In the SMX East 2016 session, Ginny Marvin (Paid Search, SearchEngineLand), Greg Sterling (Paid Search, SearchEngineLand), Babak Pahlavan (Managing Director of Measurement and Analytics, Google) and Jerry Dischler (VP, Search Ads at Google) discussed about the recent developments and product enhancements introduced by Google AdWords.
Expanded Text Ads, Remarketing in Search Ads, Customer Match, Analytics 360 and more features explored in this intriguing session.
Here is the video of the Keynote session.
The transcript of the video is detailed out here:
Transcript
Ginny: We begin our keynote discussion with Google, I’m Ginny Marvin, I cover Paid Search, primarily for Search Engine Land and for a lot of other paid media for Marketing Land. This is my colleague, Greg Sterling. Can you tell a little bit about what you do?
Greg: I cover location-based media marketing, mobile advertising, public policy, a little bit of some other stuff at the market – small business advertising…
Ginny: And we are very excited to have Jerry Dischler with us today, he’s the VP of Search Ads at Google. Did I get that right?
Jerry: Yeah. That’s pretty much…
Greg: Let’s hear it for Jerry. [Applause]
Ginny: So, how’s this going to work this morning? Also we have Babak Pahlavan from Google as well, who is going to talk about Analytics, and making some announcements later this morning. So we’re going to start. We’re going to cover a lot of, through the ads news, what’s going on with Search Ads with Jerry, and then we’ll bring in Pahlavan, and then we also, at the end, will have a group Q & A, and the Q & A forum is open, so you can do the Ask/Keynote…
Greg: Can we see the URL?
Ginny: Yeah, you guys can bring the URL, that’ll be great.
Greg: That’s the new term – URL.
Ginny: Right.
Greg: The successor to the…
Ginny: So yes. Can you bring up the URL?
Greg: Are we going to do live questions as well from the audience?
Ginny: No, we’re going to try to keep it with time management…
Greg: Okay, yeah.
Ginny: The session hashtag is: #keynote and of course there’s SMX, that’s our main hashtag.
Greg: There’s this web place to send your questions.
Ginny: Fabulous. SMX Ask can be easier. So, thank you to our Expo Hall Reception Sponsor, Stone Temple Consulting. Did a great job, and thank you very much to Bing last night for sponsoring another great [inaudible 02:08] digital. So, let’s just dive right in, Jerry. So, Expanded Text Ads have started rolling out earlier this summer.
Jerry: Yeah.
Ginny: And certainly a lot of people have started adopting them, testing with them. But, a couple of weeks ago Google announced a delay in, sort of the roll out, and extinction of Standard Text Ads.
Jerry: Yeah.
Ginny: So you can talk a little bit about why that decision was made, and sort of… And also, I’d love to hear what you’re seeing as far as, for those advertisers that are, you know, diving right into Expanded Text Ads, what you’re seeing is working and how, kind of, adoption’s going from people who are really getting it.
Jerry: Sounds good. I mean, so Expanded Text Ads overall is going well. We, as a group, are pretty, you know, enthusiastic and optimistic and innovation-oriented, and so we said, “Alright, why don’t we change the creative format for the first time in 15 years or so? And it will be great, and we’ll get it right, and we won’t need that old creative format – everybody will transition really quickly and everything will be fine.” The truth is, it’s not exactly happening as consistently as we had hoped for. So the advertisers who are really embracing Expanded Text Ads are folks who are putting as much care as they did with their highly optimized traditional text ad creatives.
And so, they’re doing things like testing multiple ETAs for Ad Group, they’re doing things like having custom-crafted creatives to each Ad Group, they’re using a similar level of dynamic elements as they were in their Standard Text Ad creatives and in general, they’re seeing great results. What a lot of folks who are doing, who are not getting great results, is they are sort of dipping their toe in the water. They’re saying, “Okay, here’s our ETA creative, we’ll copy it to a bunch of different ad groups and see how it does,” or, “We’re going to try one creative,” or, “We’re not going to include dynamic elements, we’re not going to do keyword insertion. We’re just going to try it out and see what happens.”
And the truth is, if you’re going to try something out and see what happens, that isn’t as targeted, that isn’t as well optimized, that’s competing with lots of other creatives that are targeted and are well optimized; it’s not going to do very well. So what we’re hoping is that folks will jump in with both feet, will really embrace it, and will employ the best practices that they had to get their great performance with their Standard Text Ads, and then we can turn off Standard Text Ads and go directly to an ETA world. We’re going to do that after the holiday season, instead of before, to give folks a little bit more time to get comfortable with the new format.
Ginny: And so, if people aren’t seeing click-through rate increases with Expanded Text Ads, would you suggest that they’re not doing it right?
Jerry: Well, if they’re not seeing click-through rate increases with their Expanded Text Ads, then they should try more and different things that are consistent with the same kinds of best practices that they had in creating their text ads before. These kinds of changes are very subtle. As you’ve seen, the kinds of changes that drive performance are very subtle.
As you’ve seen with your Standard Text Ads, so I would say, keep testing and keep learning. Actually one tip that I didn’t mention, that I will, is that, so with non branded generic Expanded Text Ads, we’re seeing that there are really big differences in performance when you really have highly optimized both parts of the headline. In the case of branded terms, we’re seeing shorter headlines perform better, so you may want to try shorter headlines for your branded terms to see if that improves your branded performance.
Ginny: Great. One of the other big announcements earlier this year was the re-introduction of device fitting and I think there’s probably a lot of people who are very happy to see tablet getting back. So, yeah, and thank you for that. Can you talk a little bit about why….about that decision to bring back separate device bidding? And how you expect to see advertisers implementing that, taking advantage of having tablets back and desktop and mobile also?
Jerry: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And so, what we’re doing is, so we re-introduced it because what we were seeing is, a number of advertisers come to us with, “Hey, here are use-cases on mobile or tablet that are really, really different.” And so, one example is, you know, in the travel industry. Let’s say that you’re in New York, looking for New York hotels on your mobile phone versus you’re in New York, looking for New York hotels on your desktop. If you’re on your mobile phone, you want to bid that up like crazy, you want to have very targeted creatives, because it’s very likely to convert.
But if you’re on your desktop, actually, it’s likely to have lower conversion rate and, you know, you may want to bid that down, you may want to have a more generic creative and try to expand the intent. And so, that’s just one example of folks who’re saying, “Hey, we’re really thinking in a very mobile-first way, and the tools that you have are just not capable of handling our use cases.” And this was happening more and more, people who would, rather than..In the pre-enhanced campaigns world, the thing that we were seeing is mobile-avoidance. It’s like, “My customers are on mobile, but I may not have a great mobile website,” and you know, “I’m just not going to worry about mobile.”
But what we’re seeing here is the opposite, “I fully embraced mobile and I’m trying to figure out how to make it work, but the controls that you have are not robust enough. “ So, let me talk a little bit about, sort of, best work practices in device bid. What is the best practice that we’re asking folks to do, and what a lot of folks are doing is this: Take a look at… So, your current bids represent a blended ROI.
If you are able to get a better performance on desktop, and you have slightly worse performance on tablet, let’s say, then you should adjust those in a way which is symmetric; so you should increase your bids on desktop and you should decrease your bids on tablet. And in general, what you should be doing is, looking at your blended target across all the platforms in order to set your bid and then adjust up or down on a platform by platform basis in order to achieve the right ROI mix. So, that’s the best practice.
The worst practice that we’re seeing is, people are saying, “Oh I’ve tablet controls, I’m just going to bid that down and not just the rest ,” because those folks are competing against folks who are doing the blended practice and are potentially increasing their desktop bids, and so, over time they’re going to end up losing out, you know? And you have to figure out on a per advertiser basis what’s right for you, but I would encourage you to take a look at this in a blended way and to use the the platform tuning knobs for subtle adjustments on top of your blended target.
Ginny: Yeah, thanks.
Greg: We’re going to talk a little bit about store visits, because that’s a really big deal. So Google announced that its GPS, somewhere this summer, that you were expanding store visits and that you had, you know, you had some very large number of advertisers over the past two years – a billion visits I think, that had been measured.
Jerry: That’s right.
Greg: And which is quite impressive, and near and dear to my heart as a person who covers location. So, can you talk a little bit about where this is going, what the metrics are today and why you think this is really important for the people in the room to understand? The online talk and stuff.
Jerry: Sure. I mean, you know, in this multi-device mobile-focused world, you should be measuring your entire return on investment, whether it’s online conversions on a single device, whether it’s online conversion across device, or whether it’s offline conversions or conversions through calls or other things like that. And we want to help you work in omni-channel way, and to measure the total value of your search ad spend. And so, that’s why we believe that offline is really important.
And for many industries, you know, in retail where still ninety plus percent of retail is offline, or in industries like automotive for example, where 99.9% of all transactions are offline, you’re really being able to unlock the full value and to measure that full value, you know, can help you, as a business, create more effective advertising and get, you know, better ROI, better view into your return on investment.
For many advertisers, we’re seeing actually that the offline benefit is higher than the online benefit that they get from their search ad spend, and that’s really powerful, and we want you to be able to measure that in a way which is as easy as possible. So in the case of store visits, it just appears once we have the data, we make it available. We’ve now made that available to advertisers in 14 countries up from 11 and now thousands of advertisers rather than over a 1000. So we’re really expanding that program a lot.
And, you know, advertisers are really starting to see, you know, great value in industries like autos and telecom and retail, and we intend to expand that. Something that Brad Bender announced earlier this week was that we’re expanding this from “Search” to “Display” and we’re going to continue to expand the footprint and we’re hoping that what we can do is create an offline measurement solution that works across all of Google’s ads.
Greg: Can you just real quickly refresh people’s memory about what the methodology is, how do you get this offline data? Just real quickly at high level?
Jerry: Yes, I’ll talk about store visits a little bit. What we basically do is, we have hundreds of millions people who’ve opted in to location history. We take the location history data in an anonymized and privacy-sensitive way and we aggregate it. Then we also have additional signals that we bring in. Some of those are from Google Maps, for example. We have hundreds of millions of buildings where we’ve made 3D models of those buildings across the world – we use that in order to improve precision, we use Wi-Fi data and other data.
In addition to that, we also have over five million human reviewers who use the Google Consumer Surveys App. and if we’re really uncertain of a location, then we go and ask the human reviewers, “Hey, are you inside a particular business location?”, and then we take those data and we feed them back into our algorithms in order to further improve our precision. So we have this very sophisticated multi-prong approach that we use in order to measure store visits and we’re pleased to report that we have over ninety-nine percent accuracy in our store visit measurement solution.
Greg: Well, I could go on and on about this stuff, but we have more ground to cover, so, back to you, Ginny.
Ginny: So, audience targeting – there’s been lots of developments in ways that search marketers can start taking advantage of audience targeting, not solely, you know, specifically keyword targeting. So a couple of things that have been, sort of, teased so far I know have been beta demographic targeting, Similar Audiences for Search Ads, and both have been discussed as coming out of, you know, being in beta. Can you talk a little bit about what each of those, how they each work and what they mean for marketers? And also, what we might expect coming down the pipe, from an audience targeting standpoint?
Jerry: Yeah absolutely. So I have some product announcements, so that’s good. So let’s talk about our Audience Suite in Search Ads. The first thing that we have is Remarketing Lists for Search Ads and that has been a runaway success. New advertisers who are using RLSA have said that it… Multiple advertisers have told me that this is the biggest single change that we’ve made to Search Advertising over the past five years in their ability to better target to their customers and get better ROI Ad Search, which is really wonderful to hear.
The other thing that’s interesting is, I still talk to lots of sophisticated advertisers all the time who either are using RLSA, or have limited use of RLSA. And so, if you’re in that camp, I would highly encourage you to experiment with RLSA in minimum. So Remarketing Lists for Search Ads is the first product. The second product that we have is Customer Match, and Remarketing Lists for Search Ads is designed for instantaneous intent, so if you go to an advertiser website, you know, within a certain time period, then we can add you to a list and then you can manage your search spend based on that.
What Customer Match is designed to do is, if you have customers that have interacted with you and you have their e-mail address, whether it’s offline interaction or online interaction, you can now target them on Search using those e-mail addresses as targeting criteria. And that’s really, really powerful. It’s also really powerful in this online-to-offline cross-device world, because that means you now have persistent Customer IDs that you can use for your existing customers using your first-party data.
Similar Audiences was currently in a closed Whitelist beta. It’s….we are currently….what I’m going to announce today is that where we’re transitioning that to an open beta. What that will do is, if you have list that you’ve assembled, you can then extend them to Similar Audiences, and what it will do is try to find people who have similar behaviour on Google to the folks on those lists. And so, folks in the closed BETA who have been using Similar Audiences have seen really great results and are really enthusiastic about it. So I would highly encourage you to try that out. The final thing that I’ll mention in our Audience Suite is Demographics.
We’ve had this in open beta for a while. I’m pleased to say that Demographics are going to be released today, and over the next few days. And what demographics will likely do is to target age ranges, gender and household income, which is wonderful. A couple of additional announcements that we have around RLSA. The biggest single request that we had in Remarketing List for Search Ads is, “Hey, can I manifest this at the campaign-level, because the Ad Group level is too fine-grained based on my marketing objectives?” We’re going to make that available over the coming next few weeks. So you’ll be able to manage RLSA at the campaign-level which I expect for a lot of advertisers is going to save a lot of time. We also are announcing the availability, over the next few days, of a cross-device RLSA. So rather than managing your lists on a single device, we’ll be able to target users across devices which will make RLSA even more effective.
Ginny: Great. And that follows on the opening of Cross-Device Targeting on the display network as well.
Jerry: I believe so but I’m not 100% sure.
Ginny: So, fantastic. That’s exciting. So, can you…? So, the Similar Audiences for Search… Can you just talk a little bit about what the methodology is…? Are you looking at other search queries? What kind of behaviour metric were you looking at to make those matches?
Jerry: So, today we’re looking at searches but the truth is, you know, we believe that we’re going to be able to just make that …., so what we’ve heard from folks is that it’s pretty good right now, but we’re hoping that we’ll be able to make that better and better over time using a whole number of different signals in order to get you populations that are as similar as possible to the users in your list.
Ginny: And one last question, sorry. Can you layer Demographic Targeting with Similar Audiences for Search, be able to fine-tune Similar Audiences for Search with demographic targets as well, kind of…?
Jerry: Not currently. I mean, currently we offer Similar Audiences for using customer match in RLSA, not with additional demographic criteria at this point.
Ginny: Okay, thanks.
Greg: We can go much farther, but… Well, let me ask you about that. There’s a cluster of local things, really quickly, and then we’ll go to the Analytics discussion. There’s a cluster of local ad units and capabilities that were introduced earlier – local finder ads, promoted pins, store inventory, that kind of stuff. Can you give us an update on what’s going on with that mix of location targeted units and capabilities?
Jerry: Yeah, I mean for Local Finder Ads and Promoted Pins – those are experiments that were running right now, and experiments are going pretty well. But they’re not in broad availability yet, you know? Our general thesis is, so, what we’ve shown in our online to offline measurement is that online advertising is driving people into stores. And the question is, can we create more effective formats in order to drive even more people into stores in order to generate even more user and advertiser value? And so, that’s what we’re doing with these Maps-Oriented formats. We have the ads in the place sheets, we have Promoted Pins, we also have redesigned our core Search Ad format on Maps, and we’ve added a couple of new formats within Local Universal.
And so, this is an area where we’re going to have lots and lots of investment because we think that we can really do a better job of driving people into stores by these formats. Local Inventory Ads is a little bit more established. For example, “Best Buy” drove a million incremental store visits over the holiday season last year using a Local Inventory Ads, which is really, really impressive. And we expect to evolve that format as well to help people browse and shop more effectively during this holiday season as well as in the future.
Greg: One quick follow-up surprise question about ads in the local pack. So, that was announced and people have seen different configurations – can you say anything about where that stands in the local pack on Search results?
Jerry: Yeah well, there are two different are two different iterations – one of them is in experiment currently, the other one is launched. The launch configuration shows up once you’ve expanded the full list in Local Universal; the one that’s currently in experiment is showing up as an entry within Local Universal before the expansion. And so…
Greg: That’s an experimental one?
Jerry: That’s correct. And we want to make sure that that has good metrics before we launch it, but you know, there’s every indication that that’s going to go…
Greg: So, determined or undetermined, how many spaces there, how many slots there, so it’s like an added one?
Jerry: There’s just one.
Greg: Yeah. One ad but how many organic listings in the local pack?
Jerry: I believe it’s two or three.
Greg: Yeah, because here we’ve seen both – two and three. Okay, great, thank you.
Ginny: Thank you very much, Jerry.
Jerry: You’re very welcome.
Ginny: So we’re going to have Babak come on up and we’ll call you back up for our Q & A.
Jerry: Sounds great.
Ginny: Welcome Babak.
Babak: Good morning.
Ginny: Very happy to have you, very happy to talk about Analytics, which ties so well into everything all of us do, whether or not you’re on the organic or paid side; not that… I guess we don’t have sides but…yeah.
Greg: Oh yes, we do – SEO, SEM.
Ginny: [Laughter] SEO, SEM. So, Babak is the Managing Director of Measurement and Analytics at Google and so we have a lot to ask you. There’s been a lot of developments going on in Analytics. I guess the biggest one probably was Analytics 360. I know you wanted to…
Greg: I’m dying to ask you questions about Analytics 360. Well let’s just see from the room, how many people are using any of the modules in the Analytics 360?
Ginny: How many are using Analytics?
Greg: Everybody.
Ginny: Fabulous.
Babak: Alright.
Ginny: Okay, so this is relevant information.
Babak: Yes.
Greg: And we got into analytics to some degree with Jerry. So, some people are using individual modules, some people are using the full suite, there’s a free version of Data Studio. Can you explain Data Studio and its intent? What’s going on with that?
Babak: Yeah, so Data Studio is our Dash boarding and Reporting tool that we launched earlier in the year that sort of makes it… Well, there are two fundamental things about it, that tell us in the law and it is based on, sort of, a lot of research that they did ahead of time in order to figure out what are the problems they need to tackle. So the two really, sort of, interesting things about Data Studio is, you can be up and running to do reporting, and pretty quickly, by just connecting to the data sources. So, sort of, we’re going after this problem of… Instead of just…
If you want to pull everything together, especially if you’re using the Google Analytics AdWords, Sheets – things like BigQuery that actually allows you to bring your own data sets inside of it, YouTube data, and what not, instead of actually exporting into another sheet, they would have to come under, in order to actually do some dash boarding and reporting. With Data Studio, it’s just super-easy to just connect the dots and then put it all together.
That’s one. And second thing about it is the notion of collaboration and sharing, which… I mean, a lot of their tools are out that actually do have sharing, can actually export the data sets and actually share with your organization, but the notion of collaboration is something that we’ve really focus on, just like what we have in Google Docs and Drive. You can easily share, create particular reports, share it with the organization, and then really together, collaborate on building the rest of it. So you can actually cross-source information across organization and really make this data available not just to add to the Analytics of the organization but also everyone else as well.
We announced, I mean, launched the 360-version, the Enterprise version of it, for US only, and then, also the free version, early in the year, and about, I think, in a few minutes….and also the Google will roll out the data studio, both the enterprise version and also free version in 21countries as of today.
Greg: Why wait a few minutes? Why not talk about it right now?
Babak: I think it’s already on the block, was already launched at nine. But ultimately, even if we announced in US, we wanted to be sure to learn from the experience so that before we were assured and ready for the roll out. And yeah, reception has been great.
Greg: So you’ve got some more free tools coming, is that right?
Babak: Yes, we announced Optimize 360, the enterprise version of our A/B testing and personalization tool early in the year and, you know, our objective is really to enable measurement for all businesses, regardless of the size, because ultimately for all of you guys in the room, it’s all about, sort of, creating the best experiences possible for your end-users. So, today we’re announcing the free version of Optimize that’s going to roll out in the next few weeks. We actually have the sign-up sheet for those who are interested to get the invite, so it’s on [inaudible 27:07] that you can actually get on the list and rolling it out gradually.
And it’s really set up to really help our businesses of all sizes small and large. It natively integrates with Google Analytics, so for all the people who raised their hands that they’re already using Google Analytics, it works seamlessly out-of-the-box. If you have already set up your conversions and goals inside Analytics, you can easily bring them inside Optimize, and be up and running the tests and alter the personalized right users pretty quickly. As visiting editors, it’s not meant just for the developer community but also it’s meant to be used by marketers essentially. And I have a few case studies that I’ll show…
Greg: Yeah, so you told us an interesting story ahead of the session today. I mean, can you can you tell the audience about that help, this one company was using it….
Babak: Yeah, actually there were two that comes to mind. One is Motley Fool. So, a lot of you guys might be familiar with this, it’s a publisher finance site. They were telling us that they run a lot of tests and usually with the tools that they’re using, it would take them days because they would have to set up the goals and commercial analytics in this and then bring them inside another separate tool. Now, to our delight, they told us now they run these things in minutes. So days went down to minutes, that was the Motley Fool.
The other one that really caught our attention was our friends on Apmex. They were actually really cool and calm when I was talking about. They’re an online retailer of precious stones like silver and gold coins, if any of you was in the market to buy gold. I bought a gold coin from them myself. So they were able to, using Optimize 360, and they were able to double their revenue for new users, because they were able to look at, for instance, as they’ve been telling us, their objectives created different sort of experiences for collectors versus some people that are just, like me for instance, who just buy one coin. And so, in particular, they were able to… For example, the silver coin enthusiasts who are searching on their websites, and they were actually, has an engagement data on Google Analytics, they were able to double the revenue for those folks by creating a separate experience offering limited times discounts.
Greg: So this is a personalized experience on their website, right, that they’re building and testing?
Babak: Yeah.
Greg: Fantastic.
Babak: Yeah, and it’s seamless, so you can look at your engagement that include Analytics, and then create several different experiences in Optimize Test, once you reach a certain confidence in it, that you can actually let it run the rest of this entry for you and Optimize, continuously optimize for those cohorts of users.
Ginny: And that’s rolling out….the invite is available?
Babak: The invite is available today and the objective is to roll out the free version of Optimize starting next month globally. It’s going to be a gradual roll out but it’ll be done this year.
Male Speaker: Url?
Babak: So it’s g.co/optimize.
Greg: g.co/optimize.
Ginny: That’s exciting. I wanted to talk about Smart Goals which… I guess you had announced, is it earlier this year or last year? Okay, which were created for Ad Words advertisers to be able to, if they don’t have goal tracking or conversion tracking set up, to be able to take advantage of a crowd source machine-learning feature in Analytics that will help kind of inform that marketer of the sessions that likely converted, right?
Babak: Yeah.
Ginny: Can you just talk a little bit more about how Smart Goals works and what kind of businesses are using them? And the other thing I’ve noticed is that even in, you know, accounts that already have conversion tracking set up, there’s that Smart Goals report, there’s data in there. What is that and is there a way for marketers that aren’t using conversion tracking to use or, you know, is there a value in that for marketers…?
Babak: That‘s a great question. So, we have a set of investments around how to leverage Google’s machine learning capabilities to make, sort of, businesses a lot more efficient on leveraging the data sets that they have. So Smart Goals is actually one of those they announced early in the year, and it’s already been used by tens of thousands of advertisers of all sizes, so it’s not just geared towards SMBs, but also large scale advertisers that only [inaudible 32:06] as well. In particular to your question, if your website had a lot of e-commerce data, you should continue to use that data set inside Ad Words for optimizations.
Smart Goals is especially helpful for two categories of customers. A – if you have some e-commerce data but you don’t have a whole lot of data, then you can use this for Ad Words for optimizations, or if you just don’t have any e-commerce transaction data. This system automatically creates a set of goals that can be used to improve conversions. And that’s especially interesting because they can actually, even have this feature set up who are not even using this property, but they can actually look at a preview of their performance when they go inside Google Analytics, at the Smart Goals performance report, they can actually get a preview of what their performance could look like.
And it’s a tool that we highly recommend everyone to use because you let the power of machine learning figure out what are the goals that you can just set up in order to actually optimize your campaigns that otherwise you would just miss out of. And you have a series of investments in this realm. We announced a new feature in [segment] that is called ‘Session Quality Score’ that is sort of exposing more of the underlying technology behind Smart Goals. We’re now exposing sort of a score for every single session that assists and captures and a score shows a likelihood of conversion.
Now, this is one of the few things that you can just say, “Yeah, only machines can actually do these things at scale and no human being will actually do these kind of things.” Because now we can actually determine, and it’s available in the ledgers for reporting and also for remarketing as well, so you can have a set of session that says, “Okay, there’s a high likelihood they would convert; they haven’t converted just yet.” So now either you can create different experiences to increase your conversions on the website….or we can actually talk to those users via remarketing.
Ginny: And so Session Quality Score is in….both first three and…
Babak: Currently it’s rolling down in beta, yes.
Ginny: Okay, going on a beta, and a follow-up on that, so what kind of metrics are going…, behaviour patterns are being looked at? I know there are a number of marketers are set up towards their own goal for quality visitor or whatever you want to name it, that looks at, “Let’s try to identify kind of the same thing what users that look to be, have high intent and considerations whether that’s session duration, pages visited,” those kind of things that kind of intuit that these are higher quality people that come in and spend shorter amount of time. So what kind of things is the metric…?
Babak: So it’s not just looking at just one thing, it’s looking at pretty much every single data set that’s available to us ….the advertiser and it actually does a set of sort of an automatic model detection and sort of a score detection, runs multiple tests, and it looks at in the previous, sort of, conversions, what has led to those conversions and it tries to actually mimic those and then it runs a statistical model on top of those to come up with a score essentially, and it’s drawing it continuously.
So we’re looking at a series of signals per business essentially. And that’s the beauty of machine learning, because you let it do its thing, and eventually it’s doing things that you haven’t programmed it to do but it’s ultimately learning on its own.
Ginny: And then you can take that and use that use that as a list for RLSA, for example.
Greg: Right, I was going to ask that question, Similar Audiences, all of those kinds of things.
Babak: Yes, so they have GA RLSA support, so you can actually create a set of audience list that project AdWords. So the same thing can actually be used here as well essentially. So you can use it for, right now it’s available in GA customer reports segmentation tool that can use it in order to build remarketing lists and eventually it’s going to be available throughout the rest of the product as well.
Ginny: Great. And the other thing I thought was interesting that came out earlier this year was the Autotrack library of plugins that’s for marketers that don’t have access to Tag Manager, aren’t using it, don’t have customizations of their GA setups and without having to do a whole lot of complex, very basically can take a plug-in. So there’s a plugin to easily track outbound links and form submissions, so makes event tracking much easier. ‘
So can you talk a bit about that and there was also a lot of interest when we first covered that, so I’m curious to see if it’s actually been popular, it it’s been expanded and/or the kind of support library set – are there any developments in this area?
Babak: So this is sort of the beauty of Google, because you have several really smart engineers that are constantly creating new tools for developers. So Autotracking is an example that, there was a project that was built specifically for very sophisticated advanced users, and it was a developer tool. So, it exceeded our expectation big time and it’s a starred on that project list so many times and has been shared so many times. So it’s for the developer community and it’s customers that have used those and they’ve already included us on their ….so they are sending us millions of hits on a daily basis through Analytics.
But for customers that are a little more advanced and they need more collaboration tools and they need more, sort of, ways of sort of controlling the process of how things get [inaudible 37:52] on their sites, we highly recommend you to use Google Tag Manager and that works seamlessly with Google Analytics essentially. Pretty much everything we can do with Auto-tracking, you can actually do it with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager as well.
Either we are sort of event traking their GCM supports out-of-the-box or using sort of the data layer, sort of push so the system has been enabled that can actually push events, either via custom JavaScript tags or use our sort of templates that are used for third-party partners, so like Google Tag Manager. So we have a whole list of supported tags and that is quite out of the box. In fact, today we are announcing another of the 20 additions to that list for Tag Manager. Customer such as sort of contacts being on Twitter, Nielsen, HR and a few other things that actually support out-of-the-box and segway with Tag Manager. We highly recommend customers to take a look at those.
Ginny: Okay, great. So, if you set up a custom HTML tag for the Twitter, for example, or Bing, should you just leave that there or should you come back in and use the plug-in, do you know what I mean? I mean, it doesn’t matter technically but I mean, is there any reason to do that?
Babak: So, they really have to take a look at it. So, like, if Google Tag Manager gives you a whole set of tools to be able to monitor the events that are coming in and be able to control those problematic from the service side. So, if you are using auto event, sort of, the library that we released, that you don’t have a whole lot of….so you have to go back and update your sites over and over again, so essentially, go and make some changes there. So, it’s really an opportunity, sort of, how you can handle these things but we recommend customers use Google Tag Manager as far as possible, because pretty much the same capabilities are available in that tool, but even more, and even more control is given to you.
Ginny: As far as customizations…., okay.
Babak: Yeah, correct.
Greg: So, sort of quick final question before we go to audience Q & A. I was looking at the questions that quite a few… Can you talk for a minute? So, the Google Analytics Mobile App was launched and you’ve recently added these Insight Cards within this app – can you talk about what those are and how they should be used, how people can get the most value out of that?
Babak: Yes, so you’re talking about the Analytics Insights, that we announced a few weeks ago.
Greg: Yeah.
Babak: So, it’s again in the bucket of ours, sort of efforts are on leveraging Google’s Machine Learning Technologies in order to actually make life a lot easier for marketers. We announced this, it’s available inside our app, our Google Analytics App for both IOS and Android, a redesigned version of it, but eventually will be available on the website in the web tool as well. It looks at a series of signals, and it tells you things like, for example, the products that are performing much better like this week or much worse this week as opposed to last week or, like, this month versus last, it lets you to look at all the permutations automatically or, for instance, a whole series of other things like what are the channels that are outperforming or underperforming, that are exceeding or missing the expectations, what are the areas that you can actually, should pay attention to more.
In fact right before I came on stage I was checking out the tool for one of our test sites – we have an e-commerce sites at Google that we use for the souvenirs or something to sell …Googlers. We managed [inaudible 41:36] and I just realized, I mean, it only took me just a few seconds, our friend came on stage, looked at it and he realized that this site speed in India is somehow crashing and burning, like it’s actually loading twice as slow as the rest of the percent of global system that we have. And that’s, I mean, it would have taken us probably weeks or months to catch that unless somebody complains about it, right? And these systems are now smart enough to actually tell us these things and bring those to our attention, you know, as quickly as possible.
Greg: So it’s looking at everything? How can it be looking at absolutely everything, all aspects of performance? Can you just elaborate on that?
Babak: Yeah, I mean, it’s the power of machine learning ultimately, right? You’re looking at all the, sort of, metrics and also segments that you’re interacting with the product, and it looks at, sort of, the before and the after like…
Greg: So, this will be predefined in the system?
Babak: No it’s actually learning on its own, it’s actually learning not just what’s popular but also across sort of the set of properties that they have available. And it looks at, sort of, it goes beyond just anomaly detection. It just doesn’t look at just the spikes, it actually looks at sort of what are the interesting patterns that are forming that you should pay attention to. The ultimate goal is actually create some sort of a analysts, you know, that really expands this and the analysts that you have in your organization or even give you an analyst in those companies small enough that they cannot afford an analyst essentially. We’re trying to really go after that sort of model and it really ties back into our mission of really enabling measurement for all businesses of all sizes across the globe. And this is again one of those things in this series that really helps us because it’s efficient.
Greg: Is Jerry in the house?
Ginny: Jerry? Yeah. For anyone who hasn’t used that, looked at the Insights under the Assistant section in the apps, and I highly recommend looking at this, it’s pretty fascinating.
Q & A:
Ginny: Quick for Jerry, will Expanded Text Ads be available for call-only ads?
Jerry: Will ETA be available for calls? Yes, we’re working on a new headline format for call-only actually that will all look similar to ETA. We’ve just been reviewing designs, we have a couple of other design changes for call-only ads that we’re in the process of testing out, that we think will actually improve the performance a bunch or two, so stay tuned for that.
Ginny: I think we’ve seen some in testing, right? I think…
Jerry: Yeah, we’ve been testing the call-only format; we’ve been testing a bunch of operations for the call-only formats, so you probably got to review them.
Greg: Yes there are some questions that will make you smile.
Ginny: Yes. So, a question about Keyword Planner and the changes that have happened there: Do you want to talk about, sort of, the thoughts behind why Keyword Pplanner changed as far as the data availability for non-paying customers, customers who don’t have active campaigns…?
Jerry: Yeah, I mean we really talked about it in a little bit of detail on the thread, that we had, you know, we had this situation where what we wanted to do was to have good actors be able to use our keyword planning tools and keep some bad actors out who are using the tools. The way that we’ve set it up right now, our limits are really low and so the vast majority of advertisers who have any active spend should be able to use our keyword planning tools. And then also, with agencies who are representing advertisers, you know, we should be able to accommodate most use cases while keeping the bad actors out.
Yeah, if there are certain use cases that are there still not well encapsulated by the changes we’ve made, please let me know and you know I’ll see if we can work something additional out. But really our goal was not to inconvenience folks who were legitimate users of this system for SEM purposes but to keep some of that…
Ginny: Thanks. A question for Babak: Does Google Analytics have a plan to better address ‘Refer Spam’?
Babak: So, yes, we have an active sort of project internally that… It’s not even just plans, actually has been on ongoing for quite some time that we combat spam traffic and actually sort of get it out of the system. And we’ve had quite a bit of success already with it that the stats… We’re going to share those stats externally but this is something that we take very seriously and we are really… I mean we’re in the business of making sure that you have access to sort of this quality sort of measurement data. So yeah, we’re constantly monitoring and speaking of, sort of picking in on Jerry’s point, there are bad actors out there that are trying to actually abuse these systems, so yeah, we have… I mean, I don’t know, have you guys seen improvements on your registered sites? I hope…
Male Speaker: [Inaudible]
Ginny: So he was just saying he is not seeing any improvements.
Babak: So, I would love to talk to you about it actually afterwards. This is something that we do take very seriously and our stats show that actually the spam chart that we are detecting has gone down pretty significantly but I’ll be curious to know like, what is happening in your specific case.
Male Speaker: [Inaudible]
Babak: You felt…fault in the traffic? But yeah I would love to actually talk to you more about it, yeah. Send me an e-mail, like these are things we take very seriously.
Ginny: So, this is for both of you: Can you do a quick…? There are a lot of announcements just made. Can you kind of do a quick recap, Jerry and what you just announced and further new takeaways for people that are here?
Jerry: Sure. So, product feature announcements are all in the Audience category, so, Cross-Device Remarketing for Search Ads, RLSA at the Campaign level, Demographics for Search Ads launch and Similar Audiences in open beta were the four announcements. In terms of stats announcements, the two were that we have now have thousands of advertisers using Store Visits and they’re in 14 countries up from 11 countries in the previous step.
Ginny: Thanks.
Babak: Yeah, on our side we announced four things this morning. One is the free version of Optimize is announced today and we actually, invite is still open so we’re kind of, we’ll roll that globally, so again, g.co/optimize for sign up is there, if you’re interested in using the free version of Optimize. Data Studio that was US-based only, we’re actually going global with it as of today for both the enterprise version of 360 as well as a free version.
We announced the beta roll out of Session Quality Score which is the underlying technology for Smart Goals that actually allows you to look at, sort of, sessions that are likely to convert, so you can actually start using those too to do the personalized experience on your websites or re-engage with these users on your remarketing.
And the fourth one was about Tag Manager. So we announced that roughly about 20 new tags that are added to a long list of already vendors of support on top of the custom JavaScript actively supporting the Tag Manager and you can use those out-of-the-box … as well. So these are the four things going on today.
Ginny: Great, thank you. Looks very good.
Greg: So question for Jerry, this person is asking: Are we ever going to see Store Visits for channels outside of Paid Search? So referral direct email?
Jerry: We’re now planning on that. Store Visits outside of Paid Search? Yes, as with Brad’s announcement, we’re expanding that to display and we expect to expand it further. As far as expanding into e-mails or affiliate or things of this nature, we have no plans to announce it at this time, to expand it further to this channel.
Greg: Greg: For Babak, how effective are Smart Goals for non-retail customers, non-retail advertisers?
Babak: Yeah, it is designed for those sort of customers that don’t have e-commerce transactions. So we haven’t sort of shared the stats the stats in terms of like how it’s improving conversions but the fact that it’s already… If anything, as Paul announced, the Red GPS early in the year we announced of these, 60,000 advertisers were using those already. We’re up by 50%, a figure about 90,000 advertisers using it today. So enough people are seeing value out of that, are suited up in the usage.
And again, just to recap, it’s for advertisers who either don’t have enough e-commerce transactions to use those for optimizations inside Ad Words or for advertisers who just don’t have e-commerce transactions at all. And then automatically creates calls for you that you can actually use for optimizations.
Greg: I’m seeing two quick questions for you again. People want to know the sign up for Optimize 360, the URL.
Babak: So, it’s g.co – is that short form URL for Google? So, g.co/optimize.
Greg: And this is… Never can hear that enough, I suppose.
Babak: Well, how about you repeat it as many times as possible? [Laughter]
Greg: Okay. And then, Data Studio, what are the data sources that go in, and the question here is, are you planning to add additional data sources?
Babak: It’s a great question. So, for those who’ve used Data Studio, you’ve noticed that we’ve really tried to simplify this workflow. We have an ocean of data sources that you just connect to. So as of today we’re covering Google Analytics, Ad Words, YouTube, BigQuery sheets and also SQL, sort of data source that you can actually connect to it directly by putting your authentication, sort of using your passwords and credentials. And yes, we actually have sort of a standing team that’s working on adding more connectors as we go forward and you’re going see those rolling out in the next few weeks.
One of the things that are actually interesting about Data Studio, everything….just talked about, is the notion of templates also. So it’s rolling out later in October and just like how you have templates inside Sheets and Docs and sort of the Drive tools that are out there, you can simply use one of our pre-defined reports for visualization inside Data Studio. You just connect your data source, choose your template, and then you’ll be up and running the report. [Inaudible 53:27]…
Ginny: And I think its five reports now for accounts that are going to stay, or will there be…will that expand?
Babak: We’re monitoring it. We’re monitoring the usage of it. I mean, our objective is to really [inaudible 53:40] access for measurement across all organizations, so we see if demand are actually is for users that are getting more reports [inaudible 53:40], so we’ll see.
Ginny: This is a question for both: Can you talk about the differences between creating remarketing audiences In Ad Words versus plain relying on them in GA? Are there benefits or anything unique to using GA? But I guess… Remarketing audiences in Ad Words, well, I think they’re… I’m not sure I’ve seen the question…. was going to talk about conversion tracking and if there is anything you want to talk about for audiences.
Jerry: But you can use your GA within, you use your GA within Ad Words, it’s all fully configured.
Babak: I guess that the main point is they’re complementary, so you ultimately create this audience list and you push it to Ad Words to do the optimizations there, but within GA, you have this sort of 500-plus metrics and segments that you can actually then go a lot deeper. So users who came to my site and spent more than 10 minutes, ended up adding something to the shopping cart and they didn’t check out; so creating a list of those, and then every time we observe those and then I want to offer my bids inside AdWords. So that’s the kind of thing you can do inside Ad Words.
Ginny: Right. So now you can use Retargeting Lists for Search Ads, pull from, and so the benefit is deeper ability to control what those targeting list are.
Jerry: It assists you in managing finer grained lists. You could do that all yourself but GA helps you set that.
Ginny: Yeah.
Babak: GA goes much deeper with some of the metrics that are related to your apps for your website.
Ginny: Yeah and then, kind of tied to that, so some people just rely on to the Google Analytics tracking for conversions and goals versus implementing the Ad Words Pixel, so what do you recommend? Do you recommend having both, no matter who you are, and wanted to have both, or are there cases where it doesn’t really matter if you have the Ad Words Pixel if you’re using Analytics?
Babak: So yeah, I mean, I think it’s…..
Jerry: I mean, you know, so there’s lots of Ad Words functionality that relies on Ad Words conversion tracking, so we recommend implementation for that. In fact, so our automated bidding for example, so being able to get the Ad Words stats directly in Ad Words front end is a nice benefit. But then also we rely on Ad Words conversion tracking for doing automated bidding which is extremely powerful and something that I’d recommend everybody at least try out.
Babak: Yeah, I mean that complements for user cases again, because AWCT which actually, it gives you a lot more access to optimizations inside Ad Words, and then you can then set up your regular set of goals that are related to your site, that are specific. And then if you choose to use this for conversions optimizations, you can actually then bring inside Ad Words directly. And that’s the power of these integration from these tools that are needed.
Greg: We have about 25 more questions. I’m going to combine them all into one: What is the future at Google? No, I don’t know how to handle this, because there are a lot of very, very specific questions. I’ll read a few of them and you guys, can, in the remaining 30 seconds, you can answer whatever you want. Let me read a bunch of these, so the audience can hear: Are there plans to further expand the paid served real estate pushing the organic down the page, so some people are making commentary in these questions, but what was the thought process behind providing SB ranges for users not running campaigns and in keyword public and keywords planned?
Jerry: I’m not sure I understand that question.
Greg: Yeah, no, I don’t either.
[Crosstalk]
Jerry… inside soft driving cars on Mars. So the first question was, again…?
Greg: Are you going to add more and more ads and the organic is going to disappear as such?
Jerry: No, I mean, we have no plans to add additional ad slots. I mean, it took us 15 years to add a fourth ad slot and very, very small number of highly commercially use cases on quality is high enough. One thing that I will say is that we have a challenge when we have to deliver richer units on the page with how much space do we take up relative to organic content? The way that we think about that is, especially on mobile is based on a full-page view, so how much organic content do you have versus how much ad content do you have, not necessarily what’s in the viewport?
The reason that we think about it that way is because the evidence that we have suggests that people score effortlessly on mobile devices, and so, you know, we have this, we don’t want to put ourselves into an over-constrained state. So, for example, let’s say that you have an ad unit which has an image or video in it or some structured data in it, right? So, you can show that ad unit which is relevant and a great promo for users and converts well and is highly informative.
Well, you cannot show it if it takes up too much of vertical space. The truth is, the organic units within that context, for a highly visual or highly data-oriented query, will also be taking up more vertical space. And so, we may develop units in the future that take advantage of that by presenting those data. And so how you have to think about this is based on the entire page and the vertical space taken up by organic content versus ad content and the relevance of the data that we present in a format that makes the most sense.
Greg: How much more time do we have? We’re over time, in fact. You guys want to sit here for half an hour? We can certainly go on, if you’re sure. Why don’t we let them wrap up, and I apologize that we didn’t get to everybody’s questions.
Ginny: No, it’s great that everyone has new questions. Thank you very much Jerry and Babak. This was a fantastic session. And thank you all for coming.
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