things done are constantly changing, from finding the closest coffee shop to organizing family photos. Earlier this year, we explored how machine learning is being used to improve our consumer products and help people get stuff done.Read More

The ways people get things done are constantly changing, from finding the closest coffee shop to organizing family photos. Earlier this year, we explored how machine learning is being used to improve our consumer products and help people get stuff done.

In just one hour, we’ll share how we're helping marketers unlock even more opportunities for their businesses with our largest deployment of machine learning in ads. We’ll explore how this technology works in our products and why it’s key to delivering the helpful and frictionless experiences consumers expect from brands.

Join us live today at 9am PT (12pm ET).

Deliver more relevance with responsive search ads

Consumers today are more curious, more demanding, and they expect to get things done faster because of mobile. As a result, they expect your ads to be helpful and personalized. Doing this isn’t easy, especially at scale. That’s why we’re introducing responsive search ads. Responsive search ads combine your creativity with the power of Google’s machine learning to help you deliver relevant, valuable ads.

Simply provide up to 15 headlines and 4 description lines, and Google will do the rest. By testing different combinations, Google learns which ad creative performs best for any search query. So people searching for the same thing might see different ads based on context.

We know this kind of optimization works: on average, advertisers who use Google’s machine learning to test multiple creative see up to 15 percent more clicks.¹

Responsive search ads will start rolling out to advertisers over the next several months.

Maximize relevance and performance on YouTube

People watch over 1 billion hours of video on YouTube every day. And increasingly, they’re tuning in for inspiration and information on purchases large and small. For example, nearly 1 in 2 car buyers say they turn to YouTube for information before their purchase.² And nearly 1 in 2 millennials go there for food preparation tips before deciding what ingredients to buy.³ That means it’s critical your video ads show at the right moment to the right audience.

Machine learning helps us turn that attention into results on YouTube. In the past, we’ve helped you optimize campaigns for views and impressions. Later this year, we’re rolling out Maximize lift to help you reach people who are most likely to consider your brand after seeing a video ad. This new Smart Bidding strategy is also powered by machine learning. It automatically adjusts bids at auction time to maximize the impact your video ads have on brand perception throughout the consumer journey.

Maximize lift is available now as a beta and will roll out to advertisers globally later this year.

Drive more foot traffic with Local campaigns

Whether they start their research on YouTube or Google, people still make the majority of their purchases in physical stores. In fact, mobile searches for “near me” have grown over 3X in the past two years,⁴ and almost 80 percent of shoppers will go in store when there’s an item they want immediately.⁵ For many of you, that means driving foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar locations is critical—especially during key moments in the year, like in-store events or promotions.

Today we’re introducing Local campaigns: a new campaign type designed to drive store visits exclusively. Provide a few simple things—like your business locations and ad creative—and Google automatically optimizes your ads across properties to bring more customers into your store.

Show your business locations across Google properties and networks

Local campaigns will roll out to advertisers globally over the coming months.

Get the most from your Shopping campaigns

Earlier this year, we rolled out a new Shopping campaign type that optimizes performance based on your goals. These Smart Shopping campaigns help you hit your revenue goals without the need to manually manage and bid to individual products. In the coming months, we’re improving them to optimize across multiple business goals.

Beyond maximize conversion value, you’ll also be able to select store visits or new customers as goals. Machine learning factors in the likelihood that a click will result in any of these outcomes and helps adjust bids accordingly.

Machine learning is also used to optimize where your Shopping ads show—on Google.com, Image Search, YouTube and millions of sites and apps across the web—and which products are featured. It takes into account a wide range of signals, like seasonal demand and pricing. Brands like GittiGidiyor, an eBay company, are using Smart Shopping campaigns to simplify how they manage their ads and deliver better results. GittiGidiyor was able to increase return on ad spend by 28 percent and drive 4 percent more sales, while saving time managing campaigns.

We’re also adding support for leading e-commerce platforms to help simplify campaign management. In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to set up and manage Smart Shopping campaigns right from Shopify, in addition to Google Ads.

Tune in to see more!

This is an important moment for marketers and we’re excited to be on this journey with you. Tune in at 9am PT (12pm ET) today to see it all unfold at Google Marketing Live.

For the latest news, follow the new Google Ads blog. And check out g.co/adsannouncements for more information about product updates and announcements.

Posted by Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management

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1. Internal Google data
2. Google / Kantar TNS, Auto CB Gearshift Study, US, 2017. n=312 new car buyers who watched online video
3. Google / Ipsos, US, November 2017
4. Internal Google data, U.S., July–Dec. 2015 vs. July–Dec. 2017
5. Google/Ipsos, U.S., “Shopping Tracker,” Online survey, n=3,613 online Americans 13+ who shopped in the past two days, Oct.–Dec. 2017

Get ready for the ads, analytics, and platforms innovations live stream. Watch today at 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET to learn more about Google’s latest announcements.

 

Join the conversation at #GoogleMarketingLive.Read More

Get ready for the ads, analytics, and platforms innovations live stream. Watch today at 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET to learn more about Google’s latest announcements.

 

Join the conversation at #GoogleMarketingLive.

We launched AdWords nearly 18 years ago with a simple goal—to make it easier for people to connect online with businesses. A search for eco-friendly stationery, quilting supplies, or for a service like a ...Read More

We launched AdWords nearly 18 years ago with a simple goal—to make it easier for people to connect online with businesses. A search for eco-friendly stationery, quilting supplies, or for a service like a treehouse builder gave us an opportunity to deliver valuable ads that were useful and relevant in the moment. That idea was the start of our first advertising product, and led to the ads business we have today.

A lot has changed since then. Mobile is now a huge part of our everyday lives. People quickly switch from searching for products, to watching videos, browsing content, playing games and more. As a result, marketers have more opportunities to reach consumers across channels, screens and formats. The opportunity has never been more exciting, but it’s also never been more complex. Over the years, Google ads have evolved from helping marketers connect with people on Google Search, to helping them connect at every step of the consumer journey through text, video, display and more.

That’s why today we are introducing simpler brands and solutions for our advertising products: Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ad Manager. These new brands will help advertisers and publishers of all sizes choose the right solutions for their businesses, making it even easier for them to deliver valuable, trustworthy ads and the right experiences for consumers across devices and channels. As part of this change, we are releasing new solutions that help advertisers get started with Google Ads and drive greater collaboration across teams.

Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads

The new Google Ads brand represents the full range of advertising capabilities we offer today—on Google.com and across our other properties, partner sites and apps—to help marketers connect with the billions of people finding answers on Search, watching videos on YouTube, exploring new places on Google Maps, discovering apps on Google Play, browsing content across the web, and more.
For small businesses specifically, we’re introducing a new campaign type in Google Ads that makes it easier than ever to get started with online advertising. It brings the machine learning technology of Google Ads to small businesses and helps them get results without any heavy lifting—so they can stay focused on running their businesses. To learn more, visit this post.

We'll introduce more new campaign types at Google Marketing Live. Sign up to watch the livestream on July 10th.

Stronger collaboration with Google Marketing Platform

We’re enabling stronger collaboration for enterprise marketing teams by unifying our DoubleClick advertiser products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite under a single brand: Google Marketing Platform.
We’ve heard from marketers that there are real benefits to using ads and analytics technology together, including a better understanding of customers and better business results. Google Marketing Platform helps marketers achieve their goals by building on existing integrations between the Google Analytics 360 Suite and DoubleClick Digital Marketing. The platform helps marketers plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. To learn more, visit the Google Marketing Platform blog.

As part of Google Marketing Platform, we’re announcing Display & Video 360. Display & Video 360 brings together features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center to allow creative, agency, and media teams to collaborate and execute ad campaigns end-to-end in a single place. We’ll share more details about Display & Video 360 in the coming weeks, including a demo during the keynote at Google Marketing Live.

Google Ad Manager: A unified platform

We recognize that the way publishers monetize their content has changed. With people accessing content on multiple screens, and with advertisers’ growing demand for programmatic access, publishers need to be able to manage their businesses more simply and efficiently. That’s why for the last three years, we’ve been working to bring together DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange in a complete and unified programmatic platform under a new name–Google Ad Manager.
With this evolution, we’re excited to do even more for our partners—earning them more money, more efficiently, wherever people are watching videos, playing games or engaging with content, and however advertisers are looking to work with them. To learn more, visit the Google Ad Manager blog.

Transparency and controls people can trust

We know that the media and technology advertisers and publishers choose to use impacts the relationships they have with their customers. As always, our commitment is to ensure that all of our products and platforms set the industry’s highest standard in giving people transparency and choice in the ads they see. For example, we recently announced new Ads Settings and expanded Why this ad? across all of our services, and almost all websites and apps that partner with us to show ads.

You'll start to see the new Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager brands over the next month.

We’ll be sharing more about these changes—and many other new Ads, Analytics and Platforms solutions designed to help you grow your business—at Google Marketing Live. Register now to watch live on July 10, 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET.
Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Every year at the Cannes Lions festival, the world gathers to celebrate creativity in marketing, design, tech and entertainment. The festival is a great source of inspiration, with thought-provoking programming that awakens the creative senses of people and brands alike.Read More

Every year at the Cannes Lions festival, the world gathers to celebrate creativity in marketing, design, tech and entertainment. The festival is a great source of inspiration, with thought-provoking programming that awakens the creative senses of people and brands alike.

YouTube’s creative canvas represents an exciting opportunity for brands and agencies to reimagine their approach to video. To help, we’re creating a new set of tools.

Today, we’re introducing YouTube’s creative suite, a collection of resources to help you tell great stories on YouTube, test creative variations and measure creative impact. Kellogg’s is already tapping into tools like YouTube Director Mix to harness the power of personalization, while 20th Century Fox is pairing experimentation with Video Ad Sequencing to give viewers story-driven introductions to new films.

Let’s meet the suite.

Video Experiments

Testing video creative can be expensive, time-consuming and not always indicative of real-world performance. That’s why we’re launching Video experiments, a head-to-head testing tool in AdWords that works with brand lift measurement and allows you to measure the impact of creative on key metrics like awareness, consideration, purchase intent and more. Cleanly segmented experiments run on YouTube at no extra cost beyond media investment and deliver results in as few as three days. Video experiments, launching in beta later this month, convert non-working media spend typically used for focus groups in simulated ad environments into working media spend in real ad environments. On YouTube, people only watch what they want, making it an ideal testing ground for actionable results you can trust.


Video Creative Analytics

Generating reports on creative performance can be a repetitive and manual process for AdWords users, so we’re launching new features to make the process of uncovering quantitative creative insights easier. Our initial launch brings audience segmentation to retention reports so you can better understand how your creative captures the attention of different groups. Later this year, we’ll introduce the ability to annotate key moments within your video ― like logos or product shots ― and show you what percent of your audience saw these key moments. In doing so, you can keep track of how different creative elements influence campaign performance and use that to develop ideas for your next creative brief or video experiment.


Director Mix and Video Ad Sequencing

Telling relevant stories that command attention is challenging, especially at scale. That’s why we’re committed to building tools that enable great storytelling on YouTube. YouTube Director Mix, currently in alpha, lets you create many versions of a base video and set elements to be swappable ― customizing text, image, sound and video elements to assemble the right video for the right audience and context. Video Ad Sequencing, also in alpha, lets you tell your brand story over a series of ads set in a specific order, or showcase your product message across multiple pieces of content. By showing your story in sequence, you have the potential to drive deeper engagement, awareness or consideration.


We’re excited to see how you use these new tools.

Posted by Ali Miller, Group Product Manager, Video Ads

Driven by rapid changes in technology and mobile, consumer expectations continue to rise at an unrelenting pace. There are brand new ways for people to find and engage with businesses, and it’s becoming critical for marketers to remove friction at every step of the consumer journey. This morning at ...Read More

Driven by rapid changes in technology and mobile, consumer expectations continue to rise at an unrelenting pace. There are brand new ways for people to find and engage with businesses, and it’s becoming critical for marketers to remove friction at every step of the consumer journey. This morning at Search Marketing Expo Advanced, we made three announcements for marketers and retailers including:

1. New innovations to highlight your physical locations

Almost 80% of shoppers will go in store when they have an item they want immediately.¹ To help capture this demand, we’re expanding affiliate location extensions to video campaigns on YouTube – on top of Search and Display campaigns. This helps brand manufacturers drive and measure foot traffic to nearby retail stores and auto dealers that sell their products. We’ve seen that adding affiliate location extensions to TrueView in-stream and bumper ads can increase clickthrough rate by over 15%.²

New local catalog ads on Display will also roll out to all advertisers by the end of the month to help shoppers discover what you sell, then visit your store. One-third of shoppers say finding inspiration is something they enjoy most about shopping.³ This interactive experience highlights a hero image and your inventory in an easy-to-scroll, mobile layout that helps shoppers explore your products. It also features in-store availability and detailed pricing information. This new format can complement your traditional print campaigns – including catalogs, flyers, and circulars – with the added audience and measurement benefits of digital ads.

Boulanger is one of the largest electronics and appliances retailers in France. The retail brand had a special promotional event for Spring 2018, so it turned to local catalog ads to boost its sales. Boulanger showcased a cheerful lifestyle image, a message welcoming the season and products carefully curated for local in-store promotion. With help from both click-based and impression-based store visits* (launched in March), the campaign drove over 20K visits to its stores, delivering a return of 42 times its investment on ad spend.

*Store visits are estimates based on aggregated, anonymized data from a sample set of users who have turned on Location History.

Onboarding to both local catalog ads and local inventory ads is now much easier for retailers of all sizes with the new local feed partnership program. The new program allows point-of-sale or inventory data providers, like Cayan, Pointy, Linx and yReceipts, to provide sales and inventory data to Google on behalf of merchants, so they don’t have to create their own local product feeds. As an additional benefit, retailers can showcase their local inventory for free on the “See What’s In Store” feature on the search knowledge panel.

2. Competitive pricing insights to help deliver better sales results

Beyond availability of products in store, we know that price is also a top consideration for consumers. New price benchmarks in AdWords reporting will be available soon to show Shopping advertisers how other retailers are pricing the same products. You can use these pricing insights to inform your bidding strategy when you have price-competitive products to promote, to influence pricing strategy with your merchandising teams, or to troubleshoot performance drops due to competitors’ pricing.

For example, let’s say you find that you’re selling a sweater for $40 while most retailers are selling the same sweater for $60. You may choose to bid up on this sweater because your product is more price-competitive in the current market and will appeal to more potential customers.



3. Updates for our Shopping Actions program

Consumers continue to be open to new ways of discovering and buying products. Today at SMX Advanced, we shared an update on Shopping Actions, the program we launched in March to give consumers an easy way to complete the purchase from retailers, while on Google platforms like Search, the Assistant or by voice.

Since its launch, thousands of retailers have requested to join through our interest form, and more than 70 retailers are live on the program today. Early testing indicates that participating retailers on average see an increase in total clicks and conversions at a lower overall cost per click and conversion, compared to running Shopping ads alone.⁴

As always, SMX Advanced is an exciting event that brings leading marketers together. We hope you'll join us in our Learn with Google Classroom to connect and hear more about how these new products can help you grow your business.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Director of Product Management

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1. Google/Ipsos, U.S., “Shopping Tracker,” Online survey, n=3,613 online Americans 13+ who shopped in the past two days, Oct.–Dec. 2017
2. YouTube Internal Data, US, CA, UK, DE, AU, November 2017
3. Google/Ipsos, “Shopping Tracker”, October-December 2017, Online survey, US, n=3,613 online Americans 13+ who shopped in the past two days
4. Google internal data, Feb - June 2018

Consumers search for and research products in more ways than ever before across devices, on websites, and product review blogs. It’s essential to consider the entire customer journey and keep people engaged once they reach your business. That’s why we ...Read More

Consumers search for and research products in more ways than ever before across devices, on websites, and product review blogs. It’s essential to consider the entire customer journey and keep people engaged once they reach your business. That’s why we introduced an integration between Optimize and AdWords to make it easy for marketers to test and create personalized landing pages.

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


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

Consumers have high expectations for faster, safer and better digital experiences. This means it's more important than ever for brands to deliver on these expectations.

At Google, we're building new innovations to help AdWords advertisers design the best web experiences for your customers.Read More

Consumers have high expectations for faster, safer and better digital experiences. This means it's more important than ever for brands to deliver on these expectations.

At Google, we're building new innovations to help AdWords advertisers design the best web experiences for your customers.


Speed: Improvements to click measurement
Speed matters. In fact, a one-second delay in mobile page load can decrease conversions up to 20%.¹ That’s why we announced support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) as landing pages in AdWords and developed new tools like the Mobile Speed Scorecard and the Impact Calculator. With just a few inputs, this tool estimates the revenue impact that can result from improving the speed of your mobile website.

Another way we’re improving mobile site speed is parallel tracking (blog | help center) -- which was introduced earlier this year for advertisers using click measurement systems. How does this improve speed? After an ad click, web browsers will process click measurement requests in the background, helping people reach your site up to several seconds faster.² This creates better user experiences, leading to more conversions and less budget spent on bounced clicks.

Starting October 30, 2018, parallel tracking will be required for all AdWords accounts. To get a jump start, you can now opt in your Search Network and Shopping campaigns. And even if you don't intend to turn it on today, you should start talking with your click measurement providers to ensure that they are ready for this change. Doing so, ensures there’s no disruption to your click measurement system.

If you've confirmed that your click measurement system is already compatible, you can opt in from your account-level "Settings" page in the "Tracking" section. Learn more



Security: Focus on HTTPS
You want your customers to have a safe and secure experience, every time they engage with your website. But too many brands still use unencrypted HTTP to send users to their landing pages. That's why Google strongly advocates that sites adopt HTTPS encryption, the industry standard for ensuring the security and integrity of data traveling between the browser and the website.

Over the last year, Chrome has marked an increasingly large set of HTTP pages as "not secure." Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP pages as “not secure.”

To make sure your users continue to have the best possible landing page experience, we've taken a few extra steps:

• Enabled HTTP Search ad clicks to automatically be redirected to HTTPS when we know that your site prefers HTTPS, which we will begin rolling out the week of June 11.
• Launched Ad version history to allow advertisers to update your landing page URLs from HTTP to HTTPS without resetting all of your performance statistics. 
• Will start to warn advertisers in AdWords when you’re using less secure HTTP addresses for landing pages, in the next few weeks.

We hope that these innovations will help people browse more quickly, confidently and securely.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Group Product Manager, AdWords

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1. "State of Online Retail Performance," Akamai, April 2017
2. Google Internal Data, Japan/India/US. Aggregated anonymized data from a sample of users that have clicked on an AdWords ad with URL tracking, August 2017