Google+ helps over 1.6 million Guardian followers read (and share and debate and post) all about it

While the Guardian started back in 1821 as a black-and-white-and-read-all-about-it newspaper, today it’s evolved into a global entity that’s pioneering a multi-platform, digital-first approach. In this context, the Guardian champions a unique, open model of journalism, built upon the notion that the open exchange of information, ideas and opinion can bring about change.

Given this philosophy, it comes as no surprise that social media plays a central and growing role in the brand’s work. Google+ offered the opportunity for the Guardian to reach and connect with both users of Guardian.co.uk and new potential readers. Now with over 1.6 million followers, the Guardian’s Google+ page is aimed at creating a conversation around the Guardian’s content, reaching new audiences, and finding out more about readers and their interests.

The team posts different types of content (video, photos, text, front pages) and items from different sections as a way of seeing what their Google+ audience responds to. Science and technology stories are particularly popular among their readers, as well as world news topics and hot political stories. According to the Guardian, the Google+ feature Ripples has proved extremely useful in tracking the life cycle of posts and helping to identify key influencers.

In addition, the Hangouts functionality in Google+ has emerged as a key benefit. In making use of this high quality multi-user video chat feature, the digital engagement team has run several Hangouts on a mixture of topics, from fracking to the future of the open internet. “For us one of the most interesting aspects of Hangouts is the ability to connect people from across the world in a live chat,” says the Guardian’s Laura Oliver. “We're also exploring them as a way to allow our readers to pose questions and get even closer to the subjects of a story or discussion.”

As for the future, Laura is exploring how to use Hangouts in the most inclusive way possible so that debates can encompass questions from all across its audience.  To learn more about the Guardian’s success with Google+, read the full case study.

For more publisher success stories and tips on making the most of Google+ pages for your business, check out our Social Fridays blog series.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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Sharing enhanced campaigns stories to help you prepare for the July 22 auto-upgrade

In today’s world of constant connectivity, people are switching between multiple devices throughout the day. This multi-screen reality creates new opportunities for marketers to reach customers across devices anytime, anywhere. In February, we launched AdWords enhanced campaigns to help advertisers capture these new opportunities and manage their ad campaigns more effectively.

With less than a month until the auto-upgrade on July 22, advertisers have already upgraded more than 4.5 million campaigns. We realize that the upgrade takes some work, so we appreciate the effort that many of you have put into the process. Many industry leaders and advertisers have shared their progress, results and stories with us.  Here are just a few examples:

• M&M’S - Working with its agency partner, The DuMont Project, M&M’S brand MY M&M’S reported very strong results after upgrading to enhanced campaigns, including a 41% increase in conversion rates, 22% increase in revenue, and 31% boost in ROI for search campaigns. Across search and display, MY M&M’S reported a 15% boost in ROI. They initially thought that combining desktop and tablets into one category might negatively impact sales. But, they very quickly realized that the combination actually led to a higher ROI. The company also reduced the number of campaigns they managed from over 100 to 50 - saving five hours a week on campaign management.
• Colombo & Hurd - This small Florida-based law firm worked with its search software and agency partner, WordStream, to upgrade its campaigns. The two teams completed the upgrade - including a full update of Colombo & Hurd’s mobile, location, and time bidding strategies - in less than 30 minutes. Since upgrading to enhanced campaigns, Colombo & Hurd reported that mobile click-through rates rose by 53%, CPCs fell by 13%, and mobile conversion rates increased by three times.
• American Apparel - The retailer needed an easier, better way to reach customers wherever they are, whenever they’re searching for American Apparel items or stores. With enhanced campaigns, they used the proximity bidding feature and set mobile bid adjustments at 100% for a certain radius around their stores. Since upgrading, they’ve seen impressive results, with mobile conversions growing 2X and aggregate click-through-rate increasing by 7%. They’ve also found value in new features that are part of enhanced campaigns like upgraded sitelinks and sitelink reporting.
• Third party ad platforms - Many search engine marketing platforms and agencies have integrated with enhanced campaigns to help their clients take advantage of the powerful new features. One provider recently published a detailed guide to help advertisers with the upgrade, and shared the positive progress it was seeing across clients. They noted: “We’ve seen positive results from advertisers that have opted to migrate early. Recently, a large financial services company successfully migrated to enhanced campaigns on [our] platform and optimized to increase leads by 64% while lowering their CPL by 37% across a significant portion of their campaigns.” They also observed that in the first month after upgrading, CPCs dropped by 2%, while clicks increased by 6%.

Since the earliest days of the rollout, dozens of search marketing companies have offered advertisers advice on transitioning to enhanced campaigns. Some advice (like the help provided by many of the companies above) has been extremely valuable, while some has been more speculative. Every advertiser is different, so the important thing is to review your own metrics and iterate based on your business goals. No two accounts are alike, so it’s important to get started to see how enhanced campaigns can best work for you. The key benefits that we’ve consistently heard from industry leaders and advertisers are:

1. Better decision making made possible through improved reporting by device and location, as well as more detailed reporting on ad extension performance.
2. Time savings by reducing the number of campaigns required to manage varying user contexts.
3. Improved campaign management through features such as bid adjustments, device-specific formats and flexible bid strategies. 
4. New ways to align with your business goals and operations with the ability to schedule the specific dates, days of the week, or times of day for your extensions and sitelinks, at either the ad group or campaign levels.
5. Better ways to engage with mobile consumers using mobile-preferred creative and sitelinks, as well as proximity bidding to reach people who are nearby and on the go.

You can read about enhanced campaigns best practices and other advertiser stories on the enhanced campaigns website.

We’re learning from your feedback as we continue to improve AdWords for this new world of constant connectivity. It’s more important than ever for every business to reach customers across devices in a relevant way, and we’re hard at work building new features and improvements to help you do that successfully with AdWords.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

10 for 10 publisher stories: Papilles et Pupilles finds a recipe for success

This week marks the last post of our ‘10 for 10’ success story series, which we’ve been sharing in the weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary. Thanks for following along and submitting your own stories. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and be sure to check back next week when we’ll be celebrating AdSense’s official 10th anniversary!

Eight years ago, Bordeaux resident Anne Lataillade launched French culinary blog PapillesetPupilles.fr, a site where she shares classic recipes and also recipes for people with food allergies. As the mother of two children with food allergies, Anne had already been conducting culinary research and creating her own recipes for some time. Papilles et Pupilles has grown significantly, and today generates an average of over one and a half million page views per month.


(To enable captions in a number of languages, click on the ‘Captions’ link in the bottom right corner of the YouTube player once the video starts playing.)

Earlier this year, Anne attended a Learn with Google event in Paris to learn more about optimization. After trying out the 336x280 Large Rectangle format and changing her ad units to allow both text and image ads, Anne saw an increase in her revenue. AdSense now generates 20% of the revenue from the site, which Anne uses to cover the cost of maintenance, hosting, and development.

What’s next? Anne’s goal is to continue building traffic to the site by developing new content. She’s also growing awareness of her content through her Google+ page, where she engages with over 34,000 followers.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Get a Head Start with Enhanced Campaigns: Why to Upgrade Now

Enhanced campaigns offer an array of new features to drive better performance and efficiency. With more than three million campaigns already upgraded, we’ve heard many great examples of advertisers finding new pockets of revenue and reaching new customers with enhanced campaigns – all while saving time. As the the auto-upgrade approaches on July 22, we’re introducing some new features in the Upgrade Center today to make the process of upgrading even easier. Upgrade today to start realizing the benefits right away.

5 reasons to upgrade now
By upgrading now and becoming a pro with the new features before the auto-upgrade, you can get a head start on driving better performance – and a jump start on the competition. Here are some of our advertisers’ top reasons for upgrading:

• Discover local opportunities: Use the location bid adjustment to easily and effectively engage with users based on location and proximity. This allows you to find and optimize for pockets of revenue you may not have even known existed.
  
  After upgrading to enhanced campaigns and leveraging geo bid adjustments, Peter Hughes, Manager of SEM at Constant Contact stated, “Suddenly, we realized that California has a great cluster of small and medium sized businesses.  Cool - we’ve already geo-targeted that.  But guess what?  Who knew that North Dakota had such a great ROI.  In the old, legacy world, I never would have figured it out because it did not fit into my selective scaling model.”


• Expose the true power of mobile: Implement a mobile bid adjustment to make sure you’re driving the right value for on-the-go consumers while gaining better insight into the results mobile can drive for you.
  
  American Apparel upgraded early to reach customers across all screens. They started by setting mobile bid adjustments at 100% and saw impressive results.  Since the upgrade, mobile conversions have grown 2X and aggregate click-through-rate has increased 7%.  Sean Singleton, Marketing Manager, stated, “We are going from trial to fine-tuning the way we execute our multi-device marketing strategy.  With enhanced campaigns, it’s very easy to test and iterate so we are quickly establishing internal best practices in terms of how to best run enhanced campaigns.”


• Drive more leads through calls: Use call extensions and measure calls as conversions to drive cost-efficient leads while providing a better ad experience for your customers.
  
  Woodbridge, a financial investment firm, took advantage of upgraded call extensions and new reporting features, increasing the volume of calls from smartphones from 20% to 57%, with overall smartphone leads almost doubling.  In addition, conversion rates from both desktop and mobile devices increased by 6%.


• Reach new audiences on the Google Display Network with powerful bidding:  Drive impression share to a specific audience using custom display bids across characteristics like demographics, interest categories or topics.
  
  Stathis Konstantinidis, who runs Global Marketing at Westwing, said, “With the upgrade to enhanced campaigns we have greater insight into how our converting audience looks on adgroup level. This is very important to us as we have quite a distinct idea of our target group. We can use this information in order to push the impression share of our ads within the converting audience and decrease the impressions within the less performing audience for driving conversions & decreasing the CPLs.”


• Manage campaigns in less time: Dive into enhanced campaigns to see how the powerful features work together to streamline your workflow and get you to happy hour sooner.
  
  Dutch shoe retailer, Schuurman Schoenen, reduced its total number of campaigns by 60% and dramatically cut its marketing team’s workload.  “I used to spend twice as much time to maintain and fine-tune campaigns,” says Kayo Klein Obbink, Schuurman Schoenen’s online marketer.

Improvements to the upgrade center
In April, we announced the enhanced campaigns upgrade center to help you transition from legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns. We’re introducing some additional features, rolling out over the next week, that will make upgrading even easier and give you greater control over the merging process:

• Increased flexibility when copying keywords: When merging campaigns, have increased control over how keywords are copied (or not copied) from the mobile to the desktop campaign.
• Automatic labelling of newly copied keywords: When keywords, ads, or ad groups are copied or merged, they will be labelled as having been modified by the upgrade center.
• Uninterrupted keyword level tracking: When you have two matching campaigns with different mobile and desktop keyword-level destination URLs, they will be merged automatically. The mobile URL will show on mobile phones and the desktop URL will show on non-mobile.
• ... and coming soon: Bulk upload functionality: Ad extensions and ad groups will soon be exportable to AdWords Editor.

We hope that the Upgrade Center and other resources we’ve shared will give you the tools you need to ease the transition to enhanced campaigns.

Don’t wait to upgrade
We will begin automatically upgrading all legacy campaigns on July 22nd, 2013.  Please continue to share your feedback with us as you are going through the upgrade process.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions

10 for 10 publisher stories: Northlight Images develops a successful photography business

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team. 

Meet Keith Cooper, a commercial photographer based in Leicester, England. He runs Northlight Images, a site that was originally intended to promote his business, but which has grown to include hundreds of photography-related articles and reviews. The site has now become one of the world’s top 40 photography sites, receiving over five million unique visitors a year.



Keith signed up for AdSense in 2005 after exploring a number of options. The income from the program has enabled him to focus on the areas of photography he’s interested in. “AdSense is solid and dependable,” he says, “and it earns me 80 to 90 percent of my advertising revenue.”

To maximize the site’s effectiveness, Keith also uses a variety of other Google products. “Google+ is the one that really does it,” he says. “It brings in people who are interested in the topic and looking for specific information, so they spend more time on the site and ultimately increase my revenue.”

If you’d like to read more of Keith’s story after watching the video above, check out the full case study. There’s only one more post left in our ‘10 for 10’ series -- be sure to join us back here next week for our final story!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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10 for 10 publisher stories: El Androide Libre moves its business forward

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team. 

Madrid-based elandroidelibre.com (“the free Android”) is a Spanish-language blog that features news, reviews, games and other apps for Android smartphone users. Launched in 2009, it now employs six people and receives 6.5 million visits each month.

Administrator and editor Paolo Álvarez got started with AdSense right from the start, which has accounted for around 40 percent of the site’s income. “Much of elandroidelibre’s growth is due to AdSense,” Paolo says. “We regard it as an essential tool that’s helping us to set up more blogs, take on more staff, and earn more revenue.” So far, he’s been highly satisfied with the ads appearing on his site, and notes that the 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle and the 728 x 90 Leaderboard formats work particularly well.

Paolo also uses other Google products to manage the site. He relies on Analytics to gain a better understanding of the site’s visitors, and also DoubleClick for Publishers, Google’s free ad serving solution, to manage his online advertising more effectively and segment traffic from different countries.

Hear more from Paolo in the full case study. We’ll see you next week for our next ‘10 for 10’ publisher success story as we continue counting down to AdSense’s 10th anniversary.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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10 for 10 publisher stories: Sportonline.de’s winning approach

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team. 

While managing a number of technology-related websites, Matthias Sandner and two colleagues decided to create a new site to address one of their shared passions: soccer. They brought this vision to life in 2011 with the launch of German site Sportonline.de, which they now run with a small team of employees. Matthias had been an AdSense publisher since 2007, so implementing AdSense on Sportonline.de was one of the first things he did on the site.


(To enable captions in a number of languages, click on the ‘Captions’ link in the bottom right corner of the YouTube player once the video starts playing.)

AdSense currently generates between 50 and 60 percent of Sportonline.de’s total advertising revenue, and has helped financially support the new site. Matthias has found that the 728 x 90 Leaderboard with both text and image ads enabled performs the best on his site. Since Sportonline.de is still new and growing, the team mainly invests the AdSense earnings into new content and employees. “Not only does AdSense offer a convincing performance,” says Matthias, “but it’s also clear and easy to use.” As a result, the team can focus on developing the website rather than devoting time to selling ads.

Matthias has been happy about the performance of AdSense, and is currently working to continue growing the user base and revenue from the site. He makes uses of other Google products like Analytics, which provides insights to help the team continue improving the site. In addition, Sportonline.de has already developed a large following on Google+, where the team shares content and interacts with over 35,000 fans.

For more on Sportonline.de’s start-up success, read the full story. Join us here again next Tuesday for another inspirational publisher story, and feel free to share your comments on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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10 for 10 publisher stories: Expat blog expands horizons and its business

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team. 

After finding few sites devoted to expats around the world, in 2005 Julien Faliu decided to launch a community platform for that audience. An expat himself, Julien has since grown his site into a company based in Mauritius that now employs 15 members of staff. Expat blog receives 12 million pageviews per month and is now available in four languages.

Julien initially turned to AdSense as a way to cover the costs of running his website, but as his revenue increased, he decided to focus on advertising. Today, Julien is responsible for all of the advertising space on the site. “At the start, AdSense allowed me to get my website set up by covering my costs,” Julien says. “Now, I can truly say that AdSense has enabled me to grow and recruit staff.”

Beyond AdSense, Julien also uses a number of other Google tools to continue developing his business. For instance, Analytics enables him to view his site’s growth, and DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business helps him manage all of the advertising on the site.

What’s next for Expat blog? Julien and his team are currently developing a strategy to monetize their mobile site, and looking towards bringing private investors on board to fund the next stage of growth.

For more details about Julien’s success with Expat blog, be sure to read the full story. We’ll be back again next Tuesday to introduce you to another AdSense publisher.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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10 for 10 publisher stories: Canal Sur thrives with digital tools

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team.

Seville’s Radio y Televisión de Andalucía (RTVA) broadcasts TV and radio programs online as well as the news via its website, Canal Sur. The site, which employs 18 people and receives about 6.5 million visits a month, joined the AdSense program four years ago. According to Antonio Manfredi, Director of Interactive Media at RTVA, “the economic crisis affected us like the rest of the media throughout Spain, so we decided to look for new ways to improve. We realized that AdSense was the simplest and most profitable option.”

(To enable captions in a number of languages, click on the ‘Captions’ link in the bottom right corner of the YouTube player once the video starts playing.)

Since joining AdSense, total global advertising revenue has increased by 40 percent, and AdSense has played a major part in making the website profitable. Looking ahead, the company is planning to work more closely with YouTube and to improve its TV-on-demand services.

Read the full case study to learn more about Canal Sur’s experience with AdSense. We look forward to seeing you next week for the second half of our ‘10 for 10’ series!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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10 for 10 publisher stories: Pronounced success for Forvo

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team.

For those learning a new language or just wondering how words are pronounced in different parts of the world, Forvo provides a solution. Launched in 2008, the online pronunciation guide offers recordings of over 1.5 million words in 36 languages, uploaded by native speakers. A team of four based in Guipúzcoa, Spain maintains the site, which has 250,000 registered users and receives around nine million visits a month.

According to CEO Félix Vela, “the income from AdSense has allowed me to take on two new employees over the past couple of years.” Félix has been happy with the quality and relevance of the ads, and regularly uses other Google tools like Analytics to understand the site’s visitors.

Looking ahead, Félix plans to continue improving the site and increasing the number of pronunciation examples available. “There’s absolutely no doubt that AdSense will continue to play a fundamental role in this growth,” he says.

Read Forvo’s full story, and join us here again next week to meet our next publisher.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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