Banco Bradesco, founded in 1943, is the second-largest private bank in Brazil, with more than 4,600 branches and 47,000 automatic teller machines across the country. Bradesco created a mobile app to provide consumer banking services like checking account balances, paying bills and transferring money between accounts, to its on-the-go customers. Bradesco teamed up with one of its online agencies, One Digital, to promote their latest app across Google AdWords Search and Display solutions. The team focused on driving cost-effective app downloads with the help of the Conversion Optimizer for mobile apps, a bidding feature that uses historical conversion performance data to automatically optimize ad placement so ads show more often when conversions are likely to occur.

Luca Cavalcanti, Director of Digital Channels, said: "Our apps are a key way for us to engage with our users and deliver the value they need. Promoting our apps with Google helped us to exceed our return on investment goals. With AdWords, we've dropped cost-per-download by 70%. Google is an important mobile partner for promoting our apps."

Bradesco promoted their mobile apps with ads on Google Search and the Google Display Network and used the Conversion Optimizer for apps to reach their app download and cost-per-download goals.

• Nearly 1 billion ad impressions and 4.4 million clicks during the first month
• Top 5 Ranking in Finance category of Google Play apps on average
• 31x increase in app downloads
• 70% decrease in cost-per-download (decrease from greater than R$5 to less than R$2)

To learn more about how Bradesco exceeded their app download goals, see here for the full case study.

Posted by: Gabi Viana, Head of Mobile and Social Marketing, Latin America

Ads on smartphones are effective, but many of us have at some point clicked on an ad by accident, which ultimately is a bad experience for the user, the publisher, and the advertiser who pays for clicks that may not be valuable. Our team has been analyzing the types of ad formats where accidental clicks are more likely to occur due to ad layout and placement, and are constantly looking at ways that we can combat them. Today, we’re introducing confirmed clicks into all in-app image ad banners on smartphones, which reduces accidental clicks by prompting the user to confirm that they intended to click on the ad.

We find that most accidental clicks on in-app image ads happen at the outer edge of the ad unit, likely when you’re trying to click or scroll to nearby content. Now if you click on the outer border of the ad, we’ll prompt you to verify that you actually meant to click on the ad to learn more.

This builds on our previous efforts with confirmed clicks for text ad banners on smartphones, which we introduced a few years ago. In the text ad format, tapping on the blue arrow button takes you to the advertiser’s ad destination, whereas tapping anywhere else in the ad prompts you to confirm your click.

By expanding confirmed clicks to in-app image ad banners, we’re now making this improved user experience consistent across the vast majority of the ads that we serve in mobile apps. In our initial tests, we found that confirmed clicks notably improve mobile conversion rates, with a slight decrease in clickthrough rate as accidental clicks are avoided.

This is only the beginning. As devices continue to converge there will be new challenges in the fight against what many have called the ‘fat finger’ problem. But implementing confirmed clicks is an important step that we think will benefit users, advertisers, publishers, and the mobile ecosystem overall, and we’ll continue to look for ways to improve mobile ads for everyone.

Posted by Allen Huang, Product Manager, Mobile Display Ads

In this increasingly multi-screen world, it’s important for marketers to easily run ads that reach people on different devices. But with different specs and standards across platforms, this can currently be difficult, especially for marketers who’ve invested in engaging rich media ad units. Since Flash isn’t supported on many tablets, and building a new ad in HTML5 can be expensive and time-consuming, often marketers’ rich media ads aren’t able to run on tablets. To address this, we recently launched a new feature in AdWords that allows you to easily convert Flash ads to HTML5.

Advertisers can now generate an HTML5 version of a Flash image ad with the click of a button, right within the Image Ad upload flow in AdWords. Because HTML5 ads can appear on browsers and devices that are incompatible with Flash, running an HTML5 version of an image ad alongside the Flash version in AdWords extends reach across devices. In this initial release, these converted HTML5 ads will show only on iPads, though we hope to extend support to additional tablet and mobile devices in the coming months.  

This new AdWords feature is part of our ongoing effort to make mobile rich media advertising easier. It’s the reason we’ve created products like Rich Media Designs for Mobile and continue to innovate around mobile ad serving solutions using the DoubleClick platform.  With the addition of this latest tool, it is now easy for advertisers targeting the Google Display Network with Flash ads to expand their ad's reach without using any creative resources.

To learn more about converting Flash ads to HTML5 in AdWords, visit our Help Center.

Posted by: Ashley Jiang, Product Manager, Display Ads

We recently described some of the work that we do to keep ads safe, and our broader efforts to protect against invalid activity in the AdSense network. Today, we want to share some of the ways that we’re protecting ads on mobile networks.

We’ve adapted many of our systems for protecting desktop ads to do the same for mobile ads. These include automatically discarding invalid traffic as it occurs, refunding any money from this traffic, and investigating each and every claim to make our systems better. You can learn more about why and how we do this in the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.

But mobile-specific attributes like touch screens, app usage, and portability require us to adapt our approach to the platform. For example, it’s important that our systems are driving intentional clicks on ads, which is more complicated on mobile due to the limited space on a phone and the relative inaccuracy of a finger. Our mobile-specific ad formats help minimize unintentional clicks by clearly delineating ads from content. In addition, text-based mobile ads require an additional click if users accidentally click on the edge of an ad.



Protecting our mobile ad network also means ensuring that we provide a good ad experience within apps. We’ve seen that refreshing in-app ads too quickly leads to a poor user experience and lower advertiser value. That’s why we’ve recently increased AdMob’s minimum refresh rate to 30 seconds. We’ve seen this increase publishers’ fill rates dramatically, and improve traffic quality on the refreshed ads by 26%.

The AdMob Ads SDK also provides a safe environment for ads within mobile apps. The SDK enables publishers to incorporate a variety of formats, allows advertisers to choose which apps to show up in, and enables our team to analyze signals that indicate that ads are being displayed and used properly.

On these and all ads, our team constantly monitors and re-evaluates how we detect invalid activity. We’ve updated our detection algorithms to keep up with the steady stream of new mobile devices and implementations, improving the quality of mobile ad traffic by over 12% since 2011. We’ve also disabled thousands of non-compliant mobile publishers in 2012 and returned millions of dollars, including Google’s share, to affected advertisers.

Lastly, we’ve developed the AdMob publisher best practices guide to help publishers create a good experience for users and advertisers, so that publishers can get good long-term performance and avoid problems with invalid activity.

Posted by Henry Kim, on behalf of the Ad Traffic Quality Team

Mobile technology is making it easier than ever for people to research products and connect with businesses while they’re on the go. But we all know that sometimes it helps to speak to a real person before making a purchase decision. In fact, research shows that 52% of smartphone users have called a business after looking for local information on their mobile devices. Calls are key in helping consumers connect with businesses in the digital age, so incorporating a click-to-call strategy on mobile is crucial for any company that does business over the phone.

Companies big and small have put click-to-call functionality front and center in their mobile ads to reach customers on the go, and have seen impressive results. For instance, Comcast incorporated click-to-call ads into their mobile strategy, and now find mobile drives more than 10% of online sales. Esurance also reduced their cost per acquisition by 20-30% compared to other channels by using Google mobile ads with click-to-call. With more than 20 million calls made through Google click-to-call ads each month, it’s clear that mobile works when driving calls to businesses. In fact, our studies have shown that adding Call Extensions to mobile ad campaigns have improved advertisers’ average click-through rates by about 6-8%.

But as any business knows, getting customers to call is only half the battle. That’s why we’ve invested in features like Google call forwarding numbers, which show detailed reporting on calls generated from your ad campaign such as call start and end time, duration and caller area code. Having this valuable information can help advertisers understand how effective their ad campaigns are at driving calls as well as the quality of those calls. Advertisers using Google call forwarding numbers see calls last over six minutes on average.

We’re working hard to continually improve the click-to-call experience for advertisers and consumers. Here are a few of the things that our team has recently been hard at work on:

• Click-to-call button - We recently introduced a new click-to-call button for ads leveraging Call Extensions, which people can easily tap to call businesses. Early results indicate that this new design positively impacts advertiser click-through rates and call volume.
• Expanding availability of Google call forwarding numbers - We’re also focused on bringing Google call forwarding numbers to more advertisers so they can better measure the full value that mobile is driving through calls. Already available in US and UK, we recently expanded availability to Germany and plan to expand availability to additional countries in the coming months.
• Call Extensions for in-app ads - We also recently introduced Call Extensions for ads showing in apps on the Google Display Network. Now in addition to click-to-call ads across the mobile web, advertisers can also drive calls from ads in more than 300,000 mobile apps.

New click-to-call button

If you haven’t yet tried Call Extensions in your mobile campaigns, you can find instructions for enabling in our Help Center. We will also be hosting a webinar on December 5th focused on tracking call performance in your AdWords campaigns. To register for this webinar, click here.

Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Mobile Search Ads

How do you inspire excitement around an exotic travel destination that many people have never heard of? For Finnair, the answer came in the form of the new Swipeable Gallery ad for tablets. In a CPM campaign running across six European markets, nearly 5% of the impressions Finnair achieved led to an interaction. Of these interactions, 60% clicked to enter a competition and 12% clicked through to view fares on the site with the possibility to purchase.

The seeds for this success were sewn earlier this year Finnair when became the first airline to operate non-stop flights between Europe and Chongqing, China. While China’s importance among business and leisure travellers is rocketing, Finnair faced a challenge in stimulating tourism to the destination. Because travel to exotic places is an inherently sensory and immersive experience, the airline aimed to unleash the most stimulating and emotive advertising imaginable.

The goals? First, the campaign needed to be highly visual and interactive, leading people to learn as much as possible about the destination in a short space of time. Second, Finnair wanted to drive users to register for a competition (with the prize being a pair of round-trip tickets to Chongqing) and ultimately visit Finnair’s website to check the current fare offers with the opportunity to purchase tickets.

Finnair seized the Swipeable Gallery ad format as the ideal union of performance with branding. This format is part of Google’s Rich Media Designs for Mobile, a set of templates making it easy for display marketers to create rich media ads using existing assets and to implement them across platforms including mobile and tablet. In essence, the designs enable advertisers to create beautiful and highly interactive ads with no HTML5 expertise.

The Swipeable Gallery ad used by Finnair consists of links to make a booking or to enter the competition. But the main content of the ad is a range of compelling imagery from cityscapes to ancient sculptures to tantalising local food. The viewer can swipe horizontally to browse the gallery. Clicking on any image will expand it to full screen size, effectively allowing the viewer to dive into the irresistable sights of Chongqing.

Want to learn more about the tablet’s potential for driving awareness and sales? Read the full case study here.

Posted by: Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

An inspiring mobile ad campaign for the new video game Dishonored drove viewers to a four-minute trailer on m.youtube, achieving an incredibly successful click-through rate of 13% over the 12 days that it ran. By incorporating the Dishonored promotional trailer into the new Branded Video format from Google’s Rich Media Designs for Mobile, the short clip created serious excitement around the game in a compelling new way.

Dishonored is a first-person neo-Victorian stealth action-adventure video game. Because it’s not part of an established franchise, its creators Bethesda Softworks needed to grab the attention of gamers and educate them very quickly about the unique gameplay of Dishonored. So when Bethesda gave its agency Target Media the task of raising awareness about the brand-new game, everyone was in agreement: Dishonored deserved advertising as visually remarkable and as captivating as the game itself.

The idea was to use the visually stunning announcement trailer to establish Dishonored in a front-of-mind position among the game’s tech savvy target market, building up awareness in the key demographic in the lead-up to the game’s launch. Target Media understood that the target audience of early adopters and committed gamers were likely to be heavy users of smartphones and tablets, so the Branded Video format for mobile was a perfect fit. Google’s Rich Media Designs for Mobile templates are designed to make it easy for advertisers to create ads using existing assets and then implement them across platforms including mobile and tablet. All Target Media had to do was use the Branded Video template to embed a short 20-second version of the game’s trailer on a backdrop comprising a key image from the game. By using just these two assets, the cost and turnaround time of the custom ad unit was kept to a minimum.

The clip plays with full in-line video and audio, meaning that the user can view it in place rather than being redirected outside of the ad to the native video player or their device. The aim was to get the maximum number of targeted views for the short trailer and also to drive users to click to Bethesda’s YouTube channel to watch the full four-minute version. The ad ran on the AdMob network, which provided the perfect platform to reach an audience of gamers when they were on their mobile devices. The timing of the AdMob campaign was coordinated with desktop efforts to complete a powerful multi-screen approach.

To learn more about the campaign’s success, see the full case study here.

Posted by: Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads