Consider this: 6 in 10 internet users in the US start shopping on one device but continue or finish on a different one.1 To help advertisers measure these customer paths that start on one device but convert on another, we rolled out cross-device conversions over three years ago. Using that same technology, we’re introducing three new reports in the Attribution section of AdWords to provide deeper insight into device usage along the full search conversion path.
Devices -- see how much cross-device activity is happening in your AdWords account
Assisting Devices -- inform your device bid adjustments by learning how often different devices assisted conversions on other devices
Device Paths -- examine the top conversion paths for your customers using two or more devices
Advertisers in many industries around the world have already seen the impact of cross-device activity on last-click conversions. Today, we’re excited to share new search benchmarks that show the influence of cross-device activity across the full search conversion path.
Source: Google AdWords Internal Data 2016
There are two main ways to take action on these new cross-device insights:
Select a different attribution model beyond last click. You can select one of six different attribution models for each of your conversion types: last click, first click, linear, time decay, position-based, or data-driven. These attribution models apply to your search ads and take cross-device behavior into account. When you pick a new model, credit will be reassigned across the conversion path and your conversion stats will change moving forward. Check out our recent best practices guide for additional information.
Update your device bid adjustments. The new Assisting Devices report can tell you how many conversions were assisted by clicks or impressions from different devices. The Mobile Assist Ratio shows how many conversions were assisted by mobile devices compared to the number of final conversions on mobile devices. For example, if your Mobile Assist Ratio for a campaign is 3.72, that means that for every conversion on a mobile device, 3.72 conversions on other devices were assisted by mobile devices. With this information, you can update your mobile bid adjustments.
In the coming weeks, you'll find the new reports in Attribution under the Tools tab. We hope these new reports and benchmarks will help you measure the moments that matter on any device.
Posted by: Joan Arensman, Product Manager
1. Google / Ipsos Connect, March 2016, GPS Omnibus, n=2,013 US online respondents 18+
Mobile app engagement ads are a great choice if you want to help existing app users take action in your app. You can now create and edit mobile app engagement ads in AdWords Editor, making it easier to reach more of the right app users with the right message.
Import, export, and posting for multiple accounts
We’re always looking for new ways to make managing accounts easier and more efficient. With this latest version of AdWords Editor, you can post changes to multiple accounts at the same time, import a CSV file into multiple accounts, and export more than one account into a single CSV file.
Structured snippet extensions
Structured snippets let you highlight features of a specific product or describe the range of products or services your business offers. AdWords Editor now allows you to create and edit structured snippets at scale.
and much more...
AdWords Editor 11.5 also provides support for filtering by type when downloading campaigns, aggressive targeting optimization for mobile app installs campaigns, multi-column sorting, and enhancements to advanced search. You can learn more about these updates in the AdWords Editor Help Center or download AdWords Editor 11.5 here.
AliExpress is a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group and a global e-commerce retailer. They’ve used campaigns drafts and experiments to test Target CPA head-to-head with their existing bidding solution. Says Jessy Sheng, Marketing Manager, “We wanted access to more diverse signals for our bidding to make it more dynamic and help raise online sales across multiple markets.” After only one month of testing Target CPA, they saw a 93% increase in conversions and 46% reduction in CPA. “With drafts and experiments, we can easily test new bid strategies quicker than ever before, which is important in our fast-paced business. Smart Bidding with Target CPA produced fantastic, actionable results and we’re excited to expand it to more campaigns.”
SurveyMonkey is an industry leader in web-based surveys. With strong competition on its keywords, leading-edge bid management is a priority for SurveyMonkey to maximize performance from their marketing budget. “We’re open to testing any feature that will get us more conversions and help us reach our CPA target,” says Brittany Bingham, Director of Online Marketing. “After only three weeks of testing AdWords Smart Bidding, we saw a 44% increase in conversions, which is incredible. We’re looking forward to scaling Smart Bidding with Target CPA across more campaigns.”
Capterra offers a smart way to find the right business software by providing buyers with comprehensive user reviews, product ratings and detailed infographics. With a large, complex campaign structure that spans over 1 million keywords, 400 software categories, and targets more than 30 countries, its advertising team was looking to move away from manual bidding so they could focus their time on other growth opportunities. Zachary Rippstein, Director of Advertising at Capterra, says, “We’ve gained so much efficiency by using AdWords Smart Bidding. More importantly, though, we’ve seen great improvement in performance and profit dollar growth. By leveraging Target CPA, we were able to drive 121% higher profit during our test period compared to the control period.”
To learn more about AdWords Smart Bidding, visit the Help Center and check out our best practices to maximize your success with automated bidding. If you are a DoubleClick advertiser or looking for bid and campaign management across multiple search engines, learn about DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding.
Anthony Chavez, Product Management Director, Search Ads, Google
If you rely on the “Converted clicks” reporting column to make bidding and budgeting decisions then you should also move to “Conversions.” This column can be configured to report similar numbers to your “Converted clicks” column, though you should review your setup to make sure you are counting the actions that matter most to your business. “Conversions” can give you everything “Converted clicks” does, along with much more.
If you’re in need of updating, there are a few considerations as you make the change:
Choose which conversion actions that you measure should be included in the “Conversions” column. Other actions can still be measured in “All conversions”
Determine whether to count multiple instances of a conversion after a click or only one
Customize your conversion windows and values (if necessary)
Download any historical “Converted clicks” reporting stats that you want to keep
You can adjust settings for each of your conversion actions in AdWords
Proper conversion counting is important, and it’s something that’s imperative to get right as online behavior evolves. Please read our Help Center for further information about this upcoming change.
Posted by Tal Akabas and Frederik Kemner, Product Managers, AdWords Conversions
TrueView discovery ads are such a powerful format because they deliver high engagement – when viewers click on your video, that’s a strong signal that they’re interested in your brand. It’s why on average, users view one additional video from your brand within 24 hours of watching your TrueView discovery ad.1 This format is built for winning over your audience, and guiding them to your content when they’re searching for something great to watch.
Since TrueView discovery ads capture your audience when they’re leaning forward, we see on average TrueView discovery ads drive over 5x more clicks on advertiser-provided calls to action than TrueView in-stream. They’re also great for promoting your longer form content.
Advertisers like Benefit Cosmetics are using TrueView discovery ads to amplify their branded content. In a recent campaign, they used the format to reach viewers as they searched and browsed the latest brow trends. “We wanted to insert ourselves in a way that felt natural and really drove our brand and DNA, but also be incredibly useful to the customer when they’re looking for us,” said Nicole Frusci, Benefit’s vice president of brand and digital marketing. By serving up relevant content on YouTube search results and on related video watch pages, Benefit was able to boost subscriptions to their channel by 20% and drive an additional 663,000 earned views on top of their 1.2M paid views.
But why read all about what makes TrueView discovery ads so great when you can watch a video instead? Take it away Josh:
These changes will roll out in the next few weeks – keep an eye out in Adwords or DoubleClick Bid Manager – so you can start engaging your most qualified audience at key moments of discovery across YouTube. Posted by Nicky Rettke, Group Product Manager, YouTube Ads 1. Google internal data, global, analysis based on channels with at least 10,000 organic and ad-driven views, Jan-Feb 2015.
“As Nationwide’s agency partners, driving qualified insurance prospects to its call center is a priority to effectively convert new customers. Until now, we haven't been able to maximize Nationwide’s presence in search because we couldn’t tie call revenue back to individual clicks. Imported call conversions takes AdWords measurement to the next level and we can now import actual policy sales driven by calls directly into AdWords. With this data, we can make better decisions about where to spend marketing budget, keyword bids & positioning, and campaign optimization. Even though it's still early, since including imported call conversions into campaign optimization, we’ve been able to increase spend on top-performing, call-driving terms by nearly 3x. This has even helped us identify new keyword expansion opportunities from search queries we wouldn’t have otherwise found without increasing our investment backed by imported calls data.” -- Jordan Jones, Associate Director of Performance Digital, UM
"Many customers have questions about our product selection or want to place an order directly with a sales rep, so we make it easy for them to call us from our ads and website. Imported call conversions brings our AdWords calls measurement a big step closer to fully closing the loop between our offline call center data and our online metrics. We have a better understanding of how calls from AdWords ads are driving revenue, and will be able to use these insights to make more informed decisions when it comes to budget allocation and campaign optimization." -- Jeff Loquist, Search Marketing Manager at ShoppersChoice.com
What you need to successfully import call conversions
This data will remain secure and privacy-safe for your customers, and serve as the key to match conversions back to the AdWords calls that drove them. Conversions will be attributed down to the keyword-level to help you determine which parts of your campaigns drive the most valuable call conversions and where you should be investing your ad spend.
HomeClick, an online retailer of home improvement products, has measured 7% incremental conversions when including cross-device data. As a result, they’ve increased their mobile presence and included mobile clicks in attribution modeling to optimize against a more holistic view of the consumer journey. They’ve also integrated cross-device conversions into their automated bidding. Together, these changes have helped generate 60-70% growth in revenue. According to Matthew Hardgrove, Director of Marketing, "Cross-device conversions helps us understand the greater impact of mobile on our website performance. It provides us with information that has allowed us to open up new opportunities and gain market share from our competitors on a segment of traffic we previously undervalued."
For Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, its target audience typically converts on desktop, but they also see multiple touch points before then with billboards, radio, TV and most importantly, mobile. “Without cross-device measurement, it’s hard for us to really understand the full customer journey,” says Sam Gomez, VP of digital marketing at Feld Entertainment, Ringling Bros.’ parent company. It used cross-device tracking in AdWords to prove that mobile is a major contributor to driving conversions, and justify doubling down on their mobile strategy. This increased investment has resulted in a 262% uplift in cross-device conversions, 30% rise in ticket sales and a return-on-ad-spend of 1,132%.
U.S. Polo Assn., a clothing and accessories retailer, uses cross-device measurement to help capture the full value of mobile. Working with their agency partners at Elite SEM, it has seen mobile conversions increase over 2x year-over-year alongside a 128% increase in mobile traffic. Says Matt Debnar, VP Ecommerce at U.S. Polo Assn., “Analyzing cross-device conversions produced a major mobile aha-moment. We discovered that mobile was driving 9% more conversions than we initially thought, and improving ROAS by 12%.” U.S. Polo Assn. is now updating their overall marketing strategy to allocate additional budget to mobile. “We know our customers are getting more comfortable shopping on mobile, so these numbers will only continue to rise. Cross-device conversions gives us a more complete picture of search performance and helps us prove the value of our mobile investment.”
Visit the Help Center and read Best Practices to learn more about optimizing for cross-device conversions.
Posted by: Tal Akabas, Product Manager, AdWords Conversions
Wilfred Yeung, Senior Product Manager, AdWords Bidding 1. Google / Ipsos Connect, March 2016, GPS Omnibus, n=2,013 US online respondents 18+
Price extensions show as multiple rows, providing valuable information to your prospective customers before they click on your ad. Each row features a type of product or service, its description and price, and a link to a relevant landing page. This structured way of highlighting information makes it easier for people to compare their options and decide if they’re interested in your products or services — right from the mobile search results page.
“Our mission is to help consumers find the right unit for their self-storage needs, so we were incredibly excited to see the success of price extensions in our campaigns. By including the unit sizes and prices customers can expect before visiting our website, we've seen an 18% lift in CTR when price extensions show with our ads.” — Mike Smith, Sr. Marketing Manager at Extra Space Storage
Price extensions can also co-trigger and be used effectively in combination with other ad formats, except sitelinks. For example, if you’re already using call extensions to help drive customers to your hair salon, you might create a price extension for your most popular services, like “Women's haircut,” “Men’s haircut,” and “Kid’s haircut.” Highlighting the price of each service might convince people to call and make an appointment, without needing to visit your website.
Getting started
You can manage, schedule, and report on price extensions from the Ad extensions tab. Since price extensions can be added at the account, campaign, or ad group level, you can provide more general information about your products and services at the account or campaign level, and more detailed information at the ad group level.
In this salon example, you could add price extensions for “Haircut,” “Hair Coloring,” and “Treatment” to campaigns containing more general keywords like hair salon or hair stylist. Or add price extensions for specific services at the ad group level to support more specific keywords like men’s haircuts or balayage salon.
For time-sensitive offers like promotions and sporting events, you can create multiple price extensions with corresponding start and end dates to ensure your prices remain accurate. However you plan to use price extensions, make sure the information is relevant to your keywords and consistent with the types of products or services you’re advertising. Keep in mind you must include a minimum of three entries for each extension, up to a maximum of eight. We recommend adding as many as are relevant to your business.
Learn more
Price extensions will be rolling out to all AdWords accounts over the coming days. Please note this extension can only be created in English and will only show with mobile text ads in position 1 at this time. You can learn more about price extensions in the AdWords Help Center.
Posted by Senthil Hariramasamy, Senior Product Manager, AdWords
Bidding statuses get integrated with campaign and ad group statuses
In the coming weeks, we’re also introducing bid strategy statuses to the main campaign and ad group status columns to increase their visibility in your day-to-day workflows. For example, if you have bid limits that are preventing your bids from being fully optimized, you’ll see the “Eligible (Limited)” status right in your main status columns.
Renaming the current “Limited by budget” status to be more consistent with other status types
Eligible (Learning)
New status type for automated bidding
Eligible (Limited)
New status type for automated bidding
Eligible (Misconfigured)
New status type for automated bidding
Rich performance reporting arrives for standard bid strategies
We’re also expanding reporting capabilities available for portfolio bid strategies to standard bid strategies set at the campaign-level. These reports are rolling out over the next few weeks, and you can access them from the “Bid strategy” dropdown menu in the Campaigns tab to track how changes in your bidding status and targets impact performance over time.
Visit the Help Center and check out our best practices to learn more about automated bidding. For more details on how auction-time bidding technology works in conversion-based bid strategies, read this full guide.
Posted by: Jonathan Wang, Product Manager, AdWords Bidding
While most of us are busy making the most of the summer sunshine, marketers are already beginning to think about the coldest (and busiest) months of the year--the holidays. October through December are traditionally the biggest months for both travel and shopping, and this year we expect mobile to play its biggest role ever. In fact, mobile travel and shopping searches are already up nearly 30% year-over-year.
To help marketers and on-the-go shoppers alike, we’re introducing a number of new features to make travel planning and mobile shopping easier ahead of the upcoming holiday season.
Finding the Perfect Hotel and Flight for Your Trip
Mobile is a big part of how people plan travel. Visits to mobile travel sites made up 40% of total travel web traffic in the first quarter of this year.1 At the same time, individual travel web sessions are becoming shorter and travel mobile conversion rates have grown 10% as users are increasingly ready to book on mobile.2
To help with planning and booking travel ahead of the busy holiday season, we're making it easier for people to find the right flight or the right hotel, in their price range, and in turn, help connect our partners with potential customers.
Hotel Smart Filters: We’ll now give people the option to filter Hotel search results based on specific needs. For example, travelers can filter based on rating or price with one tap on their phones. We’ll make it easy to search for exactly what people want, like “Pet-friendly hotels in San Francisco under $200” to find the perfect hotel for them. This feature is available in the US and will roll out globally later this year.
When it comes to booking their trip, 69% of leisure travelers worry that they're not finding the best price or making the best decision. To help users feel more confident about making a booking, we're working on making it easier for people to filter to find the right flight or the right hotel -- at the right price -- using our technology and real-time analysis:
Hotel Deals: Everyone loves a good deal. When searching for a hotel, you may now see a "Deal" label calling out when a hotel’s price is lower than usual compared to historical pricing or when there are discounts to the normal rate for those dates. These deals are automatically identified by our algorithms when we see a significant reduction in price. In our early tests, we've seen that hotels marked as deals receive about twice as many bookings as other hotels.
Hotel Tips: Tips are another way we're using real-time analysis to help users find the best hotels for their needs. Tips provide just the right information at the right moments when users are searching for hotels. We may show Tips to people when they could save money or find better availability by moving their dates slightly. For example, you may see a Tip like, “Save $105 if you stay Wed, Jul 13 - Fri, Jul 15”. We’ll be rolling Hotel Deals and Tips out globally beginning now and over the coming months.
Flights price tracking: To help price-conscious travelers stay on top of changing flight fares, we’re making it easier to track flight prices in Google Flights. Instead of having to continually check prices, people can now opt in to track fare changes for a date and route combination or track specific flights being considered. When prices either increase or decrease significantly, people will be notified by email and Google Now cards. This is rolling out over the course of the next few weeks in all 26 countries where Google Flights is available.
Google Flights: tracked flights on mobile and email notification of price change
Helping Shoppers Discover and Explore
We've always been focused on helping people find the exact product they're searching for when they have a good sense of what they want. But over 40% of shopping related searches on Google are for broad terms like "women's athletic clothing" or "living room furniture." For these less defined searches, what we've often shown are specific product ads -- say, a teal sofa -- and that may not be the most useful experience for the person who isn't sure what they want to buy.
Showcase Shopping ads help people further explore and discover what they want to buy and where they want to buy it. For example, if a shopper searches ‘summer dresses,’ ASOS, a global apparel retailer, can now showcase its collection of dresses in a visually rich experience.
Showcase Shopping ads - premium beta
To start, all merchants running Shopping Campaigns in the US, UK, and Australia will be eligible to have their products automatically appear in Showcase ads in the coming weeks. And for merchants who would like to customize how their brand and products appear, we're experimenting with a premium version that allows merchants to curate the experience.
Making it Easier to Shop on YouTube
People often turn to YouTube to help them research purchases. In fact, almost half of the U.S. population, 47%, says that YouTube helps them when making a decision about something to buy at least once a month.3
Last Spring, we introduced TrueView for shopping to make it easy for viewers to get more information about your products and click to buy while watching video ads. We've seen great results so far. The number of advertisers using the product is up 50% since January and in recent weeks, about 1/3 of them are using it every week.
To help give retailers even more control over branding, we're introducing two new features:
Companion banner: We’re adding a new interactive banner appearing next to the video that lets viewers scroll through products while the video is playing next to it. The banner also shows viewers the most up-to-date product information.
Product picker: Our new feature lets advertisers easily choose and prioritize which of their products are featured as cards in a TrueView for shopping campaign. This optional feature lets advertisers show specific products for specific campaigns, or they can still let the format dynamically feature products from their Merchant Center.
Trueview for shopping - companion banner
We’ll roll out these updates globally beginning now where TrueView for shopping is available. For additional resources on TrueView ads visit our best practices page.
Enabling Shopping Across Borders
These days, shopping is truly global. To make shopping more efficient for shoppers and merchants alike, we’re currently testing a tool to perform currency conversions in Australia, Switzerland, Canada, and the UK. This feature allows you to convert the currency in your product data locally. This conversion makes your ads more understandable to users in other countries, while allowing you to continue using your existing website and landing pages without change. For example, a person shopping in the UK can see products sold by a US retailer, listed in British pounds. We’ll be rolling out currency conversions more broadly over the coming weeks.
We wish everyone a summer full of great memories, and we wish marketers success in their planning for the seasons ahead!
Posted by Jonathan Alferness, VP, Product Management
1. Google Analytics aggregated data, April 2016, Travel vertical, mobile devices include smartphones and tablets. US 2. Google Analytics aggregated data, Q1 2016 quarter-on-quarter, Travel vertical, US 3. Google / Ipsos Connect, YouTube Sports Viewers Study, March 2016 (18-54 year olds onliners n=1,500)
If you think people make purchase decisions quickly, think again. Today’s consumers visit websites at least 6 times, on average, in the purchase process.1 And for those who abandon a shopping cart, 75% say they intend on returning to a company’s website to make a purchase.2
We’ve created a new best practices guide, Tailor Your Ads with Dynamic Remarketing, to help advertisers win those crucial “ready-to-buy” moments with dynamic remarketing and relevant ads. As business data feeds are crucial to dynamic remarketing campaigns, this guide focuses on how to create and optimize your feeds. It covers topics such as:
