Boost your results with Dynamic Search Ads, now available to all

Last October we introduced Dynamic Search Ads, an efficient new way to target relevant searches with ads generated directly from your website. Now, after a year of refinements and successful beta testing, we’re making Dynamic Search Ads available to all advertisers in the next few days.

Boosting Results, Efficiently
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) generate incremental leads and sales by promoting your business on more commercial queries than you’re reaching today. After all, even well-managed AdWords campaigns containing thousands and thousands of keywords can miss relevant searches, experience delays getting ads written for new products, and get out of sync with what's actually available on your website.

If you’re not already familiar with how Dynamic Search Ads work, you may want to read about the targeting controls available, reporting and optimization features, and support for third-party PPC tracking.

Successful Beta Test
Many of our beta testers set up DSA to run alongside their existing large-scale search campaigns. And DSA delivered.

• Incremental and efficient results. On average, Dynamic Search Ads boosted beta testers’ traffic and conversion volume from AdWords by 10% and outperformed their non-exact keywords by 10% on clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and cost per action (CPA).
• Success. A few examples of successful DSA beta testers include:
• Jonathan Meager, Marketing Manager at Gear4music (.pdf case study)
• Matt Wilkinson, Director of Search and Media at Rosetta and Steve Baruch, VP of eCommerce at MSC Industrial Supply (.pdf case study)
• Larry Cotter, GM at Apartment Home Living (video case study).

We also made numerous product improvements during the beta test including:

• Bid auto-optimization. Since one of our chief goals for DSA was more results with less work, we devised a system to automatically ratchet bids downward whenever specific queries for an advertiser produce lower conversion rates or user engagement levels. As a result, your ROI for Dynamic Search Ads can improve over time automatically. 
• Website crawl frequency. Any indexed page with a matched DSA impression will be crawled at least once daily (update: please see clarification below). Pages with more impressions and clicks may be crawled more frequently. So DSA will now better reflect the latest products and inventory conditions on your web site. That means more clicks, higher conversion rates and better ROI.
• Mobile and tablet support. Given the growing importance of mobile campaigns, we developed full support for DSA on mobile and tablet platforms.
• Extension support. Dynamic Search Ads support the same ad extensions as other search ads.  
• Conversion Optimizer compatibility. Once enabled, many beta test participants reported success using the combination of DSA and Conversion Optimizer to simultaneously expand their campaign reach while automatically optimizing bids to meet their average CPA goal.

Get Started
Now any business interested in boosting their AdWords results can try DSA. You can find starting points on creating a DSA campaign and setting up dynamic targets in the AdWords help center.

If you’re interested in learning even more about Dynamic Search Ads, please stay tuned to our blog. More information and an invitation to join us for a Hangout on Air will be coming soon.

Posted by Tarun Jain, AdWords Product Manager

Update (10/29/12):
Because of our own prioritization to crawl pages with more impressions and clicks more frequently, as well as other potential limitations on crawl frequency determined by your web host or internet service provider, there may be some indexed pages with a matched DSA impression that are not crawled each day. We’re sorry for any mixup this may have caused.

YouTube Campaigns: A digital thermometer for nonprofit videos

Ever pasted together 108 sheets of paper and drawn a giant thermometer to track your nonprofit’s campaign goal? Did you go through 27 red markers and then feel faint from their scent after trying to color it in?

Well, chuck those markers and recycle that paper, because through the YouTube Nonprofit Program there is a new thermometer in town. Check out the latest tool for nonprofits: Campaigns.

This new feature allows nonprofits to create campaigns with goals like increasing views or subscribers, track their progress, and let people to contribute to their goals.

A campaign consists of one or more videos. You can find instructions on starting a campaign here. Once a campaign is created, videos in that campaign will show an overlay on them, encouraging viewers to contribute to the campaign.

Additionally, a Campaign tab will show up on your channel, with a bar showing the progress toward your goal.

With more than 18,000 organizations in the YouTube Nonprofit Program we are always looking for ways to help nonprofits turn video views into greater awareness, petitions signed, laws changed, dollars raised, and lives saved. This year we released other tools you should check out like live streaming, a playbook with of best practices when using video, and other improved features like a more prominent donate button. We hope you enjoy our latest feature.

David D, Software Engineer, recently watched "Follow the Frog."

Make better decisions in AdWords with your Google Analytics data

If you’re already using Google Analytics, you know how useful it can be to help you make better decisions and improve your online marketing. Now, we’re making it possible to use your Google Analytics data right in AdWords. After setting up AdWords to import your Google Analytics data, you’ll have access to Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit, and Average Visit Duration columns directly in the AdWords interface. With more performance data available right where you’re managing your campaigns, you can make better informed decisions and improve your AdWords ROI.

Using your Google Analytics data
With Google Analytics you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in AdWords to improve your results.

• Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
• Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
• Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting. Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it. Since you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily set up A/B testing on the landing page using a Content Experiment.
  

Success in action
Casamundo, the biggest vacation rental listing service in Europe, has been an early tester of this new feature. They've used Google Analytics since 2008 and over the past 5 years they've grown and refined their AdWords campaigns to over 50 million active keywords across 10 languages. Their analysis shows that converting visitors research vacation rentals over an average of 7.4 visits, so understanding whether their ads and keywords can create strong engagement is vital to their business and how they optimize their AdWords campaigns. Seeing high bounce rates and low average time on site for a keyword means that the offer or destination page might not be a good match for that keyword.

Having easier access to Google Analytics data right in AdWords has helped Torge Kahl, Online Marketing Manager, at Casamundo make better decisions and make optimizations more quickly. According to Torge:

“The combination of using both Google AdWords and Google Analytics has proved to be the perfect set of tools for us to achieve our goals, and we're very happy to see this combination get more integrated and powerful. Using Analytics data right within AdWords has let me better optimize our account and significantly improve the return on our AdWords investment."

More details
Please visit the AdWords Help Center for step-by-step directions on how to connect your Google Analytics profile data to your AdWords account and for more details.

To exchange tips and ask questions of others, please visit the AdWords community. You can always contact AdWords support for help if you need it.

Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

New AdWords budget option: Shared budgets

Shared budgets is a new feature that lets you establish a single daily budget that’s shared by multiple campaigns in an AdWords account. Shared budgets can make it easier to match your AdWords spending with how your business allocates marketing budget. And they can save you time and improve your AdWords results. Let’s see how with an example.

How Shared Budgets Work
Say you’re an outdoor furniture seller with a single line of products. You’re currently running three campaigns:

1. A desktop search campaign
2. A mobile search campaign
3. A remarketing campaign to reach people who have visited your site but didn’t convert

Your overall marketing plan allows you to spend $100 per day across your three campaigns. Without shared budgets, you’d next have to decide how to allocate the $100 daily AdWords budget across each of your three campaigns. Say you set a $60 daily budget for your desktop campaign, a $20 daily budget for your mobile campaign, and $20 to your remarketing campaign.

On most days, each campaign hits its daily budget and you’re satisfied with the ROI of each campaign. But on some days, your desktop search campaign sees fewer impressions and clicks than other days. So you only spend $90. On these days, your overall campaign results could be stronger if you were able to put an additional $10 into your mobile search campaign or remarketing campaign.

Using shared budgets allows automatic adjustments across campaigns, so you don’t have to constantly monitor and change individual campaign budgets throughout the day.

Creating a shared budget
It’s simple. Log into the AdWords interface, then click Shared library, and select Budgets. Then follow the steps to Create a new shared budget (see image below).

Reporting
The “Shared library” is also where you can review aggregate performance metrics for multiple campaigns with a shared budget.

Learn more
For more on shared budgets, please visit the AdWords Help Center or the AdWords Community to ask questions or share tips.

Posted by Vidya Iyer, Ads Engineering

Take your channels with you on the new YouTube app

Last year we redesigned YouTube with the goal to make it easy and enjoyable to follow the channels you love. We added a guide to the homepage to quickly access your channel subscriptions and a feed of activity showing you the latest and greatest videos from your favorite YouTube channels. Now in the new YouTube app for Android, we’re bringing that experience to the app, while making YouTube better both on the go and at home.

A guide to all your channels
With less screen space on your phone than your laptop or TV, we want to focus the YouTube app on just the stuff you care about. You now have a guide on the left side of the screen that gives you instant access to your channels, and a feed constantly updating with new videos.

Faster on the go
When you’re watching YouTube on the go, watching a video buffer is as fun as waiting for the bus to show up. To spend more time with your video and less time with the spinning circle of boredom, you can now preload and temporarily cache videos from your subscribed channels on your phone anytime it’s charging and your WiFi is connected. Just enable “Preloading” in the Settings menu. You’ll still need a connection to play the video, but once you do it’s smooth sailing through the latest from your subscribed channels and Watch Later queue.

Watch it on the big screen
Back at home and want to watch that amazing video on your big screen? While the video’s playing on TV, with the new YouTube app or mobile website you’ll be able to use your phone to find the next great video to watch, comment, like or subscribe. We’re working to make this broadly available across connected TVs and living room devices, so stay tuned for updates.

To check out the new app, visit the Google Play Store on your Android phone for the latest version. The new YouTube app features are currently just available on phones with Android 4.0 and above, and you’ll start to see these features appear on other Android versions in coming months. If you’re using m.youtube.com or other versions of the YouTube app, you can still access your subscriptions by signing in and selecting “Subscriptions.”

So whenever or wherever you’re ready for some great channels, trust your YouTube app will have them ready to watch.

Andrey Doronichev, head of YouTube mobile, recently watched “JEFF BRIDGES goes Face to Face with "Weird Al" Yankovic.”

YouTube automatic captions now available in Spanish

Cross posted from the Blog de YouTube en Español

Last year, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views, or about 140 views for every person on earth. As the world tunes in to YouTube, we want everyone, in every language, to have the same opportunity to enjoy YouTube. So today, we’re expanding our language accessibility to add automatic captions in Spanish.

When a video has recognizable speech, you’ll see a “CC” button appear in the bottom of the player, which will instantly add captions of the video in Spanish. Just look for this icon and click “Transcribe Audio.”



The hundreds of millions of Spanish speakers in the world are the latest to see the auto-caption feature, adding to other available languages of English, Japanese and Korean. You’ll find auto-captions available on more than 157 million videos, with videos being added every day. We’ll continue to refine our speech recognition technology, and you can learn more about how it works here. See it in action on this video, by clicking the CC:



If you want to see YouTube videos in even more languages, you can combine auto-captions with our auto-translate feature to generate subtitles in more than 50 languages. For creators, upload a Spanish transcript with your video and we’ll automatically create timecoded captions. You can even download the automatic captions, all from your Video Manager.

We’re launching new countries and languages all the time, as we work to make YouTube accessible and enjoyable to all.

¡Nos vemos en YouTube!

Hoang Nguyen, software engineer, recently watched "Casillas: 'Si la Eurocopa hubiese sido en 2011, habría habido más problemas.'"

Have your own YouTube party in Google+ Hangouts

Ever been to a party where you start showing friends your favorite YouTube videos? Compete for the screen to see who knows the latest and greatest hit? Now you can get the same experience even if you’re a world away, with the new YouTube app in Google+ Hangouts.

Create, control, save and even share playlists of videos with your friends—all inside a Hangout. Just start a Hangout, have everyone load the YouTube app at the top of the screen, and start adding videos. It’s like your own VIP table at the world’s coolest YouTube party.



Crowdsourcing awesomeness
Everyone can add videos in the Hangout through a search tool in the app, or remove the videos you don’t like. All your friends in the Hangout can drag and drop videos to sort the order in the playlist, or skip forward or backward to play the next one. Click the “Push to talk” button to chat with the group to give props to the best curator, or to hand out reprimands to the friend who keeps adding the 10-hour Nyan Cat video.

Save and share those precious memories
If you like a video that’s playing, you can share the video with your Google+ circles at any time. Since great playlists are works of art, you can also save the playlist that you and your friends created to your YouTube account as public or private to enjoy later.

So gather the team to watch the last night’s game highlights, hangout with your friends for a haul-a-thon, assemble the audiophiles to review the newest tunes, or come up with a whole new way to enjoy (and let us know!). The new app is available worldwide in 60 languages.

Ullas Gargi, software engineer, recently watched “Ken Block Gymkhana Practice.”

Finding and following new channels you love

If you’re interested in aerial silk or Rubik’s Cubes or anything in between, we want YouTube to have a channel ready and always updating for you.

In our goal to help you find great channels and videos you care about, we created Topics on Search to narrow your search results using commonly-used phrases. We took this a step further by auto-generating whole channels of topics in the ‘Top YouTube Collections’ tab, giving you constantly updated and uniquely-focused channels. Now, you’ll start seeing these channels more broadly available around YouTube, like in ‘Recommended for You’ section of our channels page and on a video watch page.

So if you’re into surfing, you could find the Big wave surfing channel, get introduced and subscribe to the NetworkA channel, and then enjoy this video of Garret McNamara surfing one of Poseidon’s finest. Here’s what the channel looks like:



Lots of complex algorithms are working behind the scenes to give you the channel you’re looking for, for example, being able to tell when the word ‘Chicago’ means the music band and when it means the movie/musical. We’re still tweaking everything to make sure it works just right for you, so let us know what you think of the channels or learn more in our help center.

So when you see a channel “auto generated by YouTube” around the site, give it a browse to find whole collections of channels and videos you might like, updated everyday with the freshest and finest videos you’re sharing on YouTube.

Mur Viswanathan, product manager, recently subscribed to the Parkour channel and Palash Nandy, software engineer, recently subscribed to the Brickfilm channel.

Slice and dice your data using AdWords labels

We are excited to announce the launch of account labels. Starting this week, you can organize your account’s keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns into custom groupings so you can quickly and easily filter and report on the data that is of most interest to you. To see the opportunities that labels enable, let’s meet Bob.

Bob is an online retailer who sells apparel and accessories for men and women. He has campaigns for shoes, clothes and bags for each of his three major markets (New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania) and within the campaigns has separate ad groups for generic and brand keywords. This structure (ex: New York - Shoes - Generic and Massachusetts - Shoes - Generic) means that he has the same ads and keywords spread across different parts of his account. Before today, Bob could not easily sort his account or run a report to see how well sneakers are selling across geographies.

Enter labels.

Now Bob can create the label “sneakers” and apply it to all sneaker-related keywords across his account. He can then filter by this label on the Keywords tab to only see sneaker keywords, or he can run a keyword labels report to aggregate performance by label. These reports allow him to then compare --for example-- how sneakers perform against all other shoes, or other labeled groups.

Labels can be used to organize your campaign elements in any way you choose. Report on brand keyword performance versus all other non-branded keyword performance. Measure how ads that mention “free trial” perform versus ads that mention “free demo”. Or simply label your favorite keywords so you can quickly review them every morning.

Labels will begin rolling out this week to all AdWords accounts. For more information, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

How we’re making even more 3D video available on YouTube

Last year we kicked off a beta feature that let creators convert YouTube videos into 3D with a click, and since then you’ve converted hundreds of thousands of your videos to 3D. Today we’re expanding the beta to all of you by adding automatic 3D conversion for short-form videos uploaded in 1080p. Meaning, you can select 3D viewing in the Quality settings (click on the gear icon) on the YouTube player, then pop on your 3D glasses and see YouTube in another dimension. Here’s one of our favorites:



How it works

To give you more dimension on 3D, here’s some background how the conversion technology works at YouTube. Since last September we’ve been constantly improving the underlying technology, which now uses several techniques:

• We use a combination of video characteristics such as color, spatial layout and motion to estimate a depth map for each frame of a monoscopic video sequence
• We use machine learning from the growing number of true 3D videos on YouTube to learn video depth characteristics and apply them in depth estimation
• The generated depth map and the original monoscopic frame create a stereo 3D left-right pair, that a stereo display system needs to display a video as 3D

With this broader knowledge of 3D conversion, we then apply cloud computing scalability to make conversion possible across even more videos on YouTube. Breaking up a video into tiny chunks of data and processing them in parallel on Google’s cloud infrastructure lets us process these videos, while still producing the quality you expect.

We’d love to hear your feedback and other 3D features you’d like to see. With 4D, 5D and 6D around the corner there’s lots more we can do!

Deb Mukherjee, technical staff, and Chen Wu, software engineer, recently watched "YouTube Rewind 2011" in 3D!