Google Adwords Performace Summit – Announcing new mobile ad innovations

During the Google Adwords Performance Summit, Jerry Dischler, VP Product Management at Google explained how mobile has become a major medium for marketers to reach out to their audience. As a result of the extensive searches taking place in mobile, Google introduced new product innovations in mobile ads during this event.

Transcript

Moderator: Now please welcome Vice President, Product Management AdWords Jerry Dischler.

Jerry: Hi everyone and thank you for joining our global livestream today and to those of you here, in Half Moon Bay, California, welcome to the AdWords Performance Summit. It’s an amazing time to be a performance marketer. The way people use technology, taking that around, with the world around them continues to change in an unbelievable pace. Today, in the multi-screen world, people aren’t going online any more; we are living online. In fact, as of today, more Google searches are taking place on mobile devices than on desktop computers in more than 10 countries including the US and Canada. Mobile is the catalyst for a sea of changes in how we behave online and in life. For example, 91% of us look up information on our smartphones, while right in the middle of a task like comparing running shoes at a store or looking up a choco-chip cookie recipe on a Sunday afternoon. We’re able to use whatever devices at hand to act on our needs. As a result, the customer journey has been fractured into a series of moments when we instinctively turn to our devices to learn something, to do something or to buy something. We are calling this new digitial reflex, “Micro-Moments.”

Let me show you what I mean.

We all have these moments, the ‘I-Want-To-Know’, ‘I-Want-To-Go’, ‘I-Want-To-Buy” moments. Across billions of daily searches, billions of hours and videos watched every month, and billions of interactions, with various websites and apps., these are the moments that truly matter. What matters most in these moments isn’t who we are, but rather what we intend to do at that instant. We demand the information and right away. In these moments, we are far more loyal to our needs than to any particular brand. As a result, marketers who put these moments of decision-making and preferentiating at the centre of their strategy and address consumer needs and motivations with a relevance; these are the marketers who win.

But don’t take my word for it. Businesses, large and small, are pivoting to digital strategy to meet their customers with immediacy and relevance in the moments that matter, especially on mobile devices. The Home Depot is now laser focused on their customer needs in the moment at every step of the home improvement experience. To be a ‘Go-To’ brand, Bankrate.com is meeting their customers with relevancy and a seamless experience, especially on mobile devices and Toyota understands how their customers are leveraging mobile, as they shop for cars.

From the beginning, Google’s mission has been to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, to connect people with what they’re looking for, whenever and wherever they are looking, and we build AdWords to help you do this; to help people connect with businesses around the world and access information with immediacy and relevance. Today I’m excited to share with you a number of new AdWords product innovations. Each is designed to help marketers connect with consumer needs and motivations in the moments that matter the most.

Some of these products will be available starting today and some will roll out over the course of the next few months. Please subscribe to our blog: “Inside AdWords” to stay up-to-date on the latest product announcements. We also encourage everyone to participate into these livestream using the hashtag: #StepInsideAdWords. Now I would like to take a moment to thank all of you, our valued customers and partners. We’ve learned so much from you, working with so many of you from all around the world. The products that we will be announcing today are shaped by your feedback as well as the insights that we have about the billions of interactions that happen on Google every day across Search Display and YouTube. These products are part of the new-generation’s ad experiences that help you to lever on consumer needs in the moment, powerful tools for scaling and automating the things you do, and measurement solutions for navigating a fractured customer journey.

Let’s get started. 15 years ago, when we introduced AdWords, people were going online, using a single device and connecting through the world through blue links and text, but today that’s no way now good enough. We’re not going online; we’re living online, whether you are looking for a new app. or shopping for new clothes, we expect online experiences to be tailored to our needs across the web, in apps., on any device at hand. This is impossible to do with just blue links and text. For example, many shoppers are now checking out reviews when they are shopping in a store or looking up directions when driving to a trendy new restaurant in town. Availability is part of relevancy and a great ad experience addresses our immediate needs, whether it’s to view a product or to get directions to the newest business location. Through the billions of daily interactions across Search Display and YouTube, Google is helping advertisers understand consumers, as they learn, discover, find and buy. In retail, shopping ads have now become a popular way for shoppers to connect with online retailers and in travel, hotel ads help travellers make more informed decisions as they plan the perfect trip. These Google ad formats and experiences provide the immediacy and relevance marketers require to address the needs of consumers.

However, I am just giving you examples from 2 industries. We are continuing to build new mobile-first ad formats and experiences to help all marketers win the moments in that. Let’s first take a look at the automotive industry. Buying a car is one of the biggest purchases someone can make and our data show that roughly 50% of automotive related searches today like those for make and model take place on a mobile device. Based on these insights, we have also learnt that shoppers want to see images and detailed vehicle information on the vehicle they are interested in. In fact, about half of Google’s searches for cars contain images and when people are ready to buy, we are most likely to locate a car in nearby dealership on our mobile devices.

These insights could help shape our first two Automotive Ad formats. Automotive Ads, great for look and feel of the experience, directly into mobile search results. It’s the new mobile showroom where auto-shoppers can now experience a car, like the 2015 Dodge Challenger you see here. To show you what I mean, I would like to invite up to the stage, Bhanu Narasimhan, Director of Product Management for AdWords.

[Applause]

Bhanu: Thank you Jerry. Hello everyone, my name is Bhanu and I would like to show you our first two Automotive Ads. Let’s say you were to do a search for the ‘Dodge Challenger.’ If you look at the search results page today, you’ll see that the text ads are very informative, but they lack emotion. Now let’s see what the same search will look like later this year. You’ll see beautiful images that show you what the Challenger looks like inside and out. You’ll be able to swipe through the image carusel to see the car’s interior and exterior, to learn that it has optional performance seats as well as a very powerful acceleration of the line. Now these images are very engaging and much more likely to inspire actions from our users, and what’s more, based on where you are, in the car buying journey, there are actions for exactly what you are looking to do. Let’s say you are in the research phase and you want to learn more. You can easily tap on an image to bring up more information about the car, like it’s horsepower or the EPA – estimated miles per gallon. And if you are further along in your car buying journey, you can quickly tap through to the official site and start building your car. This showroom experience is available today as a beta for car models, and it’s the first format in the Automotive Ads family.

Now suppose you’re looking to go for test drive and you are looking for a dealer. You can click on, “Find a Dealer” and here in Half Moon Bay, California, the following nearby dealerships are showing up. You can easily “Click-to-Call” or “Get Directions” to go to the dealership that you want. This new, locally relevant ad format is available today as a beta for auto-franchise dealers here in the US. Automotive Ads for car models and dealerships are two new ad formats that work together to provide a seamless, much better virtual experience for users, right within mobile search results. Thank you.

Jerry: Thank you Bhanu. This shows straight how a new generation of mobile ad experience can help marketers meet consumer needs and expectations in the moments that matter! Turning from the automotive industry, let’s take a look now at what we’ve been working on in the travel industry with hotel ads. Finding the way to a hotel can be overwhelming, especially with summer vacation right around the corner. Price, location, availability, amenities, reviews, there are lot of things to consider. So it makes sense that 69% of our time we’re searching ‘Travel’ on our smartphones, is done when we have a few minutes, like waiting in a line or doing a commute In these, “I-Want-to-Go” moments our research shows that most people travelling for leisure are actually undecided about what brand to book with and how brands are differentiated. This represents a tremendous opportunity for marketers.

That’s why I’m excited to announce that hotel ads are now integrated into a brand new hotel search experience which is rolled out globally, to over a 100 countries. Travellers all over the world can now quickly compare multiple hotels and view details like ratings and amenities directly from Google search. So I think a specific hotel opens up in your booking widget, where users will now see hotel ads. These ads display current room rates and feature a “Click-to-Book” button. This immersive experience cuts down on the number of steps the consumers need to take when booking the perfect hotel on any device at hand. HILTON WORLDWIDE has seen amazing results since starting to use hotel ads for their 4200 hotels. For HILTON, hotel ads convert 45% better than their traditional search formats and have a 12% higher return on investment.

Summer vacation might be right around the corner, but Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday. If you haven’t picked out that special gift yet, don’t worry! We have you covered. Shopping ads! We’ve been enhancing to improve the experience of those “I-Want-To-Buy” moments. In the first quarter of this year, we’ve seen a 175% year over year growth in mobile shopping related searches. That’s why we continue to build on shopping ads, whether it’s finding product information, reading reviews or completing a purchase. Our smartphones have become our personal shopping assistants. In fact, a research shows that 93% of people who use their mobile devices to research, go on to make a purchase, that’s why it’s becoming more important than ever to meet the needs and expectations of these mobile shoppers.

Over a year ago, we introduced the mobile parasol which you see here, to take advantage of the tactile features of mobile devices, making shopping ads more intuitive for on-the-go shoppers. Around the same time we also announced local inventory ads, to make it easier for shoppers to find stores nearby to have the product they are looking for in-stock. Sears, for example, uses local inventory ads to extend their reach of their advertising budget. By using local inventory ads, they drive in-store sales at 5 times the rate of TV ads, which is really impressive performance. To improve this mobile experience, we recently introduced an expandable product card that you see here to shopping ads. These cards contain rich information about the products that your customers are looking for. For example, in this case, when someone searches for “X-100 Camera” on their smartphone, they now see a high resolution image in the camera and with the tap of a finger, the stores that carry it, product pricing, product details and reviews from other customers.

Consumers expect the right information right away. Automotive Ads, Hotel Ads and Shopping Ads are designed to help you with more relevant experiences, deliver on consumer needs and win those “I-Want-To-Go” and “I-Want-To-Buy” moments. In the moments when we are looking to make important financial decisions, we are increasingly turning to the web to research and buy. In fact, mobile searches for financial terms, related to mortgages, credit cards and loans, are growing at 48% year over year and the ability to find the best answers and compare alternatives is absolutely critical. Introduced in 2012, Google Compare is available in the US and the UK and is designed to help people make important financial decisions quickly and with more confidence. Google Compare provides a seamless and intuitive experience for comparing multiple financial products side-by-side. We have already launched credit card comparison and mortgage calculators in the US and earlier this year, we launched car insurance comparison in California. To tell you about some of the exciting things we’re building for Google Compare, I would like to invite Stephanie Cuthbertson up to the stage.

Stephanie: At Google, we are obsessed with great answers and if you think about it, in almost no space is, you feel more important to provide these great answers than finance. We find our users desperately want easy to understand information and information that’s truly unbiased. Since we launched car insurance, when it comes to comparing millions of users who have already come to Google to find an answer to quote on Google and since we launched in the US earlier this year, over half our users say they found a cheaper quote on Google compared to their existing policy, which is great! But if you think about it, in these types of purchases in these moments, price is really only one factor in making a great decision. That’s why we are so excited to be launching ‘Ratings’, coming in the next few weeks, so users will be able to come on Google and in addition to price, you will be able to see an overall rating for every insure. You will also be able to drill in, so you can see the information you care about or you should care about. You can look at things like claim satisfaction, customer service and whether other users would recommend that insurer to you.

Now another thing that we hear a lot from our users is that they are very interested in local agents. Now this isn’t going to be all users, but there is definitely a category who care about this, which is why we are also excited to be launching ‘Agent Support’ – support for local agents. You have the ability to connect both with agents that support individual insures and also if you prefer, you can go online and find an independent agent to help you make a good choice. Finally, we have been really excited and gratified by the great feedback in California, so we are excited to be expanding this product to new states. So users in Texas, in Illinois and in Pennsylvania will now be able to also go to Google and search for car insurance and find quotes, complete with all the ratings and local agent support that I just talked about.

Now you can also use Google to find the right credit card and here, one of the things we believe is that having a broad selection is absolutely key. That’s why we are expanding today to include support, not just for national banks, but also local issuers. These are banks that are dedicated to serving local communities and often have very special offers for those communities. Now insurance and credit cards are just two in a set of financial products we have built, to help give our users great answers. And when you think about it, in the financial space, the biggest decision in most people’s lives is typically going to be buying a home and here, I think it can feel overwhelming; having the right tools, having the right options, understanding your options is critical. That’s why we have invested so much in building a new product for mortgages which we’re announcing will come in the next few months. Earlier this year, we introduced some mortgage calculator to organic search to help our users get better, faster answers, and calculating payments is the first step, if you think about it in this process of buying a home, but calculating payments is really just one step. When it comes to getting a mortgage, overall, people often feel like they don’t have enough information to make an informed choice.

That’s why we have invested not only in these organic features, but also the newest addition to Google Compare, ‘Mortgages’ coming later this year. Whether you’re a first time home buyer or you’re looking to refinance, you’ll be able to search on Google for the latest rates from a broad variety of lenders. As you explore, you will be able to walk through a guided experience, which will help you understand the different options and the ramifications of your choices, and when it comes time to buy, you will be able to compare across many lenders, getting those current rates. You will also find helpful ratings for every lender, just like we saw in insurance, which I think helps to make a good decision. When you’re ready, you can speak to a lender directly or you can just go online to buy. These are just a few of the investments that we are making to really provide our users with great answers in the finance space. We are super-excited about what’s coming and appreciate your feedback. Thank you so much.

[Applause]

Jerry: Thank you Steph. If you haven’t already, you can check out Google Compare at Google.com/compare. It’s an amazing experience! These new ad formats and experiences provide the immediacy and relevance marketers require to address the needs of consumers in the moment. However, many of these moments are happening in apps., where people are spending an increasing amount of their time. That’s why we recently enhanced our app. promotion tools to help marketers and developers win those moments when people are looking to play games, track workouts or chat with friends. Earlier this year, we extended the range of our app ‘Promotion Ads’ to the 2 million publisher websites across the Google Display Network and back in February, we announced a pilot of Search Ads in the Google Playstore. Google Play which reaches more than a billion android users around the world is one of the best places that people turn to for popular apps and games. By bringing our unique expertise in Search Ads to Google Play, we have opened a tremendous new opportunity for marketers and app. developers to drive awareness in downloads for their apps. we will be talking more about this Google I/O later this month.

From automotive to travel, from retail to financial services, the ad formats and experiences we introduce today present a new generation of products that will help marketers win the moments that matter. However, to successfully build these great experiences, that meet the needs of your customers in every moment, you need tools that help you scale and automate the things you do. Let’s just take a look at some of those tools. Billions of interactions occur across Google every day; that’s a lot of moments for marketers to win. People’s expectation for the right information right away and on any device has increased complexity for marketers. Reaching your customers, delivering a relevant experience and optimizing bids for all of these interactions is more challenging now than ever before. That’s why we are enhancing two of our most popular scale in automation tools as well as introducing a brand new display product to help you efficiently reach your consumers, whenever, wherever they are on any device.

When it comes to search, we understand that reaching your consumers can sometimes be a moving target. Of the billions of searches being made on Google every day, approximately 15% of those searches are unique, meaning that they have never been seen before. Couple that with shifting product inventories and content hidden deep within your website; people don’t always find what they are looking for. That’s why so many years ago, we introduced Dynamic Search Ads as a powerful way to target relevant searches based on your website’s content, without the need to manage keywords. Using Google’s organic webcoin technology, DSA automatically optimizes your ad’s headlines and finds the best landing pages for what people are searching for. These ads complement your existing AdWords campaigns by targeting new, relevant searches that are uncovered by your keywords. Today, I’m excited to announce that we are enhancing Dynamic Search Ads, completely redesigning it and retooling it from the ground up. First, we have made it easier to select target pages on your website; in addition to targeting specific landing pages, DSA now crawls and automatically organizes your website into recommended categories for easier targeting. Quickly sort, refine and select any number of categories to target.

Next, we have added new tools to provide more transparency. For each recommended category target, we will calculate suggested cost-per-click based on the performance of your existing keywords to target similar queries and after selecting a target, you will also be able to see examples of the queries you will be targeting, the ads that will appear, and the pages that the customer land on. Home24, Germany’s largest online furniture store took advantage of the new targeting and transparency improvements in Dynamic Search Ads and was impressed by their results. Their recommended category targets delivered a 50% higher conversion rate and a 38% lower cost-per-order compared to when they simply targeted their entire website. Dynamic Search Ads are now more powerful than ever before and it takes less than 10 minutes to set up your first campaign. We will be rolling out these enhancements to DSA globally within the next few months. Now whatever are reaching your customers on display, today mobile consumers are learning, discovering and buying across the more than 2 million publisher websites across the Google Display Network.

However, the increasing number of devices and screen sizes has resulted in a ridiculous number of ad placement types. In fact, there are now over 50 different image ad sizes across the GDN and until today, you need to create ads in all of these sizes to reach all of your customers across the GDN on whatever device they are using. Starting today, Google can do that for you. We have enhanced the Display Image Ads to automatically resize, based on the website and device they appear on. Simply enter in ‘Ads’ in 3 different sizes and will now show for 95% of all the placements across the GDN. Auto-resizing your image ads saves you time and makes it easier to reach your mobile audiences on display. Jobs2Careers for example – automatically resize their image ads across the GDN. This resulted in 20% more conversions while reducing their cost-per-acquisition by 16%. Reaching your customers and scale with relevant ads is key to winning the billions of moments that happen every day. However, successful advertisers know that effective bidding strategies are critical to improve ad performance in these moments. Adjusting bids based on real time signals like device, browser, location and operating system ensures that you will deliver the right ad at the right time to the right person. Only Google can do this with auction level precision. Across search and display, our advanced algorithms and predictive models automatically optimize bids for every auction to hit your goals.

For example, in the first 20 days of turning on target CPA, Match.com drove a 145% increase in conversions in the UK while maintaining their average cost-per-acquisition. They are now planning to use Google Automated Bidding on all their European campaigns. To help inform you bidding strategy and provide visibility into performance, we are announcing two major enhancements to AdWords Automated Bidding. Soon you’ll be able to run a report that identifies performance opportunities at different CPA targets. These bid simulations help you evaluate your trade-off between efficiency and volume to identify opportunities to improve your campaign’s performance. For example, you can simulate how many more conversions you will get if you increase your target CPA by 10%. These bid simulations will be available for target CPA bid strategies on both search and display soon.

Next we are enhancing the bid strategy dashboard in shared library to provide more visibility into automated bidding performance. You will soon be able to review the status of your bid strategies over time and evaluate how they have been performing against your targets over that time. For example, you can chart your target CPA against your adword CPA for the past 14 days and the dashboard will annotate the status of your strategy over time. Both of these automated bidding enhancements will start rolling out to advertisers later this year. In DSA, automated bidding and auto-resizing for display, we have enhanced and introduced powerful products for scaling and automating the things you do in AdWords. However, in order to optimize and improve the performance of your marketing, it’s important to understand the value of your ads across the customer journey. To help you do that, we have built intelligent measurement tools that help you break down the complexity of these journeys.

So let’s move on to measurements. Moments are happening across an increasingly complex customer journey on the web from online to offline, between devices and in apps. Like planning a summer trip to Hawaii, our paths to purchase consist very touch points that impact the decisions we make. In order to break down these fractured customer journeys and in order to understand the value of every moment, marketers need more powerful measurement tools. Let’s start with cross device conversions. Nine out of ten smartphone users report startign a task on one device and finishing it on another. So when planning that trip to Hawaii, many of us will switch between devices along the way, making it difficult for marketers to understand the full value of their ads. Today, you can measure these types of cross device conversions, within AdWords using ‘Estimated Total Conversions.’ Jeremy Hull, who is right here in the audience, Director of BoughtMedia, at search agency iProspect noted that search team uncovered 22% more conversions that began with a mobile click, when using ‘Estimated Total Conversions.’ Later this year, you’ll be able to take action on these insights, when cross device conversions are integrated into automated bidding. Contact us to join the whitelist. This integration is a part of a broader update that will give you the option to include cross device conversions as part of the conversions column in AdWords.

When switching between devices to complete a task, we are no longer limited to our browser. Increasingly, we are moving between the web and app. These in-app. activities are valuable, but it’s hard to measure just how valuable. That’s why later this year, we will be extending cross device conversion to appear to apps. on the Google Display Network. Soon you will be able to measure conversions that started on the web, finished in an app., and vice-versa, regardless of the devices that were being used. we are really excited by this technology. Now if you are going to know why we will need new flip-flops, before walking into a store, to shop around, most of us would already have conducted a research online. But doing these types of online to offline customer journeys has been a challenge for sometime now, and last year we introduced store visits to help marketers measure them. Store visits is now available in the US, Canada and Australia and will soon be available to thousands of advertisers in 10 additional countries.

Using store visits, SOPHORA observed that mobile clicks drove an 18% higher store visit rate compared to desktop clicks. As a result, SOPHORA enabled local inventory ads and optimized their mobile bid adjustments to achieve a 15: 1 return on ad spent; 25% higher than when measuring the impact of paid search on their eCommerce sales alone. Estimated Total Conversions is a powerful tool for measuring results and is available today in AdWords, but what happens when multiple ads interact to drive those results? To understand more, we have to talk about attribution. 53% of marketers rate attribution as a high or top-priority for the organization and most marketers who currently use last click attribution see that they want to use more advanced attribution models, but struggle to implement them. This is a challenge Google is here to help our customer solve.

Google has always been committed to measurement. Over a decade ago, we introduced Google Analytics as a tool to help businesses, large and small, understand how their website and their online advertising perform. Our recent acquisition of Adometry has further strengthened our attribution expertise. Working closely with both teams over the course of the past year, we are now making attribution actionable for search in AdWords. To walk you through this powerful tool, I would like to introduce Joan Arensman to the stage.

Joan: Hi everyone, my name is Joan Arensman and I would like to show you how we’re making attribution actionable for search in AdWords. The two questions I get asked most often are, “Which attribution model should I use?’ and “How do I take action on attribution?” And we’re excited to help search marketers answer these questions. Attribution, as you know, is the process of assigning value to each touch point leading up to a conversion. For example, if I click a search ad for ‘great tech gifts’, then click an ad for ‘highly rated tablets’ and finally click an ad for ‘nexus 9 tablet’ before I buy the nexus, how much did each keyword contribute to my purchase decision? In AdWords, you can currently explore 5 different attribution models. Last click, time decay, linear, position-based and first click. These models allow you to take a more conservative or a more aggressive approach to attribution, and the right model to use often depends on your business goals. But a more powerful way to attribute search credit is to use your own conversion data, to understand the actual value of each keyword and that’s why we’re introducing ‘Date-Driven’ attribution to AdWords.

Here’s how it works. Let’s pick on the purchase path, that includes keywords A, B and C has a 3% conversion rate, while a path that includes only keywords B and C has a 2% conversion rate. This tells us that keyword A adds 1% touch point to the probability of conversion, and by doing this across hundreds or thousands of conversion paths, we can calculate the actual contribution of every keyword in your account and optimize for the best performing ones across the conversion path. Google has been applying this logic and optimizing like this for quite a while now. These are just some of the advertisers already using data-driven attribution in other Google products – Google Analytics Premium and Adometry. In the coming months, we’ll be making a whitelist available for data-driven attribution in AdWords and expanding that list throughout the year. So now that you have selected the right model for your business, how do you take action on it? How do you adjust your bids to reflect your customer’s full journey to purchase?

We will make it just really easy. Let me show you how. In AdWords, you go to ‘Conversions’, you select the ‘Conversion Type’, you click ‘Edit Settings’; you go to ‘Optimization & Attribution’, and simply select the ‘Attribution Model’ from a drop-down. In this case, we select ‘Data-Driven’ and we’re done. From this point on, as you collect new conversion data, the selected model will be reflected in the ‘Conversions for Optimization’ column and if you use automated bidding, Google will now automatically optimize keyword bids based on the actual value of your search ads across the conversion path, respecting the model you select. Finally, before you switch to a different model, you want to understand how your campaigns and keywords would perform and that’s why we are adding a new set of column, showing you the number of conversions that wouldn’t be attributed to your campaigns or keywords, using each of the available models, because when it comes to attribution, it’s important to evaluate the different models and select the one that delivers the best results for your business and with that, I would like to hand it back to Jerry. Thanks so much for listening.

[Applause]

Jerry: Thanks Joan. Attribution is getting more complex as people continue to use technology to connect with the world in new and sometimes unpredictable ways. As marketers, this uncertainty means that you need to be more sophisticated and disciplined in how you test your marketing campaigns. Last year, we announced ‘AdWords Drafts & Experiments’ and ‘Report Editor’, here at APS. Both of these are highly anticipated products. However, based on your feedback, we need to build in more flexibility, which has taken us longer than originally planned, so I’m here to give you an update. For AdWords Draft& Experiments, we will be making a whitelist available at the end of June and we will launch the product later this Fall; where spring for those of you in the southern hemisphere. And starting two weeks ago, the Report Editor started rolling out to all advertisers globally and that will now we’ll complete by the end of Fall. When testing the impact of your marketing campaigns, it’s often difficult to know whether those dollars are delivering incremental values, are we observing correlation or causality? For example, how many incremental conversions does bidding on branded keywords drive or how much of incremental impact is increasing display ad spent, possibly impact search performance?

With the customer journey fractured into a collection of moments, the pressure to prove the incremental value of your marketing campaigns is all that more important. However, setting up well-designed and controlled experiments is difficult, setting up experiment parameters, establishing confidence in the rules, setting up control in test groups and randomly selecting populations is a non-trivial task. To help you keep your marketing hands on, while measuring the incrementality of your marketing campaigns, we are introducing new tools available through your account team that help large advertisers design and set up and test on large scale control marketing experiments. These measurement tools do several different types of proven, testing methods to deliver precise results, based on what your business wants to know. With the minimal spend requirements compared to traditional experiments, you can test the incremental effects of search display video ads and gain deeper insights into what’s working and whether it might be opportunities.

For example, 1-800 flowers ran an experiment to help evaluate their investment in YouTube advertising. As a result they were able to prove that their TrueView ads were driving incremental sales. And eBay set up an experiment and proved that Google Display Network is driving incremental conversions for them. You can get started today by reaching out to your AdWords account…Estimated Total Conversions, Data-Driven attribution modelling and our new measurement tools were designed to help address an increasingly fractured customer journey. By using these tools to understand the full value of your ads, you can take action to win the moment. We’re living our lives online and expect to connect with the right information right away on any device and Google is in a unique place to help marketers deliver on this consumer needs in the ‘I-Want-To-Know’, ‘I-Want-To-Go’ and ‘I-Want-To-Buy’ moments. These moments are immediate; they are rich in intent and they matter as much to consumers as they matter to you as marketers.

Today we announced a number of innovative products to help you win these moments and I’m excited to hear how you put them to work. From Automotive Ads to Google Compare, we introduced a new-generation of mobile ad formats to help you build more relevant experiences. To help you save time by scaling and automating the things that you do in AdWords, we have made major improvements to Dynamic Search Ads and Automated Bidding as well as introduced Auto-Resizing for Display. And finally, we introduced a suite of powerful tools including Data-Driven Attribution to help you break down the customer journey and understand the value of every moment. Mobile has changed the way we live. Displays is Google’s unique strength. Google is a company built on intent and immediacy. Every day we see billions of interactions happening online, offline, in apps. and across devices. We understand your customers today to have higher expectations than ever before and that’s great news. We have the technology to help you reach them in those moments, in the most relevant ways. By putting to work the tools and insights we shared with you today, you can be there with the right experience in the right context to win the moments that matter the most. Thank you for joining us today over here in the livestream and here in person in Half Moon Bay.

[Applause]