Mobile’s immediacy effect: Half of mobile search conversions happen in one hour

In this era of mobility, our smartphones are always with us, keeping us connected anytime and anywhere. With this constant connectivity, we’ve come to expect information (literally) right at our fingertips just a search away - whether it’s locating the nearest sushi restaurant or booking flights for your upcoming trip. In “Mobile Search Moments: Understanding How Mobile Drives Conversions”, we set out to understand when and why people turn to mobile search, the actions they take as a result, and how marketers can capitalize on every mobile search moment. We found that there’s an immediacy effect of mobile search, with more than half of the resulting conversions (going into a store, calling a business, or making a purchase) happening within just one hour.

Working with Nielsen, we also wanted to push the standard of mobile research. It’s traditionally been difficult to quantify mobile’s full impact on driving conversions, particularly since consumer surveys are often constrained to broad recall questions. Instead, we asked participants to log their mobile searches over two weeks in a diary smartphone app - logging more than 6,000 mobile searches in total. We followed up to ask them what actions resulted from those searches, helping us draw more precise, measurable connections between mobile searches and the conversions that they drive online and offline.

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Here are the highlights of the research:

Mobile search is both always-on and on-the-go
Mobile has traditionally been considered an out-and-about or on-the-go context, used on the bus or while in a store. While that’s certainly true, the research showed that mobile’s role is also much more than that. People turn to mobile devices throughout the day to find information because of its speed and convenience, with 77% of mobile searches happening at home or at work. What does this mean for marketers? Mobile is always-on for consumers, so marketers should make sure their mobile search strategies are reaching people in these different customer contexts.

Mobile searchers take a variety of actions... and they act quickly
We also found that three of four mobile searches trigger additional actions. These range from open-ended actions like additional research (36%) or a website visit (25%), to more concrete conversions like a store visit (17%), a purchase (17%), or a phone call (7%). On average, each mobile search triggers nearly two actions, so in order to understand the full value of mobile, marketers must evaluate the different ways that their customers convert, both online and offline, and measure accordingly.

Most interestingly, not only do mobile searchers take action - they act fast. In fact, 55% of conversions from mobile searches happen within one hour. We see this immediacy effect with mobile because not only are people potentially closer in physical proximity to a purchase, but they’re also closer to the crucial decision moments. Forty-five percent of mobile searches are conducted to help make a decision, and that number jumps to two-thirds when happening in a store. And when people use mobile search to help make a decision, they’re more likely to convert. So it’s important for marketers to be present during those searches, while also creating ads and experiences that are relevant to this immediacy.

Context is key to mobile searches
The research also showed that the types of searches people conduct on mobile are strongly tied to their specific context, like location and time of day. For instance, shopping searches are twice as likely to be done in-store. Mobile searches made in stores are a key opportunity for marketers to reach someone who’s looking to take action. And since searchers are also 55% more likely to notice ads when they’re in a store, there’s a huge opportunity for marketers to capitalize on these mobile-led moments.

Mobility continues to change the way that we search, explore and shop, and as consumer behavior comes further into focus, there are clear opportunities for marketers to take advantage. Check out all of our findings by downloading the full report here.
 
Posted by: Ben Chung, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Join AdWords and DoubleClick Search at SMX West in San Jose

SMX West kicks off on March 11, and the AdWords and DoubleClick Search teams hope to see you there!

During the first two days of SMX West, Google will be on the floor to help you learn how to engage your audiences in a constantly connected world. Below are some of the activities that we’ll be hosting across the 3-day conference:

March 11, 2012, 5-6pm - Enhancing AdWords for a Constantly Connected World
Join Google AdWords’ special enhanced campaigns presentation on Monday, March 11 at 5pm, where Lead Product Manager Surojit Chatterjee will discuss key features and changes with enhanced campaigns, give tips on getting started, and answer your questions.

March 11 -12, all day - Learn and win with DoubleClick Search
Visit the DoubleClick Search lounge at Booth 401 to learn about how we’re making search marketing faster, smarter, and better. Watch our videos, get a glimpse of some of our newest features through demos, play games, and engage with our team to see how we’re helping you run effective search campaigns across devices, as well as across channels. Tweet what you learned using hashtag #dsSMX for a chance to win a Nexus 7 tablet!

The full SMX West agenda can be found here. Be sure to check out our other Google speakers at the following panels:

• March 11: Brendon Kraham, Director of Global Mobile Sales & Strategy - Converting The Mobile Customer, 3:30pm-4:45pm
• March 12: Jon Venverloh, Head of Platforms for Google Shopping - Google Shopping Goes Pay-For-Play, 5:00pm – 6:15pm
• March 13: Surojit Chattejee, Lead Product Manager - Google Enhanced Campaigns - What You Really Need to Know, 2:30 - 3:30pm

Still haven’t registered? Enter discount code SMXW13google (case sensitive) and save 10%. Expo passes are free and get you into the AdWords and DoubleClick Search events.

We hope to see you in San Jose!

Kim Doan, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

Understanding the full value of mobile: adidas and RadioShack drive in-store traffic with mobile

We live in a multi-screen world where people are constantly connected and moving seamlessly across devices. Not only do mobile devices keep us connected anytime and anywhere, but they play an increasingly important role in shopping, both online and offline. With mobile, consumers no longer just take linear paths to purchase that begin and end on the same device. Instead, there are a range of customer journeys - like starting on a smartphone and ultimately buying in-store, continuing on a different device, or making a phone call.

This era of mobility is bridging the digital and physical worlds, so marketers need to fully understand mobile’s impact both online and offline, and evaluate how each of these actions applies to their business. Here’s a look at two brands who’ve invested in understanding the full value of their mobile efforts:

adidas
Being locally relevant is key for any brick and mortar business, and adidas worked with its agency iProspect to leverage mobile’s power to reach local customers. They recognized that in order to build an effective mobile presence, they had to pivot their thinking to understand how mobile drives value beyond mobile commerce, particularly in-store sales. “If we look at a 1:1 response or 1:1 measurement of what our media budget is driving on a mobile site, we're missing a big part of that picture. As performance marketers, a lot of the times we look at direct responses, and what mobile is requiring us to do is redefining direct response," says Kerri Smith, head of mobility at iProspect.

adidas and iProspect partnered to estimate the value of each store locator click on their mobile website. Based on internal benchmarks, iProspect theorized that 1 out of every 5 people who visited the mobile site store locator page went into an adidas store. In-store conversion data from adidas indicated that around 13% of shoppers who go into stores completed a purchase, and that their average order value is $71. Since an active search usually demonstrates stronger intent to purchase, iProspect applied a 20% conversion rate and an $80 average order value. As a result, they determined that 4% of the people who clicked on a store locator translated into an actual sale for adidas, meaning that each store locator click is worth $3.20.

To put that in perspective, for a hypothetical mobile investment of $1 million, in-store sales from store locator clicks was an extra $1.58 million beyond direct mobile purchases. [Download the full case study here]

RadioShack
To fully understand how mobile drives in-store sales, RadioShack collaborated with its agency Mindshare to redefine mobile success: “User behavior is much different on smartphone compared to the desktop experience. It became obvious that to be successful, we had to measure mobile performance by focusing on different criteria,” says Lisa Little, Search Marketing Manager at RadioShack.

RadioShack worked with Mindshare to understand how mobile impacted foot traffic into stores. Using mobile search ads to promote their mobile site, they found that 36% of the clicks were going to the store locator page. Based on internal studies, the teams estimated that 40-60% of people who used the store locator on a mobile device visited a store. RadioShack’s internal analytics team also determined that approximately 85% of customers who visited the store as a result of the store locator made a purchase in store. [Download the full case study here]

A holistic view of the mobile customer
This new model can help marketers better understand the return on investment they’re getting from their mobile efforts. Both companies also found mobile success because they developed a holistic view of their mobile customers and created strong synergies across all marketing channels. For example, RadioShack’s social, email, digital, video and search marketing teams work collectively to create the best user experience possible for mobile customers. Little says, “This allows us to better understand the behavioral path of our customers, from the initial research phase through the final purchase stage including all the marketing they were exposed to along the way. To be successful, you have to adopt this holistic vision of the mobile user behavior.”

Posted by: Julie Pottier, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

5 Things You Should Be Doing With Google Mobile App Analytics Crash & Exception Measurement

When an app crashes, it disrupts the user experience, may cause data loss, and worst of all, might even cause users to uninstall the app altogether. As developers, we do our best to minimize crashes, but no app is ever perfectly stable.

A crash can actually represent a great opportunity to improve an app and one of the best things we can do as developers is to measure our crashes and exceptions.

The crashes and exceptions report in Google Mobile App Analytics.

Measuring crashes in your app can help you make better a product, make more money (if that’s your thing), and use your development resources more efficiently (especially if you are the only developer).

Google Mobile App Analytics offers easy-to-implement automated crash and exception measurement for Android and iOS as part of the V2 SDKs, as well as a host of reporting options to slice the data in context with all of the user engagement, goal completion, and in-app payments data you already know and love.

To help new developers get started, and to give existing developers some pointers, here are four things app developers should be doing today with Google Analytics crash and exception measurement:

1. Automate your crash measurement.

Want to measure app crashes but don’t want to deal with a complicated implementation? Fully automated crash measurement with Google Mobile App Analytics takes just one line of code to implement for Android or iOS:

<!-- Enable automatic crash measurement (Android) -->

<bool name=”ga_reportUncaughtExceptions”>true</bool>

// Enable automatic crash measurement (iOS).

[GAI sharedInstance].trackUncaughtExceptions = YES;

Implement automated crash measurement with just one line of code on Android or iOS.

Now each time your app crashes, the crash will be measured and sent to Google Analytics automatically. Try automated crash measurement now for Android or iOS.

2. Find out how stability is trending.

Are new releases increasing or reducing app crashes? Monitor the stability of your app from version to version by looking at crashes and exceptions by app version in the Crashes & Exceptions report.

If you are measuring the same app on two different platforms, like Android or iOS, you can break this view down further by selecting Platform as the secondary dimension.

View crashes and exceptions by app version number in the Crashes & Exceptions report. In this example, version 1.1.7 has crashed 7,285 times, while the latest version 2.0.0 has only crashed 91 times in the same period. Nice work dev team!

To graph crashes for two or more versions over time, you can create advanced segments for each version number, and apply them both to the Crashes and Exceptions report.

See crashes by app version over time using advanced segments and the crash and exception report  In this example, a bug fix pushed around January 24 caused significant reduction in crashes across both versions, but crashes persist for v1.1.7 that might warrant some additional investigation.

3.  Find out what crashes are costing you.

Do you know what app crashes are costing you? Find out what crashes cost in terms of both user engagement and dollars by using a custom segment.

By using a particular crash or exception as a custom segment, you can see how user engagement and in-app revenue may be impacted by a particular issue or set of issues.

Use custom segments to segment user experience and outcome data by crashes. This gives you some idea of what they might be costing you in users and in dollars.

To set this up, you’ll want to create two custom segments: one that contains all the sessions in which the exception(s) occurred, and another baseline segment that contains all other sessions unaffected by the exception(s).

Learn how to create advanced segments.

Once created, try applying both segments to your Goals or Ecommerce Overview reports to get a sense of how the exception(s) might affect user outcomes. Or, apply the segments to your Engagement overview report to see how the exception(s) might impact user engagement metrics.

4.  Gain visibility into crashes at the device model level.

Do you know which device models are the most and least stable for your app? Developers can’t always test their app on all devices before launch. However, by using Custom Reports in Google Mobile App Analytics, you can monitor crashes and exception per device to find out where additional testing and bug fixes may be needed.

To see crashes and exceptions by device, create a custom report and use a dimension like Mobile Device Marketing Name, with Crashes and Exceptions as the metric.

Learn how to create a custom report.

See crashes by device by using a custom report. To get even more detail, add the Exception Description dimension as a secondary dimension. In this example, the high level view shows the Galaxy Note and Desire HD as device that might need additional testing before the next launch.

5.  (Advanced) What about caught exceptions? You should measure those too.

While caught exceptions won’t crash your app, they still may be valuable events to measure, especially when they might have an impact on user experience and outcomes.

For instance, if your app normally catches a server timeout exception when requesting user data, it might be useful to measure that caught exception to know how often a user’s request is not being fulfilled.

A caught exception is measured in Google Analytics using a custom description. In this example, a number of failed connections may indicate a backend problem and could be causing a poor user experience. Reducing the number of these caught exceptions could be a goal for the dev team in the next release.

Get started measuring caught exceptions on Android or iOS.

As always, please keep in mind that you should never send personally identifiable data (PII) to Google Analytics. Raw exception descriptions may contain PII and we don’t recommend sending them to Google Analytics for that reason. 

Also note that there’s a 100 character limit on exception descriptions, so if you send your own descriptions, be sure to keep them concise.

Lastly, here are some links to resources you might find helpful when implementing crash and exception measurement in your app:

Developer Guide: Measuring Crashes & Exceptions (Android)

Developer Guide: Measuring Crashes & Exceptions (iOS)

And for brand new users:

Getting Started: Google Mobile App Analytics (Android)

Getting Started: Google Mobile App Analytics (iOS)

Posted by Andrew Wales, Google Analytics Developer Relations

DoubleClick Digital Marketing helps you create, buy and manage your video and mobile campaigns

In today’s digital marketing landscape, it’s becoming increasingly crucial for campaigns to span multiple screens and ad formats in a cohesive way. Online video is the fastest growing form of display advertising, projected to grow 2.5 times to $6.5B by 2016. And total mobile ad spend is projected to grow ~4.5 times to $22.4B in 2016, representing ~35% of all digital ad spend by 2016.

Given these transformations, we are working hard to build best-in-class tools for our integrated platform that make it easier for you to create, buy and manage successful campaigns across all formats and screens. Today, we’re announcing a series of improvements that aim to help you accomplish this.

The DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform now helps you:

Create more beautiful video and mobile ads in DoubleClick Studio.

Build robust interactive in-stream video ads in DoubleClick Studio, and use the new IAB rising stars formats to turn your standard 15-second TV commercial into a longer, engaged viewer experience. Check out our demo below!

Preview and test your mobile ads as they will actually appear on mobile and tablet devices. Scan a QR code on your phone or use our Mobile Ads Showcase App to push your ads to mobile and tablet for testing.

Buy video inventory in real time on DoubleClick Bid Manager, and access more mobile and video inventory on DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

With DoubleClick Bid Manager (DoubleClick’s DSP and real-time bidding platform), you’ll soon be able to programmatically buy and report on your video campaigns in the same place as the rest of your display media. We’ll be offering a video beta for select clients in the coming weeks. Contact your sales rep for more info.

Buyers can now find skippable in-stream video inventory and expandable/interstitial mobile inventory from across the web on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Ad Exchange continues to grow its available inventory across high-quality content, helping you expand your creative palette.



Manage all of your ads - across devices, formats and channels - with enhanced campaign support in DoubleClick Search and a single reporting interface in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

DoubleClick Search (DS) will be supporting AdWords enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks, to help you better reach your customers across locations and devices. By using enhanced campaigns through DoubleClick Search you additionally gain holistic measurement, a streamlined, easy workflow, and better bid decisions based on your Floodlight conversion data.

Track all the metrics for your Trueview in-stream video ads in DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA). Thanks to one new trafficking tag, even though the ads aren’t served through DFA,  you can still pull the metrics back into DFA and compare them with the rest of your placements.

With an integrated platform of DoubleClick products that work better together, you not only benefit from top-notch individual products, but you also benefit from the efficiencies, insight, and performance gained when all of your campaign’s assets and data exist in one spot.

For more information about our DoubleClick platform, visit our website.

Posted by Jason Miller, Director of Product Management for DoubleClick

A look back at a merry multi-screen holiday season

Note: this was posted earlier today on the Google Mobile Ads Blog.

This past holiday season, homes were aglow with the twinkling lights of large screens (like laptops, desktops and tablets) and mobile phones alike. In our holiday consumer survey, conducted in partnership with Nielsen, we found that consumers relied on their devices more this holiday season, moving fluidly between devices based on their setting and context. 63% of consumers frequently used more than one digital device to shop for gifts this holiday season, and 67% of consumers believe that “having access to multiple devices makes it easier to shop”.

Another important finding was that more screens means more shopping. People using one device to research and shop made online and offline purchases across an average of six product categories (like electronics, apparel, auto parts, etc), while those that used two devices purchased across eight categories, and people who used all three devices shopped across an average of nine categories.

In many cases, consumers discovered a business on one device, for example on their smartphone while in a store, and would then engage further with that business on another device at a later time. We saw that 65% of holiday shoppers were frequently engaging in this sequential behavior throughout all of their shopping. For multi-screen shoppers, different devices fulfill specific objectives. For example, smartphones were the preferred device for contacting or navigating to a business with 71% of shoppers using a store locator on their phone, while 82% of shoppers used a larger device like PC or tablet for making online purchases.

These same multi-screen trends carried us into 2013 as people used multiple devices to make and keep new years resolutions. Looking at search query behavior around New Years, we saw an interesting twist on the classic resolution of becoming more healthy. People used their smartphones on January 1st to look up things like gym memberships, diets, or cleanses, and then the following day, searches for those same words spiked on tablets and desktops as people continued their research on these devices at home or at work. This behavior demonstrated the growing trend of using multiple devices in combination to help make everyday decisions.

Implications for businesses
This multi-screen consumer behavior doesn't fade away with the holiday. In fact, better understanding how people searched, shopped and seamlessly moved between multiple screens during the holiday can give us insight into this new constantly connected consumer. So what can businesses do about it?

One good answer is to think context. All these new search patterns have created new opportunities for businesses to be more relevant to people’s context. Context signals like time of day, general location, and the kind of device a person is using, provide powerful insights into what they may be looking for and where they are in the buying cycle.

Within AdWords, advertisers now have the opportunity to use enhanced campaigns, which help them reach people across all devices with smarter ads that are relevant to their intent and context. Learn more about enhanced campaigns here.

This multi-screen behavior will only continue throughout the year. As device penetration grows and multi-screen behavior becomes the norm, those businesses that evolve their marketing strategy along with it will remain the most relevant and see the greatest results.

Posted by: Adam Grunewald, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Enhanced campaigns: New bidding tools and mobile bid adjustments

Today, people are constantly connected and searching from all kinds of devices. Advertisers are looking for ways to reach people with ads that are relevant to their context, like their location, the time of day and the device they are using. With an enhanced campaign, you can easily vary your bids across devices, locations, and time of day – all within a single campaign.

Example: A multichannel retailer wants to reach people close to their stores searching for “party supplies.” Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 50% higher for people searching up to a mile away, 20% lower for searches on weekdays, and 25% higher for searches on smartphones.

In this post and a Learn with Google webinar this Thursday, February 21st, at 10am PST (sign-up here), we’ll look more closely at the new bidding tools and mobile bid adjustments. This Thursday’s webinar will also dive deeper into some of the improvements with mobile ads.

Bid adjustments
With an enhanced campaign, you start by setting default bids that reach all devices. You can then set bid adjustments to increase or decrease your bids for mobile devices and different contexts – like location and time of day. Setting higher bids when and where you’re more likely to satisfy a customer’s intent can boost your ad’s visibility and potentially lead to more visits and sales. Setting lower bids for contexts where your lead quality or average order value is lower can improve your ROI, although you may see fewer visits and lower total sales.

Bidding for devices with larger screens, like desktops, laptops and tablets, is grouped together in enhanced campaigns. We and others in the industry see that users’ search behavior on these larger devices is very similar, and likewise, overall advertiser performance is very similar across these devices.

Bid adjustments combine using multiplication. If you set multiple location-based bid adjustments, only the most specific adjustment will apply.

Continuing the example above: The retailer’s max CPC bid for the keyword [party supplies] is $1. When someone searches for “party supplies” on a smartphone within a mile radius from the store on Wednesday, then the location, time, and mobile bid adjustments set will apply. So this retailer’s CPC bid for this particular search would be adjusted to $1.50 ($1 x (100% + 50%) x (100% - 20%) x (100% + 25%) = $1.50).

The AdWords interface provides a calculator to show you how multiple bid adjustments might combine to affect your bids.

(click image to expand)

Valuing mobile and setting a mobile bid adjustment
People can take a wide range of actions on smartphones. Beyond purchasing directly from your mobile site, customers might call your business, click on driving directions to visit a store, download an app, or even convert on another device later. But traditional online conversion reporting may not show the full consumer journey across devices and can therefore lead to undervaluing mobile. Savvy marketers are looking deeper to consider the full value that mobile brings to their business. Check out how Radio Shack, a large multi-channel consumer electronics retailer, approaches their mobile bidding and measurement strategy here as an example.

With an enhanced campaign, you can choose a mobile bid adjustment to influence your ad position, clicks and cost on mobile devices. For a bit of perspective, here are a few of examples of how advertisers set their mobile bids as a percentage of desktop over the course of the last several months (actual CPCs may differ).

• On average, advertisers in the Australian retail sector set mobile bids to 103% of desktop.
  
• On average, advertisers in the US real estate sector set mobile bids to 91% of desktop.
  
• On average, advertisers in the Canadian travel sector set mobile bids to 88% of desktop.
  

With each campaign you upgrade to an enhanced campaign, you’ll see the estimated change in impressions, clicks and cost depending on your selected mobile bid adjustment. The suggested bid adjustment shows you how similar advertisers bid on mobile compared to other devices.

(click image to expand)

Experienced search marketers know that bids are one of many factors that influence overall campaign performance, along with keywords, ads, extensions, and landing pages. So after setting a mobile bid adjustment, periodically measure your results and make changes as needed to better meet your campaign goals.

Feedback
We want you to succeed with AdWords, so we’re very interested in hearing your feedback. As you begin using enhanced campaigns, please share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Group Product Manager

Upgrade To The Next Generation Mobile App Analytics Platform

Spring is coming right around the corner and it's never a bad idea to get a head start on your spring cleaning! The same goes for your mobile app analytics solution. Have you switched over to our new Mobile App Analytics Platform (v2) yet? The benefits are numerous:

A more powerful mobile SDK

• We are providing a new mobile app analytics solution, solving the problem that there is currently no single repository to understand end-to-end value of mobile app users. This is supported by a more powerful mobile SDK (v2.0) that is easy to implement.

“One stop shop” for app measurement

• Understanding app performance holistically through acquisition, engagement and outcome is critical to improve mobile app results, optimize user engagement and increase revenue generated. Our new reports show the entire lifecycle. 

Improve ROI and engagement

• App developers and brands can make better, more comprehensive data-driven decisions for mobile investments with better reports. For example, marketers can optimize their mobile programs to improve ROI and app developers can improve in-app engagement.  

Though we call it “Version 2,” the truth is that we didn’t just “upgrade” our original platform. We decided to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. Our team at Google Analytics has reimagined mobile app analytics and have created a brand new experience tailored specifically for mobile app developers, providing reports on the data you care most about, in the language you understand. In addition, we also completely rebuilt our Android and iOS SDKs to be even more lightweight, efficient, and faster.

We’re continuing to build and add features to this platform all the time. So if you haven’t migrated yet, now is the perfect time to do it and find out exactly what you're missing out on. 

To make it easy to migrate, we’ve put together a Migration Guide for Android and iOS to help you make the move.

And if you’re new to Mobile App Analytics, check out the Getting Started Guide for Android or iOS to get your app up and running with Google Analytics in minutes.

Posted by Calvin Lee, Google Analytics Team

Enhancing AdWords for a constantly connected world

Today we’re upgrading AdWords, by rolling out enhanced campaigns. This is a first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.

Why enhanced campaigns?
People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.

This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.



Key features
Here’s an overview of some key features.

1. Powerful marketing tools for the multi-device world
   People want search results that are relevant for the context they are in — their device, location and the time of day. Enhanced campaigns help you better manage your campaigns and budgets for this multi-device world. With bid adjustments, you can manage bids for your ads across devices, locations, time of day and more — all from a single campaign.
   
   Example: A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for "coffee" or "breakfast" on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.
   
   
2. Smarter ads optimized for varying user contexts
   People on the go or near your store may be looking for different things than someone sitting at their desk. With enhanced campaigns, you’ll show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.
   
   Example: A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign.
   
   
3. Advanced reports to measure new conversion types
   Technology is enabling people to take action on your ads in new ways. Potential customers may see your ad and download your app, or they may call you. It’s been hard for marketers to easily measure and compare these interactions. To help you measure the full value of your campaigns, enhanced campaigns enables you to easily count calls and app downloads as conversions in your AdWords reports.
   
   Example: You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads.
   

Upgrading to enhanced campaigns
Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the next few weeks, and we plan to upgrade all campaigns in mid-2013.

Enhanced campaigns are designed to help you succeed in a multi-screen world, but we know that transitioning may involve some initial changes. Here are some resources to help you:

• Website
  
• Help Center
  
• Upgrade videos and guides
  
• AdWords Community forum
  

Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the new features with tips and best practices on the Inside AdWords blog and on our Google+ page. We’d love your feedback.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering

New Mobile Ads Showcase App puts the best of mobile ads in agencies’ hands

Smartphones and tablets can be great creative canvases for brand advertisers, and many agencies are helping brands go big on mobile. But it’s hard for agencies and advertisers to experience the full interactivity of mobile rich media -- mobile video and HTML5 ads --  through static images alone. Last night at our annual Creative Sandbox event in New York, we unveiled the new Mobile Ads Showcase App, which lets you experience mobile ads exactly as your users will.

The app lets you explore what best-in-class advertisers are doing with mobile rich media, and learn about all that’s possible with Google Mobile Ads. Additionally, agencies can use the app as their mobile portfolio by coding, testing and uploading their HTML5 ad examples to the MRAID-compliant “My Ads” screen. The app is now available for Android smartphones and tablets through the Google Play Store.

See the app in action and learn more about how it works on the Creative Sandbox site. 



Posted by Jessica Sapick, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads