Promoting on-the-go productivity

The Galaxy Tab 7 was Samsung’s first offering in the exploding tablet-computing market, having debuted simultaneously in Asia and the US in late fall 2010. It quickly found critical and consumer advocates for its uncompromising design and functionality. Technology publication Engadget deemed the Tab the “best Android tablet on the market,” adding that the “entire experience was snappy,” while CNET offered: “Galaxy Tab is a beautiful product with features that will make iPad owners envious.”

To heighten the buzz around Galaxy Tab’s product launch in India, Samsung turned to Google  to leverage the powerful AdMob network in the mobile-centric facet of the campaign. Focusing on males aged 18-34—known as the strongest sector of mobile-device users, Samsung was confident that successful persuasion of these early adopters would spur quicker acceptance of tablet computers.

600,000 click-throughs
To spur demand, Samsung marketing developed enticing banner ads that appeared on apps tailored to a young demographic. The ads exhorted viewers to visit the mobile-optimized site; those that did click-through found additional product information and the ability to download a free demo of the Tab.

Not surprisingly, the mobile-ad campaign results for this mobile-savvy country were impressive. More than 600,000 users were enticed to the Samsung site. Of those, 350,000 delved deeper for additional product information and 7,500 gave their phone numbers to secure a demo download.

For Samsung, incorporating AdMob’s advertising network into its overall marketing campaigns has become standard operating procedure—the expenditure translates into the one of the company’s most efficacious uses of marketing dollars.

Posted by Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager

(Cross-posted on the Inside Adwords Blog)

There’s no debate that the world is going mobile. Mobile web searches have grown five times over the past two years. YouTube mobile now gets more than 400 million views a day, representing 13 percent of our total daily views.

For advertisers, this opens up more opportunities to reach customers. And in some cases, it can amplify existing campaigns. In a recent study conducted with Nielsen research, we found that promotions perform better together when displayed across multiple screens. In fact, brand recall jumps dramatically to 74 percent for people who saw ads across TV, PC, smartphone and tablets, up from 50 percent for those who just saw ads on TV.

Here are a few ways you can extend your mobile reach with YouTube:

YouTube’s Promoted Video ads on mobile
Do you use Promoted Video ads to reach viewers searching for relevant products and potential customers browsing videos on YouTube.com? You can also use Promoted Videos to reach viewers on the go. Promoted Videos are featured at the top of the video search results on m.youtube.com, YouTube’s mobile platform.

Advertisers pay only when the viewer chooses to watch the video, and all mobile and desktop view counts are summarized into one complete view count on your channel page. Mobile Promoted Video ads are auction-based campaigns that can be managed in your Google AdWords account. All Google AdWords campaigns are opted into “all devices” by default, but creating separate mobile campaigns help optimize your mobile campaigns and performance of your brand channel.

A Promoted Video ad on m.youtube.com  includes an ad thumbnail, title and channel name; similar to the organic video results.

Promoted Video ads have recently joined YouTube’s family of TrueView ad formats. Soon, your Promoted Video ads will become TrueView in-search ads and TrueView in-display ads. TrueView in-search ads show up in display ad units against search results on YouTube, whereas TrueView in-display ads show up in display ad units against suggested videos on YouTube and across website content on the Google Display Network. These TrueView video ads can be setup and managed in any Google AdWords for video account and purchased on a cost-per-view basis.

YouTube mobile in-stream ads
YouTube mobile in-stream ads are 15-second pre-roll ads that appear before the video begins to play. Similar to your desktop experience, mobile in-stream ads may show before videos produced by YouTube partners. In addition to the Android YouTube app, in-stream ads are also available to viewers accessing m.youtube.com from their iPhone.

You can optimize your mobile in-stream ads to reach specific audiences, locations and content. In-stream ads are priced on CPM and can be arranged via ad reservation through your Google sales representative.

Animal Planet used mobile in-stream ads to promote the new season of River Monsters.

YouTube mobile roadblocks
YouTube Mobile roadblocks give brands 100% share of voice on the YouTube home, browse and search pages on m.youtube.com. According to recent Nielsen data, these roadblocks add 17 percent incremental impressions for advertisers.

adidas used mobile roadblocks to complement their homepage masthead ad. Using multiple mobile tactics in addition to roadblocks, channel views jumped 26x over the span of their “adidas is all in” brand campaign.

Mobile brand channels extend your online presence
Many advertisers use banners, background images and gadgets to customize their YouTube brand channels. Extend your brand presence to mobile users by creating a customized mobile brand channel. Accessed through m.youtube.com, mobile channels offer the same high level of customization, including the use of gadgets. You can drive traffic to your YouTube mobile brand channel by running ads on the AdMob network or on m.youtube.com.

YouTube’s AdBlitz brand channel features custom-designed elements which engage our growing mobile audience.

For more information about YouTube mobile ads, connect with your Google sales representative or visit www.youtube.com/advertise/mobile.html.

Posted by Nicky Crane, Product Manager

An extensive archipelago comprised of over 13,000 islands, Indonesia ranks as the world’s fourth most populous country. An important trade region going back to the 7th century, this vibrant slice of Southeast Asia has always presented communication issues because of its unique geographical character and diverse languages.

The dominance of non-electronic delivery in the past has given way to a formidable telecommunications infrastructure that is well suited for this country’s unique needs. Already more than 67% of its citizens sport a mobile device, a statistic which XL Axiata (XL as it’s commonly known)—a dominant provider in the Indonesian telecom field—intends to expand.

XL fully understands its unique market and boasts more than 40 million cellular subscribers and 22,000 cell towers after 15 years of business. Java and Bali, in addition to the nation’s principal cities, have access to data communication, broadband Internet, and mobile communication/4G services.

Promoting across the Google AdMob network
Capitalizing on its strong brand recognition, XL decided to both pursue new customers and solidify current ones with a broad mobile-centric advertising campaign. Using Google’s AdMob network as the advertising conduit, they conducted a 45-day ad campaign consisting of colorful banner ads exhorting viewers to check out promotions and contests. Since the mobile-ads technology is predicated on appearing within user-downloaded websites, XL’s ubiquitous ads popped up on a broad spectrum of apps. After clicking on the various ads, users were directed to a mobile-optimized site for more information.

“Google’s AdMob is already the gold standard in mobile-computing ad strategies here in the Southeast Asian market,” says Tommy Wattimena, SVP Marketing Brand and Communication Deevelopment PT XL Axiata. “We’ve already had tremendous results employing it in our telecom expansion efforts, so it was a no-brainer to use it again as the foundational tool in our latest mobile-marketing campaign.”

With the burgeoning implementation of Google’s mobile ads, text, banner, and media-rich adverts are now an integral facet of the application landscape on smartphones and iPads, and users readily engage with those that catch their interest.

During the month-and-a-half campaign, over 80,000 users were sufficiently intrigued with the banner ads to investigate further, representing a healthy clickthrough rate (CTR) of 1.48%. In addition, 5.4 million impressions were recorded, augmenting XL’s brand awareness.

For XL, employing Google AdMob to drive its latest mobile-advertising campaign was a given since it has proven its merits in previous telecom marketing efforts. “Google mobile ads really come through for us,” says Mr. Wattimena. “They’ve become a standard part of virtually every campaign.”

Posted by Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager

Last Thursday, we presented a webinar “Making Mobile-Friendly Websites: Best Practices in Action” on the resources you need to learn about what makes a good mobile site and to start building one. This was part of our broader “GoMo” initiative, which helps businesses “Go Mobile”.

Dai Pham and Sonja Lee of the Google Mobile Ads team presented an overview of the mobile momentum, why mobile sites matter, 10 best practices with full case studies and business examples. They also introduced the tools and resources showcased in HowToGoMo.com to the audience.



The PDF deck can be downloaded here.

For more information about how to mobilize your website, please visit HowToGoMo.com.

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Mobile Ads

According to the Harvard Business Review, Asia-Pacific is expected by many to constitute half of the world’s economic growth by 2030 1.  According to internal Google research, nearly half of the top ten markets for smartphone penetration are in Asia.  AdMob requests grew by 500% in Asia Pacific last year, the highest in the world.  A rapidly expanding population, upward trending consumer spending and living standards, and significant infrastructure investment all help to make Asia-Pacific a hot market.  As such, starting today Google Mobile Ads will focus this next week on Asia-Pacific to help you optimize your Asia strategy for mobile.

About Lexus
Lexus has established a unique place in the automotive world as a manufacturer of premium vehicles. The Lexus brand is synonymous with breathtaking design, innovative technology, heart-stopping performance and environmental sensitivity.
In March 2010, Lexus launched the first luxury hybrid hatch on the Australian market, the         CT 200h, reinforcing Lexus’ commitment to innovation. The target audience was people in their late 20s to early 40s, both singles & couples, with a high disposable income and for whom style, design and technology is important.
Lexus’ objective for the CT 200h, launch was threefold:

• To drive awareness among the target audience;
• To focus messaging on the unique features of the CT 200h, such as the Two Mood-Two mode;
• To connect and engage with their audience to drive consideration.

Solution
Among the target audience, smartphone ownership and internet penetration is very high. Subsequently, casual gaming usage is heavy, a typical quote being “When I need something to pass the time, I use Lineup on my iPhone.”
Based on these insights, Lexus, The White Agency (Lexus’ digital agency) and Admob worked together to create The Lexus CT City Challenge -a mobile app that was addictive in nature, held the key product benefits ‘eco’ and ‘sports’ two moode-tow mode at its centre. They also ensured the game is part of the overall CT 200h and F1 strategy, and it was also incentivised with a grand prize of a CT 200h.  The digital directive was lead by The White Agency and development of the app by Webling.
The app was created with a young, urban, design and quality-conscious audience in mind, this being the primary target group for the car itself. They are frequent visitors to the Apple iTunes App Store, engaging with and purchasing casual gaming offerings in high quantities.
To build awareness and acquisition of the app, Admob also created a mobile ads campaign..

The Lexus CT City Challenge Game
The game challenges players to take the Lexus CT 200h for a virtual spin around courses modeled after Australia's capital cities. The game features five courses which are progressively unlocked as players achieve qualifying scores. Engagement was incentivised with a live playoff at the Melbourne Motor Show with the winner receiving a brand new Lexus CT 200h
The “Slot Cars” style gameplay demonstrates the unique hybrid “two mood – two mode” feature of the CT 200h. This allows players to switch between ‘Sport’ and ‘Eco’ modes to achieve the best times while saving fuel, culminating in higher scores and positioning on the leader board.
Players can easily broadcast their scores across social media, challenging friends to download the game, or beat their scores/position on the leader board.
The game was developed via a custom 3D engine and features realistic torque physics, particle animation, sound effects and an original music soundtrack, with a stylised look and feel to match the Lexus brand.

The Admob Mobile Ads campaign
The campaign ran from 21st April to 1st June across the Admob network, targeting iPhones, iPads and iPods. Click-to-download banners were displayed on mobile apps such as Words With Friends, Angry Birds, WeatherZone, and various mobile websites. These sent the user through to the iTunes App Store where they could download the app.
A burst strategy was employed to upweight investment at strategic intervals to help the app rise up the iTunes ranks in order to achieve higher vis
ibility and gain more organic downloads.

Results
●   Won “Best mobile advertising campaign” at the 2011 Mobile Marketing Awards.
●   Total time played (all players): 1,138:46:83 (hh:mm:ss)
●   Average number of plays per user: 5.01
●   Most number of plays by a single user: 131
●   CTR:1.03%
●   Downloads peaked 2 weeks after the campaign launch. A 2nd peak occurred during the last week of the campaign
●   Highest Ranks in iTunes Store achieved during the campaign
○   Racing: 5th
○   Game: 76th
○   Overall 168th


Quote from Julie Hutchinson, CRM & Interactive Marketing Manager, Lexus Australia
"For the launch of the Lexus CT200h we wanted to reach out to a new demographic, a younger audience in their late 20s to 40s. The Lexus CT City Challenge mobile campaign was the perfect way to achieve this objective. It created a sense of excitement and innovation around the Lexus brand and kept this demographic engaged with the car and the brand."

 1Harvard Business Review, April 2010

Posted by Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager

In September, we announced that mobile site optimization would soon become a new factor in ads quality for all campaigns running mobile search traffic. This past week, we introduced GoMo, an initiative to help businesses “Go Mobile” by giving them tools and resources to build a website that works well on smartphones. Today, we want to let you know that this new factor in mobile ads quality will be rolling out to all advertisers. Ads that have mobile optimized landing pages will tend to perform better in AdWords -- they will generally drive more mobile traffic at a lower cost.

The AdWords system will automatically visit your landing page, and evaluate your site as viewed by smartphones. However, if you already have a mobile site, we recommend confirming with your webmaster that you’ve configured your server to show the mobile-optimized site when the AdWords mobile User-Agent is detected.

We encourage you see what your mobile customers see. Visit your website on a smartphone or in the “GoMoMeter” preview tool on HowToGoMo.com. The GoMoMeter will analyze your site and give you customized recommendations on how to make your site more mobile friendly to customers. If you don’t have a mobile site, but are interested in getting started, please check out best practices and the directory of vendors HowToGoMo.com.

Posted by David Nachum, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

Recently we launched GoMo, an initiative to help businesses learn how to build sites that work well on mobile phones. As we were working on this project, we thought it was a great opportunity to apply the knowledge we had gained to our own site. Today, we’re delighted to announce the mobile-friendly version of Google Mobile Ads, which you can take for a spin at google.com/mobileads on your mobile device.

In addition to practicing what we’re preaching, there were important reasons to build a mobile site. Use of the mobile web is accelerating and there are now 96 million smartphones in use in the US.[1] That number becomes much more tangible through the lens of your own analytics data. When we looked at our site, we observed a rapid increase in mobile visits over the past year. Today, nearly 10% of overall traffic to our Mobile Ads website comes from mobile devices. That’s hard to ignore.

We realized that our mobile users were having a really poor experience when accessing the desktop site via a mobile phone. Furthermore, we were wasting 10% of our efforts in marketing the site. Again, the data didn’t lie: the site’s bounce rate from mobile devices was above 60%, more than double the bounce rate from desktop users. Clearly something was up.

How did we do it? I sat down with a webmaster here at Google - Jerome Senaillat - and together we shaped the content and features that would work best on mobile. The process was surprisingly quick: we had a near-final working version of the site in just four weeks, without working on the project full time. We followed this list of ten best practices when designing the site, focusing on three which would greatly improve the experience for a mobile user:

• Design for visibility: the problem with the homepage was that none of the content could be read without causing eyestrain. The solution was drastic: we abandoned the images on the homepage and replaced it with an easy-to-read, simple-to-navigate menu.
• Keep it quick: using our analytics data we were able to identify the most popular content consumed by mobile users on our desktop site - such as our mobile insights page - and made it quick to access from the homepage of the mobile site.
• Make it easy to convert: a primary goal of our site is drive people to try mobile ads by creating an AdWords account. We optimized that experience for mobile users by connecting them to a call center where an advisor can create the account on the fly. We set up a separate phone number to track calls.

We’re excited about the early results we’ve seen since launch. Already, we’ve noticed that mobile users are staying on the site twice as long as they did before.

Jerome and I recorded a short video to explain what we did in a bit more detail, you can check it out below. It was easy to GoMo and we hope you’ll GoMo too!



Posted by Mike Schipper, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

[1] CTIA, October 12, 2011.