Reach, Relevance and Trust: The 'Big Three' in Display Advertising

Google Display Network offers a powerful blend of advanced targeting, innovative formats and best-in-class optimization tools that work across screens to help you reach and engage with your perfect audience. Today we’d like to take a closer look at our our reach and our partner sites that help you scale your message to precisely the right people – wherever they are.

According to comScore, 210 million unique visitors see ads served by the Google Display Network each month in the US alone. That’s as many viewers as all of the Emmy-nominated dramas put together! It's hard to visualize the full Google Display ecosystem in terms of numbers alone, so we've created an infographic to show some of our great partner sites and the metrics (like the 1 trillion monthly impressions) they generate:

Even given those big numbers, though, marketers know that sheer volume isn't where successful ads start. The real magic lies in the connection one ad makes with one consumer at a moment that counts. That's why the place where the brand meets the consumer is so important. When a publisher has a close relationship with users, it's like the ad is being introduced by a trusted friend.

Today we'd like you to meet three publishers in the Google Display Network who help make those introductions happen: Men's Health, Apartment Therapy and Serious Eats. Their stories embody what we think is special about GDN: the way it balances those big reach numbers with relevance and trust.

Reach

"One of the biggest advantages of working with Google is obviously the reach, and most importantly for us, the trusted reach, that Google brings to the table."

- Ronan Gardiner

Publisher, Men's Health

In Men's Health, a story about diet and nutrition might be matched with an ad for a healthy oat cereal or a video of a celebrity chef offering low-cal recipes. That kind of match is made millions of times a month. These days those connections happen more and more on mobile screens. Men’s Health now has more than 125,000 subscribers on tablets, enabling them to bring, as Ronan explains, “a totally cross-platform, synergistic opportunity to advertisers to speak to our guys whenever and wherever they’re engaging with our content.”  But on a personal device like a smartphone, the trusted reach that Ronan Gardiner talks about is all the more important.

Relevance

"Our audience is 60% women, 40% men, between the ages of 25 and 45. If advertisers know who they want to reach, we’re perfect for them.”

- Maxwell Ryan

CEO & Founder, Apartment Therapy

Apartment Therapy is "saving the world, one room at a time." Here you might see ads for handcrafted wood furniture matched to a photo essay titled "Organic Modern Dining Rooms." Maxwell Ryan, the founder and CEO of this über-cool home design collective, attributes his site's success to its ability to make an emotional connection with his readers: "We're addressing a very personal space for people in a very focused way."  A personal connection with a very focused group: that's the kind of relevance that marketers really aim for.

Trust

"Our audience is very passionate about food and they've come to trust us. So advertisers who advertise on SeriousEats develop that same credibility with our audience and their product."

- Ed Levine

Founder, SeriousEats.com

Founder Ed Levine says that "every post is the start of a conversation," and we believe you should be able to say the same for every ad. The Google Display Network portfolio includes 65% of comScore’s top 100 sites, so you can feel sure that your brand conversation will be happening on a site that has earned viewers' trust.

That's our goal, after all: to make sure that your great ads get matched to the right audience on great sites like these. The Google Display Network makes those introductions, one match at a time, millions of times each day. We'll keep working hard to make sure the GDN continues to grow with full measures of reach, relevance and trust. To become part of the Google Display Network with your site, sign up today!

Posted by Brad Bender, Director Product Management

Create beautiful, engaging display ads in seconds with Ready Creatives

Building on VP of Product Management Neal Mohan’s presentation to the Mobile Marketing Association about building cross-screen creative in HTML5, and Product Management Director Brad Bender’s keynote speech about advances in creative formats at IAB MIXX yesterday, we’re excited to announce the launch of Ready Creatives – our groundbreaking new solution to make display ad creation easier than ever. Ready Creatives consists of two powerful tools: Ready Image Ads and Ready Ad Gallery.

Display ads today need to captivate consumers with rich creative and dynamic messaging. But creating an engaging, beautiful ad takes time and effort. High quality ad creation – until now – has been a big challenge, putting it out of reach for small to medium businesses. Ready Creatives puts the power back in your hands – and makes it easier than ever before to create beautiful ads that can be consistently displayed across screens.

Instantly build IAB Standard, HTML5 compatible ads with Ready Image Ads

With one single click, take advantage of Ready Image Ads flexibility by simply adding your website URL to automatically construct display ads based on images from your website.  You can customize further by adjusting the text, font, color, images, headlines, URL and more – in a way that best tells your story. Our friendly user-interface and streamlined process enables you to build display ads in minutes, automatically creating IAB standard ads in HTML5 formats using your existing elements from your website or your own uploaded images. And these HTML5 ads can be viewed across mobile devices as well as desktops!

Provide your website URL and Ready Image Ads automatically builds a variety of beautiful ads for you to use in your campaigns

Beautiful ads at your fingertips in Ready Ad Gallery

Ready Creatives doesn’t just quickly cobble together the elements you want included in your ad – it helps you build campaigns that engage customers with stories they love, remember and share. Our Ready Ad Gallery features pre-built templates you can easily customize based on your campaigns goals.

Choose from the following formats and watch your display ad come to life:

• Dynamic Ads – Dynamic Ads deliver tailored creative across the web that combine the layouts, products, messages and offers that your customers are most likely interested in, based on what they viewed on your website.
• Engagement Ads – Engagement Ads captivate consumers with rich creative messages. They fit in standard display units, allowing to scale across the web, and then expand to a larger format after an innovative two-second hover delay. 
• Video Ads – Videos are as effective as TV in building awareness of your business.  Create a quick video ad in seconds that showcases your brand.
• General Purpose Ads – if you need a simple display ad, browse through our hundreds of template options and customize in our easy-to-use editing tool.

Building display ads has never been simpler, and we’re making this capability accessible to all advertisers at no additional cost, and as part of the AdWords campaign workflow. No matter what type of ad you choose, you can be sure you will not only have saved time and money but also have created an ad your customers and prospects are sure to love.

To get started using Ready Creatives today, log into your Adwords account and click on the Ads tab. For more information, visit www.google.com/think/products/ready-creatives.html.

Posted by Ashley Jiang, Product Manager, Google Display Network

Modcloth and Inflection Drive Performance with Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting

Advertisers use contextual targeting on the Google Display Network to reach new customers as they browse content related to their products and services. In March we launched Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting, which enabled our display advertisers to manage their contextual campaigns with the same level of precision and granularity as search. In a few short months we’ve been delighted to see how it’s translated into real results for our customers, and today we’d like to shine a light on two specific examples.

Modcloth, an online retailer selling vintage inspired clothing, had been using contextual targeting on the Google Display Network as a way to scale their message across a wide variety of sites. Their challenge was figuring out which keywords were triggering which conversions across their multiple product lines. With keyword level reporting and optimization levers, Theresa Rockovich, Modcloth’s SEM Manager, was excited to finally put her SEM skills to work. “Before the ability to target and bid on keywords, we were barely making these campaigns profitable. Now that we’ve been able to adjust our bids and see which keywords are driving performance, margins are the healthiest they’ve ever been.” In nine weeks, their keyword-level optimizations helped turn three unprofitable contextual campaigns into some of their highest performers. Their jewelry lines saw a 460% increase in click-through-rates and their dresses campaign saw a 700% increase in ROI.

Andrew Wong, Marketing Director at Inflection, similarly took a search-focused approach to managing their contextual campaigns. “We took the shell of our search campaigns and copied them onto the Google Display Network” and created specific page URLs for each product line. After a few weeks of generating traffic, they turned on the Display Campaign Optimizer – the Google Display Network’s auto-optimization tool that automatically manages targeting and bidding – and the results were phenomenal. With the help of DCO, they increased conversions by 480% at a cost-per-action 10% lower than the rest of their display campaigns.

Keyword level targeting is one of the many reasons why our Display Campaign Optimizer  has improved in both accuracy and efficiency the past year. We've seen advertisers are usually able to reach their target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) in about two weeks, versus the two months it often took before these changes. Coupled with new bidding capabilities, such as real-time bidding, MaxCPC and Enhanced CPC, DCO is now available to use on ‘hybrid’ search and display campaigns.

And it gets even better

In addition to keyword targeting, bidding and reporting, today we’re announcing  new keyword status messages to assist advertisers troubleshoot for more effective and consistent keyword matching and delivery. Now you’ll know if a keyword is pointing to a suspended site, has been disapproved, or if it matches too few pages (Few Page Matches). We’ve also added a notification that alerts users with display-only campaigns when a Display Network bid - which overrides keyword bids when ads are shown on the Google Display Network - is in place. We recommend removing the Display Network Bid in display-only campaigns to take advantage of keyword level bidding. Click here to learn how.

Learn More

We look forward to seeing even more success stories as we continue to roll out these new features! To learn more about how to implement these strategies into your display campaigns, download the Google Display Network Guide here!

Posted by Katie Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager Google Display Network

Creative Sandbox Gallery. Now open for play.

At Google, we're amazed by how the ad industry is using the digital canvas to bring brands and ideas to life. Whether it’s enticing viewers with video, evoking a smile with a mobile phone, or reconfiguring the typical ‘test drive,’ when digital advertising works, it can not only be informative, but emotional and dazzling. That’s why we've created a space where everyone can see this great work, talk about it, and roll around in it like a big happy dog.

Today, we’re launching the Creative Sandbox gallery. It’s a crowdsourced collection of global campaigns that push the boundaries of creativity and technology from across digital platforms -- a place to flash your brilliance, spark new digital ideas, inspire and be inspired. We're asking the creators to share a little detail on how they made the magic happen and the tools they used to do it, exposing us all to new ideas and new ways to improve our own work.

As with any sandbox, looking and playing are required. Vote to push your favorite projects to the top. Tell other creators what you admire. And if you've done something amazing lately, send it in. We'd all love to see it.

Jump in. Explore. And play.
www.creativesandbox.com

Posted by Justin Joy, Agency Marketing Manager

Today’s Webinar: Google and Forrester Present New Research on the Value of Combining Audience with Contextual Targeting

In the past 10 years the number and variety of new technologies in display advertising have more than doubled, effectively creating new - and better - ways to buy display across the web. With this influx of new display targeting technologies available to advertisers (contextual, remarketing, demographics, interest categories to name a few), our clients often wonder which targeting method performs better: audience or contextual advertising? We've said in the past that the combination of audience and contextual buying work better together, and now we have some new insight into how advertisers are thinking about these tools.

We worked with Forrester Consulting and surveyed 150 interactive marketers to evaluate their perceptions on the effectiveness of combining audience & contextual targeting with respect to display buying. The findings from the new whitepaper, Display Media Buyers Value Audience in Context, will be presented today (10AMPT/1PMET) during a special joint Learn with Google webinar featuring Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell and Google’s Woojin Kim. Register here!

Key findings from the research include:

• 50% of respondents use a full range of targeting types including: Remarketing, Demographic, Behavioral and Contextual
• Contextual and behavioral targeting dominate: Used by the vast majority - 82% in the case of contextual, 71% in the case for behavioral
• 94% of marketers combine contextual & audience buying for higher performance and greater accuracy
• Audience targeting has become the norm in display buying: The majority of marketers se bullish on audience targeting, and few see it as overhyped.
• Most marketers plan on maintaining increasing spend on combined audience & contextual targeting.

Interested in learning more? Download the whitepaper on Think Insights with Google and tune in to the webinar today!

Posted by Katie Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager Google Display Network

Finding your audience with demographics

Marketers have long looked to get a better understanding of the audience make-up of different print and broadcast media to help them better tailor their message and deliver more relevant ads to consumers. This audience insight is equally important in digital advertising, which is why, more than a year ago, we introduced a beta enabling you to show ads based on certain demographic categories, like age and gender.

Since 2011, we’ve been hard at work making this available to more advertisers.  Marketers have been getting great results. For example, Blue Nile used demographics in a campaign to reach potential engagement ring buyers and saw a click through rate of 10x higher than the U.S. national average for online display campaigns.

Today, we’re happy to share that this feature is now widely available within AdWords for campaigns targeting 39 countries; if available in your region, it will start to appear in the Display Network Tab as Age and Gender targeting.

Demographic categories complement other AdWords targeting features, such as interest categories, remarketing and keyword contextual targeting. The ultimate goal is to help you better refine your marketing message and reach the right audience with the right ad. For example, if you sell yoga gear and know that your core audience tends to be women between the ages of 25 and 34, you can set your campaign to show mostly to that audience, rather than showing your ads to people less likely to be interested in the product.

Our goal is to help you better connect with your audience, meaning more effective marketing campaigns for you. This is an important part of our efforts to make our ads better for users, which helps to fund content across the web. To get started using demographics in your campaigns, visit our help center.

Posted by Jon Krafcik, Product Manager

More ‘Flexible’ Targeting on the Google Display Network

Last month we introduced the Display Network tab, a new interface in AdWords dedicated to making display buying easier and more efficient by combining your targeting, bidding and optimizing in one place. To give you even more control over your display ads, we’re pleased to announce the new Flexible reach targeting setting on the new Display Network tab.

In the next couple of weeks, the Networks and devices section of your Settings tab in AdWords will include a new targeting option called “Flexible reach.” Flexible reach enables you to fine-tune where your ads show by choosing your settings at the ad group level instead of the campaign level. This will give you more control over where your ads appear and who sees them.


Why the Change?
Today, you can manage your display targeting on the campaign level by selecting Broad reach or Specific reach.

• When you select Broad reach, your ads are shown on pages that match your primary targeting method.
• When you select Specific reach, your ads will show on pages that match all of your targeting methods.

Flexible reach allows you to select any combination of multiple targeting selections at the ad group level, plus the control to combine different methods for targeting and bidding at the ad group level. It also provides transparency into how your targeting selections are affecting the reach and impression volume of your campaigns.

How will this affect my campaigns today?
The Flexible reach campaign setting will appear as an optional setting in AdWords accounts in June and will eventually replace the Broad and Specific reach options later this year.

Once you’ve selected this option in an existing campaign, you can’t revert back to Broad or Specific reach and any new ad group will have Flexible reach by default. Your current targeting and bidding selections will remain the same, but you’ll now have the control to select how to target and bid on an individual ad group basis.

Learn More!
To find out more about how to take advantage of Flexible reach, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Subha Subramanian, Product Manager, Flexible Reach

Webinar: Bringing the power and control of search to display

Join us tomorrow, June 19, 2012 for the Learn with Google webinar, "Bringing the Power and Control of Search to Display,” to learn from the experts about Google’s major update to contextual targeting. The webinar starts at 10amPST / 1pmEST.

It’s now possible to target, bid and report on keywords on the Google Display Network, which means that you can fine-tune the performance of your contextual campaigns with the same level of control you’re used to in Search. It’s now easier for you to extend search campaigns to display and more efficient to run the two types of campaigns together.

Key areas that will be covered include:

• The benefits of combining display with your search campaigns
• Step-by-step campaign set-up guide
• Campaign optimization tips and best practices

This webinar will be presented by Charlie Vestner, Global Director of Display Solutions and will include Q&A. The session is suitable for advertisers who are already running campaigns on the Google Display Network, as well as those who have not yet tried it.

Register now!

Posted by Katie Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

New In-Ads Notice Label and Icon for the Google Display Network in Europe

Last year in the U.S., we launched the AdChoices Icon on the Google Display Network. AdChoices is an industry standard "i" icon that expands to “AdChoices” when users move their cursor over the icon. Giving users clear notice about the ads they see is a high priority for Google and for many in the online advertising industry at large. Users who click this label are taken to a page where they can learn more about online advertising and the ads they see.

We’re now rolling out the AdChoices feature across Europe, supporting industry-wide efforts to provide more information to consumers. We'll soon start to change our “Ads By Google” in-ads notice icon to a new icon that expands to an "AdChoices" label. These notifications were developed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB Europe)-led Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising to proactively give users notice and choice about the ads they see. With the adoption of a common icon users will see on ads across the web, we hope to show our support for the industry-wide initiative and to increase users' understanding about their choices.

Over the next few weeks, we'll start showing the new icon and label on most ad formats across the majority of European-language sites. Over time, we’ll expand the notice to ensure that all European-language publisher sites in the Google Display Network come within the Self-Regulatory Framework. This will be the single largest rollout of the "AdChoices" label to date, and we're encouraged that others in the industry are also adopting the label.

Users who click on the "AdChoices" label will be taken to a page where they can learn more about online advertising and the ads they are shown. This page will also link to the Ads Preferences Manager, where users can control the types of interest-based ads they see on the Google Display Network. We think this rollout will help users better understand the ads they're seeing, and we look forward to seeing widespread adoption of this label throughout the industry.

Posted by Jason Bigler, Product Management Director

The key to success on the Google Display Network

Small businesses are realizing that they can go beyond search ads with the Google Display Network, reaching new customers and leads with engaging and relevant messages. In the past year alone, the number of small businesses running ads on the Google Display Network has almost doubled, and this growth trend is just beginning!

To help propel other small businesses to win the moments that matter with display, we decided to learn more from our customers, highlight their success, and share the strategies they’ve employed to achieve successful display campaigns.

Making display work for you
The key to being successful on the Google Display Network is understanding the mix of targeting types you should use to achieve your marketing objective. While there is no one-size-fits-all strategy, we know there are recurring themes among businesses who have set up successful display campaigns.

We found three small businesses that are great illustrations of these different approaches to display: Julian Bakery, Legacy Learning Systems, and Bedder Way.

Let’s take a closer look at their successful display network strategies:

• Drive sales online and in stores – Since ramping up their GDN campaign to drive online and offline sales, Julian Bakery has grown from 40 distributors and 100 customers to 1000 distributors and 300,000 customers nationwide.
• Control and understand every dollar you spend – Legacy Learning System achieves, on average, 1M impressions per day on the Google Display Network and 150 online sales per month by maximizing their ad performance using conversion tracking data.
• Harness the power of an image – Bedder Way has increased their display network conversions by 50% and decreased their cost per conversion by 25%, by using image ads on the display network to visually showcase their murphy beds.

To help inspire you, we’ve compiled these companies’ strategies into three short videos and downloadable guides on our revamped Google Display Network website. The videos provide an overview of each company’s strategy and the PDFs act as a guide to help you follow their lead, developing your own successful campaigns on the GDN.

Take a look, browse the site, and try out the Google Display Network for yourself!

Posted by Brad Bender, Director, Product Management - Google Display Network

Display Campaign Optimizer Available to All

Recently we announced the most significant enhancement to our contextual engine ever: the ability to optimize Google Display Network campaigns down to the keyword level using Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. These new controls will help advertisers fine-tune their campaign performance on a completely new level - like upgrading from a standard engine to a 6-speed manual gear-shift race car. For advertisers that prefer to put their campaigns on cruise-control and let Google technology do the heavy lifting, our suite of automatic optimization tools maximize the performance of your Google Display Network campaigns while saving you valuable time and resources. From adjusting bids with Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC, to automatically finding optimal placements around the network with Display Campaign Optimizer - these features help advertisers achieve their ROI goals, with a fraction of the effort.

Display's Self-Driving Car - Display Campaign Optimizer

The Display Campaign Optimizer was launched in 2010 as a limited beta, and since has become one of our most popular automation tools for large advertisers managing high volume campaigns. In addition to fully automating your targeting and bidding, it uses a variety of signals like context, demographics and interest categories to find additional conversions across our vast AdSense publisher network - all at your desired CPA.

Watch how it works

As we highlighted last fall, advertisers have had great success using Display Campaign Optimizer. Recently it helped Dale Carnegie Training expand their online reach to more than 85 countries in the world without a lot of hands-on effort. After implementing the Display Campaign Optimizer on two campaigns, they increased conversions by 308% and 101% in only six months while maintaining a steady cost-per-lead.

Dale Carnagie Wins Friends and Influences Buyers with Display Campaign Optimizer

Now Open to All

With greater adoption and a significantly improved engine, we’re excited to announce that Display Campaign Optimizer is exiting “beta” and available to all advertisers through AdWords. Previously only large advertisers with very high conversion volumes (150/month) could take advantage of this powerful tool. The new and improved Display Campaign Optimizer now has the same low conversion requirement (15/month) as Conversion Optimizer. This means you can simply opt-into DCO on any campaign running on Conversion Optimizer and take advantage of the added benefit of more conversions!

Get Started!

Starting today you can easily set-up Display Campaign Optimizer campaigns in AdWords. For more information on how to set up your Display Campaign Optimizer campaigns, review our step-by - step guide on our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by David Mitby, Product Manager Display Campaign Optimizer, and Abhinay Sharma Sr Engineering Manager

Webinar tomorrow: Advanced audience targeting on the Google Display Network

This live webinar will outline how advertisers can use advanced audience targeting across the Google Display Network. We will discuss how to overlap and maximize AdWords products in order to reach specific target audience segments by using products such as remarketing, interest categories, topic targeting and more. This live webinar will be presented by a UK-based Google Display Specialist and more specialists will be on hand to answer any questions you may have.

When: Tuesday 27th March at 3pm GMT (10am EST / 7amPST)

Register now!

Posted by Katie Miller, Inside AdWords crew

A better way to buy display

Editor's note (Monday, May 7th, 2012, 11:41 am PST): We have updated the date of the Display webinar mentioned below to June 19th.


Display advertising has undergone a bit of a fairytale-like transformation over the past several years, from the medium of “Click Here!” banner ads, to one that can be smart and sexy and help bring big ideas (even those from advertising’s past) to life. Now that display has had its “Cinderella moment,” we figured the “carriage” could use an upgrade as well. So today, we’re unveiling some changes designed to simplify the way you buy and run display through AdWords.

Display’s New Home in AdWords

For nine years, AdWords customers have been buying display campaigns through an interface designed for search. This is like trying to run in glass slippers -- it might work, but it’d be a lot more effective with the right running shoes. So we’re giving display its own tab within AdWords. Rolling out over the next few weeks, the new Display Network Tab is an interface built from the ground up to run display campaigns, and will enable you to bid, target and optimize display campaigns all from a single place. Click the image below to see the different Display Network Tab targeting options.

Display Network Tab

click to view larger image

A Revved-Up Contextual Engine

The contextual engine, which matches ads to pages based on keywords, is at the heart of display-buying through AdWords. We’ve been hard at work behind-the-scenes to give this engine its biggest enhancement ever, the ability to combine the reach of display with the precision of search, using Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. This means that you can fine-tune the performance of your contextual campaigns down to individual keyword level, which will help you take the performance of your marketing campaign to a completely new level. It’s now easier for you to extend search campaigns to display and more efficient to run the two types of campaigns together.

For example, let’s say you’re running display campaigns for a Travel Agency who offers a vacation packages in several Caribbean islands. In the past, you would have created themed ad groups targeting vacations to Turks and Caicos and the Caribbean. Now, with this new keyword level transparency you might realize that the keyword “Turks and Caicos vacations” is 4 times more profitable than the keyword “caribbean vacations”. You can optimize your campaigns to aggressively target these high performing keywords, and be more conservative on “caribbean vacations”.

Giving a Visual Edge

And like the writers of the best fairytales know, sometimes pictures communicate better than words (or numbers). Along with the new Display Network Tab and contextual engine, we’re introducing a way to visualize the reach of your campaigns, and see how that reach is impacted by combining multiple targeting types, such as keywords, placements, topics, interests or remarketing.

These changes are some of our biggest steps to date towards bringing together the science of search advertising with the art of display. We hope they give you some powerful new tools to connect with their customers and deliver engaging and relevant display ads.

Learn More

We’re rolling out the new Display Network Tab to all advertisers in the upcoming coming weeks.

For more information on what’s new on the Display Network Tab visit our help center article.

Please join Google in our upcoming webinar on June 19th to learn more about optimizing your targeting strategies for campaigns using the Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. Check out our new webinar page to register.

Watch Brad Bender, Director of Product Management for Display talk about the new Display Network Tab and the Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting.

Posted by Alok Goel, Product Manager Next Gen-Keyword Contextual Targeting, Rebecca Illowsky, Product Manager Display Network Tab, and Claire Cui, Principal Engineer

See potential placements for Google Display Network campaigns

Since the inception of the Google Display Network, contextual targeting has helped you to reach users effectively. This type of targeting allows you to show your ads next to related web content that users visit across millions of sites on the Display Network.

Today, we’re announcing an AdWords feature that provides you with example sites in the Display Network where your ads may appear when using contextual targeting. The example sites are based on the keyword list you provide when creating your campaign, and are available for campaigns that are solely running on the Display Network. Starting this week, the feature will be available to a limited set of advertisers, and will become more broadly available in the coming weeks.

Since contextual targeting happens in real-time across millions of sites in the Google Display Network, with this feature, you get insight into the types of sites where your ads can appear. Seeing example sites before your campaign runs can help you to refine your keyword lists to ensure optimal targeting. Along with example sites where your ads can appear, you can also see a suggested bid for your ad group. The example placements we provide are meant as a guide to help you get a sense of where your ads can appear. They’re not an accurate representation of actual placements, which can vary with the dynamics of the ad auction once your ads are showing.

While this feature provides a deeper level of transparency before your ads run, as always, once your campaigns begins to run, you can access site- and URL-level reporting that shows the specific places in the GDN where your ads actually appeared.

To see potential placements when creating your campaign, your can click the "See potential placements" button when selecting keywords for display-only ad groups in the new ad group creation interface. Please visit our Help Center to learn more.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

Performance at Scale on the Google Display Network

One of our key goals is to help you drive better performance with your display advertising campaigns.

As users increasingly spend time across a growing number of sites, however, display advertising is becoming more challenging. Last year alone there were 47 million new web sites created*. Contextual targeting can help by automatically showing your ad to users on web pages related to your products on the millions of sites in the Google Display Network (GDN). But building and managing your campaigns can still be time-consuming. So how do you reach your target audience easily and efficiently while meeting your business goals?

Today, we’re launching two tools -- the Display Campaign Optimizer and the Contextual Targeting Tool -- to help you maximize your performance on the GDN, while saving you valuable time and resources.

Display Campaign Optimizer. This new tool automatically manages targeting and bidding for your Display Network campaigns with the goal of increasing your conversions while meeting your advertising objectives. You simply provide us with your target cost-per-acquisition (CPA), creatives and budget, and the Display Campaign Optimizer goes to work, showing your ads in all the right places, automatically. It monitors your campaign performance and, in real time, adjusts your campaign accordingly. Your campaigns stay optimized, as it “learns” and does more of what’s working and less of what isn’t. For example, Seventh Generation, a company that sells eco-friendly household cleaning, baby care and personal care products, was looking to connect with more “green” consumers across the web and get them to download coupons from their site for use in-store. After implementing the Display Campaign Optimizer, the tool delivered 60% of the coupons downloaded from their site, with a CPA 20% below their target. Further, analysis of our beta testers showed that on average, campaign using Display Campaign Optimizer were likely responsible for almost one-third of the accounts’ total conversion volume with CPAs within 6% of their peer group CPA.**

The Display Campaign Optimizer is now available globally for larger campaigns running on the Google Display Network.

(watch on YouTube)

Contextual Targeting Tool. While the Display Campaign Optimizer is an automated solution that does all the heavy lifting on your behalf, the Contextual Targeting Tool helps you more efficiently build your own display campaigns. This tool is ideal for those of you who prefer transparency and control over your campaigns’ targeting and bidding. The Contextual Targeting Tool builds tightly themed keyword lists for your display campaigns, which are used to contextually target your ads. Tightly themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting. With this tool, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of ad groups in minutes, quickly scaling your campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting and control over your campaign.

For example, if you sell yoga gear, normally, you might take the time to build out separate ad groups around each of your product lines, such as yoga mats, yoga clothing, yoga gear, etc. Inputting each product category into the Contextual Targeting Tool will generate even more tightly themed keyword lists. For example, inputting ‘yoga mats’ into the tool generates more specific ad groups, such as designer yoga mats, thick yoga mats, yoga mats with designs, etc. These are all separate ad groups that can help you generate additional traffic and sales, that you wouldn’t necessarily think of creating when manually building out your campaigns.

This week, we’re beginning a phased launch of the Contextual Targeting Tool, and it will become available to more advertisers over the coming weeks and months.

Whether you’re looking for easier ways of building out your display campaigns or looking for a more robust, automated solution that continually optimizes bids and targeting, we think these tools will help you easily and efficiently achieve performance at scale with your display campaigns.

Posted by Woojin Kim, Product Manager and Shaun Seo, Product Manager


* Source: Netcraft Web Server Survey, Dec. 2009
** Source: Internal analysis of active beta testers, in comparison with peer group advertisers. Oct. 2010

YouTube Homepage: Promoted Videos advertisers can get it while it's hot

Cross posted from the YouTube blog.

For big advertisers on YouTube, the YouTube homepage is often seen as the holy grail. It's the highest-profile placement on YouTube, providing marketers with the ability to deliver a big impact and drive attention to content, trailers or advertising. To give you an idea of the scale we’re talking about, the homepage has been delivering nearly 45 million impressions per day and 18 million unique visitors a day in the U.S. — that's the equivalent to the ratings of several top-rated prime-time television shows combined. While impressions and unique visitors are never guaranteed, users who visit the homepage are actively looking for the next video to watch, so advertisers naturally want to be part of the action.

A little known fact is that a few days each quarter, we open up the YouTube homepage to Promoted Video advertisers. These companies end up getting a bit of extra exposure from their campaigns. There are a couple of ways to make sure your ads show up on the homepage, should the opportunity arise. First, log into your AdWords account, and under "Campaign Settings," consider the following:

• In order for Promoted Videos ads to appear on YouTube browse pages, watch pages, and on the homepage, select "Display Network"
• To appear *only* on YouTube placements, select "Relevant pages only on the placements I manage" and add youtube.com as a managed placement.
• To appear *only* on the homepage, select "Relevant pages only on the placements I manage" and add youtube.com::pyv-top-right-homepage as a managed placement
• Set a specific bid for the homepage and keep in mind that it is a more competitive placement
• Please note: this feature is only available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and The U.S.

Because the dates we run Promoted Videos on the YouTube homepage vary, we unfortunately don't have a set schedule for you. However, we typically know about 48 hours in advance. If you have a managed account, you can ask your Google representative to let you know when these opportunities arise so that you can increase your bids to improve your chances of showing up.

Several advertisers – large and small – have found great success showing Promoted Videos on the homepage. One YouTube advertiser, Dynomighty Design, grew their entire business by using Promoted Videos and getting placements on the YouTube homepage. Founder Terrence Kelleman says: "YouTube helps us sell our product, learn about our audience and build a strong brand image. And as a small company with a limited advertising budget, YouTube has become our main advertising strategy. Not only are costs low with Promoted Videos, but healthy conversions also make YouTube our #1 referring site in terms of traffic and revenue." To read more about Dynomighty's story, check out their original YouTube video and their feature on the Official Google Blog.

The YouTube homepage has a captive, engaged audience and it's our goal to let advertisers understand how best to reach customers that would be interested in hearing from them. For more information about advertising on YouTube, visit youtube.com/advertising, and for more information on Promoted Videos, check out ads.youtube.com.

Posted by Mark Sabec, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube

New Tutorial: Exporting Google Display Network Placements from Ad Planner into AdWords

DoubleClick Ad Planner helps you research and identify the web sites most likely to attract your audience. With Ad Planner, you can select sites, add them to your media plan and easily export them directly into your AdWords account as a new campaign, or add them to an existing campaign or ad group.

Many of you requested this feature because you wanted an easy way to plan and buy Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns using Ad Planner.

Exporting to AdWords is easy and this online tutorial will show you how to take advantage of it. In this video, you’ll learn more about:

• Creating a media plan and finding GDN placements
• Exporting your plan to AdWords
• Setting up a new campaign or adding to existing campaign in AdWords

Click here to watch the video

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

Google Display Network series: Measure everything. Optimize relentlessly.

In the last three weeks, we showed you tools to effectively plan your display advertising campaigns, develop compelling ads, and target your ads to reach precisely the right audience across millions of both popular and niche sites in the Google Display Network (GDN). In today’s final post, we’ll dive into measuring and improving your online display campaigns with powerful, free tools that bring accountability to your display advertising investment.

Campaign reporting and optimization

On the GDN, you have real-time reporting for every site and URL where your ads ran. You can view basic metrics like impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR) and cost, or, by implementing our free AdWords Conversion Tracking, you can measure conversion metrics to determine your campaign’s return on investment (ROI). We also recently introduced viewthrough conversion reporting to provide a more complete picture of your display campaign performance.

With rich site- and URL-level data like this, you can see exactly what’s working and respond on the fly. This means you can increase bids for sites generating lots of sales or decrease bids for, or exclude, poorer-performing sites.

With Conversion Tracking enabled, you can also unleash our bid management tool, Conversion Optimizer, to help increase your conversions while decreasing your cost-per-acquisition (CPA). One of the most powerful bid management tools available, the average campaign using Conversion Optimizer sees a 21% lift in conversions with a 14% lower CPA*.

Web analytics and optimization

Your campaign’s performance is heavily influenced by the experience visitors have on your site.Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you measure user behavior on your site, providing metrics like time spent on your site, page views, traffic sources, bounce rate, and more. Using this information, you can identify areas on your site you need to improve to increase conversion rates and ultimately, your ROI. Although Google Analytics works independently of Conversion Tracking, it’s possible to automatically import your Analytics data into Conversion Tracking, enabling you to consolidate reporting and optimization across these measurement tools.

While Google Analytics tells you what’s happening on your site, Website Optimizer empowers you to change it. You can show your visitors multiple versions of a page or elements on a page to test which are most effective, thereby getting more of your visitors to convert into customers.

Measurement beyond the click

Finally, research shows that the impact of display ads extends beyond immediate clicks and conversions. After seeing display ads, many users search for the advertised product or brand, or visit the advertiser’s web site days or weeks after having seen a display ad, even if they didn’t click on it. 

Recently, we launched Campaign Insights to help you measure the impact of your display campaigns beyond immediate clicks and conversions. Campaign Insights calculates the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign. By comparing a data set of thousands of advertisers who saw a particular display ad with an equivalent group that did not see the ad, we can determine the incremental change directly attributable to the display campaign. With this insight, you can establish your display campaign performance, beyond just immediate clicks.

This post ends our series on the Google Display Network. Over the past four weeks, we hope you’ve discovered new ways Google can help you run successful display campaigns. For more on the GDN, please visit our microsite.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

* Analysis compares performance of Conversion Optimizer campaigns over the course of a year with a control set of campaigns and represents the average impact of Conversion Optimizer. Actual impact may vary form campaign to campaign.

Google Display Network series: Your toolbox for creative display ads

In last week’s installment of our Google Display Network series, we showed how DoubleClick Ad Planner can help you effectively plan your display ad campaigns and reach the right audience. Today we’ll talk about creating compelling display ads and the options available on the Google Display Network (GDN). Let’s look at each category of options you have today:

Great impact through Rich Media and Video. Rich media and video formats engage users at a whole new level, drawing them in and encouraging interactivity in a way not possible with other ad formats.

Example of a great rich media ad run by Volvo and the agencies Euro RSCG New York and Media Contacts:

(Click here to view ad)

If you use rich media and video formats to engage your customers, here’s what we offer through our DoubleClick Rich Media and Video solutions:

• Choice of a variety of rich Media formats, based on your campaign objective.
• Access to DoubleClick Studio, a free rich media production and workflow tool.
• Analyze data on more than 100 unique interactions in every creative unit with Audience Interaction Metrics.
• Integration with DoubleClick for Advertisers, a robust ad management, serving, and reporting solution that simplifies trafficking, reporting and billing of your Rich Media campaigns.
• If you’re already working with another rich media vendor, we have many approved vendors we work with.

Build display ads in minutes. Creating display ads can be resource-intensive, and for many marketers, it may not be in the budget. So we introduced Display Ad Builder in 2008, a free tool for creating professional-looking display ads in minutes. Here’s what you can do with Display Ad Builder:

• Create image, video (InVideo, Click-To-Play), Flash and rich media (including expandable) ads using hundreds of fully customizable templates or templates tailored for specific industries.
• Stay true to your brand with your own images, text, videos and logos.
• Automatically convert the ads you design into most standard IAB ad sizes.

(click for full size image)

Display Ad Builder is also great for testing different messages and creative elements, or to get insights for more complex display campaigns managed by your in-house team or agency.

Stand out by blending in. Text ads are a versatile ad format that are easy to create and edit. They’re especially effective as an extension of your existing search campaigns. Simply opt your search campaign into the GDN and your ads will show to users as they surf relevant web pages via our contextual targeting technology. Text ads also complement display campaigns by engaging users who ignore display ads (i.e. banner blindness). Further, they give your campaign wider reach since not every publisher may accept display ads, or may only accept a limited number of display ad formats and sizes on their site.

(click for full size image)

Whether your goal is to drive awareness or generate immediate sales, the robust creative toolbox available on the Google Display Network can help. We’ll see you next week when we talk about how you can reach your audience with the targeting technologies available on the GDN.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Google Display Network series: Effectively planning your online display campaigns

Cross posted from the Google Agency Ad Solutions Blog

We recently introduced a new umbrella name for our online display media offerings, the Google Display Network (GDN), to make our advertising solutions clear. You also heard from us about the investments we’re making in display advertising and the promise it holds to drive great marketing results. In this series of posts, we’ll cover what you can do today on the GDN.

We’ve been busy working to improve every step of your display campaigns: from media planning and developing creative to choosing targeting, measuring results and improving your campaign. Each week over the next month, we’ll talk about the solutions available to you in each area, starting with campaign planning.

With millions of sites on the web, how do you find the exact people who’ll respond to your message? We introduced DoubleClick Ad Planner to help. It’s a free research and media planning tool to help identify web sites most likely to attract your audience. The insights provided by Ad Planner continue to get deeper and more robust. Let’s take a look:

Research sites by those you know your audience visits, or by defining your audience based on what you know about them. This can include geography, demographics, interests, sites they visit or keywords they search. Recently, we released more features to help you research more effectively:

• Pre-defined audiences: select from commonly used audiences like Baby Boomers to save time or if you don’t know how to define your audience.
• Ad Planner 1000: quickly reference and target the web’s largest sites.
• Subdomain and ad placementdata: do more granular media planning.
• Lists: create lists of your favorite sites and placements for future use.

Manage your site results by applying a variety of site ranking methods:

• See sites that are most likely to attract your target audience, as well as larger, mass-media sites to ensure campaign scale. Or, see a balance between the two.
• Filter to see just sites in the Google Display Network, or all sites that accept advertising.
• Apply other filters to see sites accepting certain ad formats, sites in specific categories like Video Games or sites with a particular domain suffix like .edu.

View robust site details. For each site, you can see detailed information and audience visitation patterns. The Site Overview shows general site information like a site thumbnail, description and site categories. Traffic Statistics and Demographics show unique visitor metrics and demographic information. Online Activity shows what other sites your audience visits or keywords they search. Finally, Ad Specifications show placement type, impressions/day and accepted ad formats and sizes. Most recently, we introduced audience interest information, showing the aggregate interests of a site’s visitors. It complements the demographic data available in Ad Planner, providing a deeper view into a site’s audience.

Build, analyze and export your media plan. After researching, you can select sites and add them to your media plan. As you do, you’ll see unique users, reach, and page view statistics. You can then analyze your media plan by reviewing its aggregate demographic statistics. When you’re ready, you can export sites directly into your AdWords account or into CSV format to import into MediaVisor.

Beyond robust features like these, Ad Planner provides true scale for your campaigns. With it, you can go beyond the most common sites, tapping into millions of others in over 40 countries and 20 languages. Web site owners can also claim, manage and share their data on Ad Planner, providing another level of up-to-date and accurate information for your media planning.

You can stay on top of new enhancements in our Ad Planner release notes. Stay tuned for our next post about developing effective ads and the solutions available on the Google Display Network.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network