Google Partners Blog: April 2014

New upgrade option for Shopping campaigns

Friday, April 18, 2014

success storiescustomize your product groups and bids

After setting up your Shopping campaign, you’ll be taken to a new page to create ad groups. Here, you’ll see two options: the ability to start fresh with one ad group or create one or many ad groups based on a regular PLA campaign.

Note that some parts of a regular PLA campaigns aren’t transferable to a Shopping campaign, like product targets that use AdWords labels or groupings. If none of your PLA campaigns are transferrable, you might not see this option.

Keep in mind
With Shopping campaigns, you no longer need to create separate ad groups or product targets to track your impressions, clicks and cost. You can analyze and report on your PLA performance by product attribute or by individual items in the Dimensions tab, regardless of your campaign structure.

As a reminder, all PLA advertisers will need to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining regular PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to share more information and tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale.

To learn more about Shopping campaigns and how to upgrade, here are a few resources:

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

How Search Insights Can Shape Your Event Strategy

Monday, April 14, 2014

Read the full articlefull collection

Who Made the Cut? March YouTube Ads Leaderboard

Friday, April 11, 2014

Think with GoogleAds are determined for the YouTube Ads Leaderboard by an algorithm that factors in paid views, organic views and audience retention (how much of a video people watched). For additional coverage of the YouTube Ads Leaderboard, go to Adweek.com.

Step Inside AdWords on April 22 and be the first to see the newest innovations

Friday, April 11, 2014

Inside Adwords blogRegister for the livestream hereRegister for the livestream here+GoogleAdsPosted by Your Inside Adwords Team

Beyond the Cable Box: The New Face of TV Viewership

Thursday, April 10, 2014

It’s been called the “New Golden Age of Television,” but today’s TV ecosystem differs greatly from that of the era of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. People now turn to their laptops, smartphones, and tablets to view trailers and research cast information before tuning-in, to use social media for real-time conversations about their favorite programs, and to binge watch episodes on demand. In fact, 90% of TV viewers also visit Google and YouTube, signaling the shared audience between both digital and television.*
In an effort to identify how digital has impacted viewer behavior in this new era, we analyzed search queries, video views, and engagement metrics from a sample of 100 cable and network television shows. From this analysis we published a new report called “The Role of Digital in TV Research, Fanship, and Viewing,” which outlines how online behavior is a clear indicator of a show’s popularity.
To view the full report, visit Think with Google. At a quick glance, here are a few of the key findings from the study:

TV related activity is growing on Google and YouTube. Searches have grown by 16% and 54% YoY* on Google and YouTube search respectively. We’ve also seen a rise in video views, watch time and engagement on YouTube around TV-related content, suggesting that TV viewers are increasingly using these platforms to interact with other fans and engage in a show - in fact, watch time on YouTube for TV-related content has grown 65% YoY.

Mobile and tablet searches are spearheading growth. Searches for TV content on Google and YouTube have increased 100%+ YoY on mobile devices, where users are looking for quick bits of information like premiere-date, plot, and cast-related information, and on tablets where users are looking for watch-related information.

Activity on Google and YouTube is correlated with tune-in. Our analysis of Google searches, YouTube searches, and YouTube video views show positive .72, .74 and .67 correlations with “live plus three day” viewers, respectively.*

The YouTube “community” actively creates TV-related content. In 2013 for every piece of content uploaded by a show’s network on YouTube in 2013, there were more than seven pieces of community-generated content related to a show. Some fan favorites far exceed that benchmark: Game of Thrones, for example, had 82 community-generated videos per video uploaded by the network and The Vampire Diaries had 69.

Subscribers are vital to driving awareness for new content. TV networks have been gaining subscribers for their official YouTube channels at a blistering rate, with an average per channel subscribership increase of 69% from the beginning of 2013 to the end of the year. These subscribers are vital to spreading content on YouTube.

Catching-up on seasons is on the rise, and drives tune-in. We found that 70% of viewers catch-up on prior episodes before tuning-in to a new season. And this intent appears to be on the rise - catch-up related searches on Google in the pre-premiere timeframe have grown by 50% YoY. For people who catch up on past seasons of returning shows, about half will start more than two months in advance. Analyzing behaviors around catch-up are important, since 4 in 5 viewers say they are more likely to tune-in to a season premiere after catching up on prior seasons*.

In summary, today’s TV audiences use Google, YouTube, and digital overall to extend and inform their TV-watching experience. To learn more, download the full whitepaper from Think with Google.Posted by Mahlet Seyoum, Industry Analyst, Media and Entertainment

What March Madness Trends Mean for Marketers

Thursday, April 3, 2014

The country has been going mad for college hoops over the past few weeks. This year, we saw an 80% jump in mobile use for college basketball news searches during March Madness. As the Final Four prepare to duke it out, Think with Google takes a look at the latest trends they’re seeing in Google and YouTube data and explores what they mean for your next event strategy in a new infographic. As live events increasingly lend to mobile use, make sure your related content is easy to access on all devices.

What’s next for Shopping campaigns and retailers

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

In February, we made Shopping campaigns available to all Product Listing Ad (PLA) advertisers and, in March, we released AdWords API support to help you manage your campaigns at scale. Shopping campaigns offer the ability to browse your inventory directly in AdWords, report on your performance down to the product-level, and bid competitively with new metrics like benchmark data and impression share. We’ve received great feedback from you so far and are excited to share what’s next:

Size your opportunity with Bid Simulator To provide more actionable insight into your PLAs, we’ve been rolling out a Bid Simulator that’s now available in all Shopping campaigns. With a Bid Simulator, you can now estimate how bid changes could impact your impressions, clicks or costs.
Options to create a Shopping campaign

In the coming days, we’ll be adding some options to help you get started. You would be able to create a Shopping campaign from scratch or, for many of you, use one of your regular PLA campaigns to create similar product targets, negative keywords or promotional text.

Multiple ad groups for advanced retailers
While many of you will be happy with your Shopping campaign as is, we’ve heard from advanced retailers that they’d like to create multiple ad groups. It’s now possible to do this within a Shopping campaign.

Continued Retailer Success

Since we made Shopping campaigns available to all PLA advertisers, we continue to hear many examples of how it helps you manage PLAs and effectively grow your business. Here are a few:

JumpFly	“The benefits of Shopping campaigns can’t be overstated – the ease of setup, the transparency of data, the ability to group products into logical categories and manage to the product level make it a must. All of these contribute to our clients’ ROI almost tripling, and there’s still room to improve.”
Exclusive Concepts	“The new Shopping campaigns allowed us to achieve a much higher-level of profitability, cutting costs by 13% and increasing return on ad spend by about 22% on average. Not only that, the new campaign type trims about 2 hours of setup time.”
Wiggle	“We used the product-level data from our Shopping campaign to fine-tune our bidding strategy, focusing on the products that acquired the most traffic & lowered the ones that are less important. This helped us increase visits 25% & ROI by 16%.”
White Shark Media	“Shopping campaigns effectively reduced the time spent setting up product-specific bids and optimizing in half. We can now invest even more time into each client, and the results we’ve seen have been no less than amazing. A client selling home accessories saw a 301% increase in revenue after only one month. As a result, we are now changing our agency standards within PLAs to only use Shopping campaigns.”

Future of Shopping campaigns and retirement of regular PLA campaigns

Shopping campaigns offer a truly retail-centric and seamless approach to PLAs. We're very excited by the positive feedback we've heard so far and will continue to build tools and features into this new campaign type. Thus, we'll be retiring the regular PLA campaign type and asking all PLA advertisers to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll share more information and release more tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale. We encourage you to start planning your upgrade to Shopping campaigns today to take full advantage of the new features as soon as possible.

For additional help, here are a few resources:

Tutorial Videos to help you get started
AdWords Help Center for more detailed information on Shopping campaigns
Learn With Google Webinar (April 15) for upgrade tips
Learn With Google Webinar (May 15) for more advanced upgrade best practices
AdWords Ads Developer page for more AdWords API documentation

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

YouTube Brand Channel Leaderboard

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

The YouTube audience is more than just viewers—it’s fans. While viewers sit back, fans lean forward, forming passionate communities around their favorite channels. As brands continue to blur the line between advertiser and creator, we want to recognize those brands that regularly publish content—paid or otherwise—to build an engaged fanbase. That’s why we’re excited to launch the first-ever Brand Channel Leaderboard. Want to see which brands made the cut? Check out the standings on Think With Google.

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