This past holiday season, homes were aglow with the twinkling lights of large screens (like laptops, desktops and tablets) and mobile phones alike. In our holiday consumer survey, conducted in partnership with Nielsen, we found that consumers relied on their devices more this holiday season, moving fluidly between devices based on their setting and context. 63% of consumers frequently used more than one digital device to shop for gifts this holiday season, and 67% of consumers believe that “having access to multiple devices makes it easier to shop”.
Another important finding was that more screens means more shopping. People using one device to research and shop made online and offline purchases across an average of six product categories (like electronics, apparel, auto parts, etc), while those that used two devices purchased across eight categories, and people who used all three devices shopped across an average of nine categories.
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In many cases, consumers discovered a business on one device, for example on their smartphone while in a store, and would then engage further with that business on another device at a later time. We saw that 65% of holiday shoppers were frequently engaging in this sequential behavior throughout all of their shopping. For multi-screen shoppers, different devices fulfill specific objectives. For example, smartphones were the preferred device for contacting or navigating to a business with 71% of shoppers using a store locator on their phone, while 82% of shoppers used a larger device like PC or tablet for making online purchases.
These same multi-screen trends carried us into 2013 as people used multiple devices to make and keep new years resolutions. Looking at search query behavior around New Years, we saw an interesting twist on the classic resolution of becoming more healthy. People used their smartphones on January 1st to look up things like gym memberships, diets, or cleanses, and then the following day, searches for those same words spiked on tablets and desktop as people continued their research on these devices at home or at work. This behavior demonstrated the growing trend of using multiple devices in combination to help make everyday decisions.
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Implications for businesses This multi-screen consumer behavior doesn't fade away with the holiday. In fact, better understanding how people searched, shopped and seamlessly moved between multiple screens during the holiday can give us insight into this new constantly connected consumer. So what can businesses do about it?
One good answer is to think context. All these new search patterns have created new opportunities for businesses to be more relevant to people’s context. Context signals like time of day, general location, and the kind of device a person is using, provide powerful insights into what they may be looking for and where they are in the buying cycle.
Within AdWords, advertisers now have the opportunity to use enhanced campaigns, which help them reach people across all devices with smarter ads that are relevant to their intent and context. Learn more about enhanced campaigns here.
This multi-screen behavior will only continue throughout the year. As device penetration grows and multi-screen behavior becomes the norm, those businesses that evolve their marketing strategy along with it will remain the most relevant and see the greatest results.
Posted by: Adam Grunewald, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
Today, people are constantly connected and searching from all kinds of devices. Advertisers are looking for ways to reach people with ads that are relevant to their context, like their location, the time of day and the device they are using. With an enhanced campaign, you can easily vary your bids across devices, locations, and time of day – all within a single campaign.
Example: A multichannel retailer wants to reach people close to their stores searching for “party supplies.” Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 50% higher for people searching up to a mile away, 20% lower for searches on weekdays, and 25% higher for searches on smartphones.
In this post and a Learn with Google webinar this Thursday, February 21st, at 10am PST (sign-up here), we’ll look more closely at the new bidding tools and mobile bid adjustments. This Thursday’s webinar will also dive deeper into some of the improvements with mobile ads.
Bid adjustments With an enhanced campaign, you start by setting default bids that reach all devices. You can then set bid adjustments to increase or decrease your bids for mobile devices and different contexts – like location and time of day. Setting higher bids when and where you’re more likely to satisfy a customer’s intent can boost your ad’s visibility and potentially lead to more visits and sales. Setting lower bids for contexts where your lead quality or average order value is lower can improve your ROI, although you may see fewer visits and lower total sales.
Bidding for devices with larger screens, like desktops, laptops and tablets, is grouped together in enhanced campaigns. We and others in the industry see that users’ search behavior on these larger devices is very similar, and likewise, overall advertiser performance is very similar across these devices.
Bid adjustments combine using multiplication. If you set multiple location-based bid adjustments, only the most specific adjustment will apply.
Continuing the example above: The retailer’s max CPC bid for the keyword [party supplies] is $1. When someone searches for “party supplies” on a smartphone within a mile radius from the store on Wednesday, then the location, time, and mobile bid adjustments set will apply. So this retailer’s CPC bid for this particular search would be adjusted to $1.50 ($1 x (100% + 50%) x (100% - 20%) x (100% + 25%) = $1.50).
The AdWords interface provides a calculator to show you how multiple bid adjustments might combine to affect your bids.
Valuing mobile and setting a mobile bid adjustment People can take a wide range of actions on smartphones. Beyond purchasing directly from your mobile site, customers might call your business, click on driving directions to visit a store, download an app, or even convert on another device later. But traditional online conversion reporting may not show the full consumer journey across devices and can therefore lead to undervaluing mobile. Savvy marketers are looking deeper to consider the full value that mobile brings to their business. Check out how Radio Shack, a large multi-channel consumer electronics retailer, approaches their mobile bidding and measurement strategy here as an example.
With an enhanced campaign, you can choose a mobile bid adjustment to influence your ad position, clicks and cost on mobile devices. For a bit of perspective, here are a few of examples of how advertisers set their mobile bids as a percentage of desktop over the course of the last several months (actual CPCs may differ).
On average, advertisers in the Australian retail sector set mobile bids to 103% of desktop.
On average, advertisers in the US real estate sector set mobile bids to 91% of desktop.
On average, advertisers in the Canadian travel sector set mobile bids to 88% of desktop.
With each campaign you upgrade to an enhanced campaign, you’ll see the estimated change in impressions, clicks and cost depending on your selected mobile bid adjustment. The suggested bid adjustment shows you how similar advertisers bid on mobile compared to other devices.
Experienced search marketers know that bids are one of many factors that influence overall campaign performance, along with keywords, ads, extensions, and landing pages. So after setting a mobile bid adjustment, periodically measure your results and make changes as needed to better meet your campaign goals.
Feedback We want you to succeed with AdWords, so we’re very interested in hearing your feedback. As you begin using enhanced campaigns, please share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.
Posted by: Surojit Chatterjee, Group Product Manager
Last week we announcedenhanced campaigns, which let you more easily adjust your ads and bids depending on your customers’ location, device, and time of day - all within a single campaign.
We’ll be hostingseveral Learn with Google webinars about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks. This Thursday, February 14 at 10am PST, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering, and Jason Spero, Global Sales Director, will provide an overview of enhanced campaigns and Q&A. Pleasesign up here to attend. Also look for more information and details about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks here on our blog. Posted by: Mark Martel, the Google Ads team
Today we’re upgrading AdWords, by rolling out enhanced campaigns. This is a first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.
Why enhanced campaigns?
People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices - PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.
This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.
With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.
Key features Here’s an overview of some key features.
1. Powerful marketing tools for the multi-device world
People want search results that are relevant for the context they are in for example - their device, location and the time of day. Enhanced campaigns help you better manage your campaigns and budgets for this multi-device world. With bid adjustments, you can manage bids for your ads across devices, locations, time of day and more - all from a single campaign. Example: A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for [coffee] or [breakfast] on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.
2. Smarter ads optimized for varying user contexts
People on the go or near your store may be looking for different things than someone sitting at their desk. With enhanced campaigns, you’ll show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.
Example: A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC - all within a single campaign.
3. Advanced reports to measure new conversion types
Technology is enabling people to take action on your ads in new ways. Potential customers may see your ad and download your app, or they may call you. It’s been hard for marketers to easily measure and compare these interactions. To help you measure the full value of your campaigns, enhanced campaigns enables you to easily count calls and app downloads as conversions in your AdWords reports.
Example: You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads.
Upgrading to enhanced campaigns Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the next few weeks, and we plan to upgrade all campaigns in mid-2013.
Enhanced campaigns are designed to help you succeed in a multi-screen world, but we know that transitioning may involve some initial changes. Here are some resources to help you:
Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the new features with tips and best practices on the Inside AdWords blog and on our G+ page. We’d love your feedback.
Posted by: Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering
Smartphones and tablets can be great creative canvases for brand advertisers, and many agencies are helping brands go big on mobile. But it’s hard for agencies and advertisers to experience the full interactivity of mobile rich media -- mobile video and HTML5 ads -- through static images alone. Last night at our annual Creative Sandbox event in New York, we unveiled the new Mobile Ads Showcase App, which lets you experience mobile ads exactly as your users will.
The app lets you explore what best-in-class advertisers are doing with mobile rich media, and learn about all that’s possible with Google Mobile Ads. Additionally, agencies can use the app as their mobile portfolio by coding, testing and uploading their HTML5 ad examples to the MRAID-compliant “My Ads” screen. The app is now available for Android smartphones and tablets through the Google Play Store.
See the app in action and learn more about how it works on the Creative Sandbox site.
Posted by: Jessica Sapick, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
In July, we shared some of the secrets behind smartphone game developer Chukong’s success with promoting their game Fishing Joy using AdMob. Recently Chukong CEO Haozhi Chen shared some perspective on AdMob’s role in their marketing strategy.
Since launching, AdMob has comprised 70% of Chukong’s promotional budget and has already served 1.5 billion impressions and 1.7 billion ad queries for Fishing Joy, helping build a user base of over 80 billion downloads to date at a conversion rate of over 5%.
For more information, read the full case studyhere.
Posted by Kevin Otsuka, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
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
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