Imagine: you’ve built a beautiful digital marketing campaign and it’s finally live. You get your reports back with a list of data points and while the numbers seem good, it’s pretty hard to understand them without any reference points. That’s the crutch: data doesn’t take on meaning when it’s just floating around in the ether; you need to build context around your data and anchor it to other relevant data points to better understand what your own numbers mean.

Industry benchmarks -- reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry -- give you these comparisons. And today, for the first time, we’re launching the Display Benchmarks Tool, an easy-to-use webpage that lets you pull benchmarks to help you make better decisions about your campaigns.

Click here to enlarge

Whether you're after comparisons by country, industry vertical, ad size or ad format, our tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions. Here’s a quick demo of how to pull the benchmarks.

We've been playing around with the tool and identified some interesting trends around user engagement in our industry. Here's a bit of what we've seen:

Trend #1 User choice leads to more engagement: People want to choose how and when they consume content online. We’re starting to see new ad formats, such as the TrueView and Engagement formats, that let people choose whether to watch or skip an ad. Our benchmark data shows that people are increasingly choosing to interact with these ads. Video completion rates are the highest we’ve ever seen, with people completing 60% of the videos that they watch.

Trend #2: Richer ads lead to more engagement: Longer interaction also stems from more beautiful and compelling ads, which advertisers are increasingly incorporating in their campaigns. Interactive video ads, such as this one from Cadillac, allow advertisers to layer information about their brands on top of their video commercials. Dual-channel ads, such as this Skyfall ad, let viewers turn their mobile phones and tablets into controllers that dictate what happens within the content on their desktop. These ads represent the new creative formats that are closing the gap between advertising and awesome content. And we’re seeing the results: since last summer, people are interacting with rich media ads ~50-60% more frequently and spending ~20% more time interacting.

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Trend #3: Optimize your campaigns for engagement: Advertisers used to rely solely on click-through rates and reach/frequency reports to measure their campaigns. Now, these new rich media formats provide a better set of metrics, which help advertisers understand what’s best for users and optimize their campaigns. For example, from the benchmarks tool we’ve learned that interaction rates correlate strongly with larger ad area - the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. Similarly, we’ve learned that rich media expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for getting people to interact for longer amounts of time. These types of insights are instrumental in making improvements to an advertiser’s campaign.

These findings confirm what we've heard from our partners -- as ads become more engaging and relevant to users, their performance improves. If you’re still hungry for more data, don’t worry --  next Tuesday, we’ll be kicking off a “Data Insights Blog Series,” where we’ll deep-dive into one trend a week and explain how the insights apply to your campaigns.

As you check out the tool for yourself, let us know if you find any nuggets you think we’ve missed. We just might feature your insight in one of our blog posts.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)

Last month, the DoubleClick Search team introduced the beta release of dedicated tools to help advertisers seamlessly upgrade to enhanced campaigns. Today, we’re excited to announce that these tools are available to all DoubleClick Search customers globally. Read on for details around the newly available features, what's coming, and how customers are seeing success in upgrading to enhanced campaigns with DoubleClick Search.

Easily upgrade to enhanced campaigns
With this release, advertisers can save time when upgrading to enhanced campaigns with custom solutions that will:

• Identify similar campaigns that target different devices within your DoubleClick Search account
• Create reports to quickly merge and upload these similar campaigns into one enhanced campaign
• Provide the AdWords-suggested mobile bid adjustment in DoubleClick Search for more control and precision over bids in an enhanced campaign

Learn about these features and more in the enhanced campaigns upgrade guide.

Upcoming features
This is the second of several feature rollouts we have planned for enhanced campaigns. Over the next few weeks, the DoubleClick Search team will be introducing advanced features to prepare advertisers for a constantly connected world, including support for ad group mobile bid adjustments and granular device-segmented reports.

What we’re hearing so far
With the goal of simplifying search managing, we’re continuing to invest in solutions that will help marketers run effective search campaigns across devices, as well as across channels -- and our clients are seeing the benefits.

Keith Wilson, VP of Agency Products at The Search Agency, notes: "Recent enhancements in DoubleClick Search support for enhanced campaigns has been a wind on our backs for transitioning clients to enhanced campaigns. The overall functionality within DoubleClick Search is evolving rapidly, and that enables our teams to keep pace with the changes in the paid search space with the right tools.”

After performing initial upgrades using DoubleClick Search tools, Samridhi Chawla,
 Senior Account Manager at Acuvue, said: "Our accounts look cleaner after upgrading to enhanced campaigns. The DoubleClick Search team has done a great job in making the transition smooth, and we're already seeing positive results."

Hear more about our enhanced campaigns vision from our clients and product experts:

  

To learn more about how clients have been using our enhanced campaigns upgrade tools, we’ll be at SMX Advanced in June, where Eric Papczun, US President of Performics, will share his company's plans, successes, and best practices on upgrades through using search platforms like DoubleClick Search. Register here, and stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog to learn more about our support of enhanced campaigns features.

Posted by Kim Doan, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

Today’s post about improving results with location bid adjustments is the second in a bidding best practices series. The series began with prioritizing and iterating on your bid adjustments.

Your advertising performance almost always varies by location, no matter what kind of business you run. The good news is that if you optimize your bids for different locations, you can increase your sales and ROI.

Optimizing bids for better performance by location
With enhanced campaigns, it’s now much easier to boost bids in locations where your performance is stronger and reduce bids where performance is weaker. Before enhanced campaigns, you’d have to set up and manage an identical campaign for every location where you wanted unique bids. Since this was hard, the most common approach to location optimization has been to cut out underperforming locations using targeting exclusions. But in the long run, this approach can limit your growth and reduce your business competitiveness. So we recommend using bid adjustments rather than location exclusions.

Calculating location bid adjustments
Start by downloading a location performance report. Here’s how, using the AdWords interface:

1. Set the date range to the past 30 days (longer if your campaign is on the smaller side).
2. Click on the “Location details” button and select “What triggered your ad.”
3. Click the View button and select Region.
4. Click Download.

To maximize orders or leads at a particular CPA or ROI level, a common best practice for setting bid adjustments is to equalize your target metrics across all locations. As a math formula, it looks like this:

Location bid adjustment = 100% * ( ( Campaign goal ÷ Actual performance ) - 1 )

Here’s an example from a campaign with a cost-per-action goal.

Example of calculating your location bid adjustment

Location	Conversions	Cost	CPA	CPA Goal	Location bid adjustment
Florida	100	$800	$8	$10	100% * [(10÷8) - 1] = +25%
New York	120	$1080	$9	$10	100% * [(10÷9) - 1] = +11%
Ohio	70	$1050	$15	$10	100% * [(10÷15) - 1] = -33%
Pennsylvania	85	$850	$10	$10	100% * [(10÷10) - 1] = 0%

You can implement your bid adjustments in the AdWords interface (directions) or using the AdWords Editor (directions).

Businesses with local stores or service areas
Closer customers are often more likely to buy from you and less costly to serve. So if your business has local stores or service areas, you should consider optimizing your bids based on customer proximity. For example, you can easily set one location target for customers within 2 miles of your business locations, and a second target for customers within 20 miles of your business locations (directions). Then use the approach described above to calculate your optimum bid adjustment for your two location extension targets.

Tips and reminders

• Maintain a broad location target to cover your entire potential market. Targeting too narrowly can limit your reach, clicks and conversions.
  
  
• It’s OK to set overlapping location targets with bid adjustments. We’ll only apply the most specific location bid adjustment. For example, say you have a +10% bid adjustment for Canada and a +20% bid adjustment for Montreal. When someone searches in Montreal, your bid will be increased by 20%. And you’ll see distinct performance stats for Montreal and all of Canada except Montreal on the Locations subtab on the campaign Settings main tab.
  
  
• Be careful when you don’t have much data. Otherwise your calculated bid adjustments could end up being too high or too low, and you could end up with worse results instead of better. If you don’t have statistical expertise on hand, we recommend not adjusting bids in locations with fewer than 1000 clicks and 30 conversions, as a general rule of thumb. Lengthening the date range for your reports to the past 90 days or more can help.
  
  
• Periodically check performance and increment your bid adjustments. From time to time, check your performance for each location target on the Locations subtab. Incrementally raise your bid adjustment where your performance is above your goal, and lower your bid adjustment where your performance is below your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids over time and adjust to changing consumer behavior.
  

Posted by John Sullivan, Global Search Solutions

On June 11th, Google Shopping will complete the transition to a commercial model in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. When the transition is complete, free product listings will no longer appear on Google Shopping. We believe this new model, built on Product Listing Ads, will help retailers of all sizes connect the right products with customers around the world, increase clicks to their sites, and convert more shoppers into buyers.

Onward and upward
We've been pleased with the rapid adoption of Google Shopping by the global retail community. Over 1 billion products are now being promoted globally on Google Shopping, largely driven by a 300% year-on-year growth in participating sellers (including many aggregators and marketplaces). And we’ve seen 20% growth in traffic to retailers over the past year.

Global merchant success stories
We’ve heard from a variety of retailers around the world who have embraced Google Shopping and are seeing great results. Check out the highlights below:

France	eSearchVision helped Vertbaudet, a retailer specializing in children’s apparel and decor, launch a Product Listing Ads campaign that accounted for 7% of sales from their website in the Autumn-Winter 2012 season.
Japan	Enigmo runs a social shopping site offering domestic customers brand items from sellers outside of Japan. After they optimized their data on Google Shopping and created a Product Listing Ads campaign, Enigmo succeeded in increasing the number of new customer sign-ups.
Netherlands	TuinFlora.com is a family-owned business that exports flower bulbs, seeds and plants across Europe and the US. They promoted their products on Google Shopping for their top export markets and saw their conversion rates increase by 20%.
United Kingdom	Forward3D helped New Look, a leading fashion retailer for men, women and teens in the UK, experiment with Product Listing Ads to increase reach and improve engagement beyond standard text ads. They used Merchant Center labels to categorize the catalogue by price bracket, balancing CPAs and ROI more effectively. As a result, New Look saw a 24% increase in revenue week over week, 68% overall revenue growth and 40% improved ROI.  Equimedia helped WHSmith.co.uk, a retailer of books, stationery, and more, promote their products on Google Shopping. Product Listing Ads represent 6% of total PPC spend but generate 10% of the revenue, producing a total ROI that is 59% better than standard text ads.
Germany	Hurra.com helped bonprix, a leading fashion retailer, complement standard text ads with Product Listing Ads, achieving a 50% higher click-through-rate and 30% higher conversion rate at the same cost-per-click.

Make the most of Google Shopping
Whether you’re just getting started with Product Listing Ads or are looking for more advanced optimization strategies, we’ve compiled our top recommendations to succeed with Google Shopping below. Read on for these quick tips and sign up for one of our upcoming Hangouts on Air in your country to learn how you can prepare for the global commercial transition.

If you’re new to Product Listing Ads

• Get started with Merchant Center, the place to upload your product data to Google 
• Once your products are in Merchant Center, create a Product Listing Ads campaign to promote your products on Google Shopping

If  you’re already using Product Listing Ads

• Use the All Products target to quickly promote your entire inventory
• Take advantage of automatic bidding for Product Listing Ads, which saves you time and resources by enabling Google to automatically adjust your CPC bids to optimize traffic
• Provide high quality data and follow our updated product feed specifications
• Promote products across devices by ensuring all of your Product Listing Ads campaigns are upgraded to enhanced campaigns

For agencies

• Join Google Engage to get the latest agency news, trainings and support from the Google Shopping team

Need additional assistance? We’re happy to help. Feel free to visit our Help Center or call one of our Shopping specialists in your country below:

• Australia - 1800 087 124
• Brazil - 0800 727 8947
• Czech Republic - 800 500 353
• France - 805 540 727
• Germany - 0800 5894933
• Italy - 800930819
• Japan - 0120-984-684
• Netherlands - 0800 2500026
• Spain - 900 814 539
• Switzerland - 0800 002539
• United Kingdom - 0800 169 0711

Posted by: Sameer Samat, Vice President of Product Management, Google Shopping

The latest version of AdWords Editor gives you more ways to make bulk changes to your enhanced campaigns. With the new version, you can:

• Set bid adjustments for placements, topics, and audiences.
• Set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level.
• Upgrade campaigns in bulk using CSV import or the Add/update multiple campaigns tool.
• Use the new ValueTrack {ifmobile}, {ifnotmobile} parameters.

On the Keywords tab, new columns show detailed keyword performance metrics on the Display Network, enabling you to manage and optimize your Display campaigns with the same granular level of control as your Search campaigns. For example, you can adjust keyword bids depending on their performance, and fine-tune campaigns based on your specific goals.

We've also improved the performance statistics that you can download for locations, audiences, and placements.

For more details about these changes and other updates, see our AdWords Editor 10.1 release notes.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 10.1. To learn more about upgrading, including how to keep unposted changes and comments when you upgrade, please review these instructions. You can also download version 10.1 from the AdWords Editor website.

Note: Support for previous versions of AdWords Editor will continue for four months to allow you time to upgrade. To ensure uninterrupted use of AdWords Editor, you will need to upgrade by September 16, 2013.

Posted by Darcy Lima, AdWords Editor

Have you ever wished you could apply automated bidding to part of your campaign while manually bidding on other keywords in the same campaign? Or maybe you’ve wanted to apply a single bid strategy to some keywords, but they’re in different campaigns?  Now you can with flexible bid strategies, available in the next couple weeks when you upgrade to an enhanced campaign. Flexible bid strategies let you apply multiple bidding strategies within a single campaign or across campaigns. This provides you the freedom to choose the appropriate bid strategy without being constrained by account structure.

Control and insights with new flexible bid strategies

Ramping up over the next couple weeks, flexible bid strategies can be found in the Shared library (see image below). Once you’ve created a flexible bid strategy, you can apply it to specific keywords, ad groups, and campaigns and monitor its performance.

Click here to enlarge

Here’s more information about what each flexible bid strategy does and when you can use it:

Flexible bid strategy	What it does	When to use it
Target search page location (new bid strategy)	Automatically tries to get your ads to the top of the page, or onto the first page of search results	+ When you want more visibility on the first page of Google Search results or in the top positions
Maximize clicks (flexible version of Automatic Bidding)	Automatically sets bids to get you the most clicks, within a target spend amount that you choose	+ When site visits are your primary goal + When you want to maximize traffic on long tail terms and keep to a certain spend
Target CPA (flexible version of Conversion Optimizer)	Automatically sets bids to get you as many conversions as possible while reaching your target average CPA goal	+ When you want to get the most conversions at your target CPA
Enhanced CPC (flexible version of Enhanced CPC)	Automatically adjusts your manual bid up or down based on each click’s likelihood to result in a conversion	+ When conversions are the main objective, but you also want control over keyword bids

Some of our bid strategies incorporate real-time details during each auction such as device, location, and other context signals to adjust your bids based on your ad’s predicted performance. This approach offers the potential for even better performance. Target CPA and Enhanced CPC use this technology today, and it will be incorporated into other bidding strategies in the future.

Customizing the new flexible bid strategies to work for you

Flexible bid strategies let you apply a bid strategy to keywords across separate campaigns, or test multiple bid strategies within a single campaign. Say, for example, you run a network security consulting business. You might have some keywords like ‘network security’ in multiple campaigns focused on generating awareness for your business. You can apply the Target search page location bidding strategy to those specific keywords regardless of where they are in your account, to keep them in top positions.  Then let’s say you have another campaign mainly aimed at lead generation with keywords like ”perimeter network security audit,” but which also has some awareness building keywords, too, like “perimeter network security best practices.” In this campaign, you can use the Target CPA bidding strategy for the lead generation ad groups and use the Target search page location bidding strategy for the awareness building keywords.

You can learn more about flexible bid strategies by visiting our help center. As with all types of automation, we recommend that you periodically monitor your bid strategies’ performance relative to your advertising goals.

In addition to new features like flexible bid strategies and support for many-per-click conversions in Conversion Optimizer, we’re working on more optimization features to help you more easily achieve your advertising goals, like return on ad spend. Let us know what you think of these new flexible bid strategies on our Ads Google+ page and stay tuned for more to come.

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

What’s the future of digital media and marketing? How are CMOs thinking about leveraging digital to reach and engage audiences? What marketing channels are proving most effective in building brands digitally - paid, owned or earned?

These are some of the questions executives from across the digital marketing ecosystem will address at thinkDoubleClick, Google’s annual discussion on the state of digital.

Register now to join the event livestream on June 4th, 9:00 AM - Noon Pacific. Registration enables you to participate in the conversation, and ask speakers and panelists your questions with #thinkDCLK.

thinkDoubleClick 2013 speakers include:

• Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company
• Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive
• Peter Horan, President & COO, Answers
• Meredith Kopit Levien, Group Publisher & Chief, Forbes
• Randall Rothenberg, CEO, IAB
• Lorraine Twohill, Chief Marketing Officer, Google
• Michael Learmonth, Chief Editor, AdAge

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th!

Missed last year’s event? It’s not too late to catch up with the videos below.

Posted by Scott Brown, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Behind every successful AdWords campaign are well planned out keywords and ad groups. In the past, you may have relied on tools like the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator to identify new keywords and ad groups, get traffic estimates, and choose competitive bids and budgets. Over time however, we’ve heard from you that having two tools for search campaign building was cumbersome.

We’re constantly working to simplify the process of building campaigns, and today we’re happy to announce the launch of a new tool, Keyword Planner, which combines the functionality of the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into a smooth, integrated workflow. You can use Keyword Planner to find new keyword and ad group ideas, get performance estimates for them to find the bid and budget that are right for you, and then add them to your campaigns. You’ll also see some new features in the tool - some of which we’ll highlight below.

Find new keyword and ad group ideas
To find new keyword and ad group ideas, use Keyword Planner just like you would the Keyword Tool. You can search for ideas related to a keyword, your website, or a category. A new feature in Keyword Planner also allows you to ‘multiply’ keywords, or combine two or more keyword lists to generate new keywords. Unlike Keyword Tool, where you were only able to target countries, you'll now be able to target individual cities and regions within a country. Also, for each keyword idea you'll only get statistics that are specific to that exact term.  To decide what keyword match type to use, you'll have to add the keyword to your plan and look at performance estimates for each match type.

Add keywords and ad groups to a plan
Next, you can review your keyword and ad group ideas and add them to a plan. Think of a plan as a shopping cart of ideas that you can add to a current or new campaign. While you build your plan, you can add ideas, delete ideas, and change your bid range to see total estimated clicks and cost. When you’re done building your plan, you can click “Get estimates and review plan” to pick a specific bid and get more detailed estimates.

Get performance estimates
When you review your plan, you’ll see a graph with a range of max CPC bids and daily performance estimates for your keywords and ad groups. To see more detailed estimates, you can select a bid (and optionally, a budget as well). You can also update your targeting settings, keywords, and ad groups to further refine your estimates. For example, you can change all your keywords in an ad group to phrase or exact match to see how this could affect performance.

When you’re satisfied with your plan, you can apply it to a new or existing campaign or download it to implement later.

With the launch of this new, combined tool, we will be sunsetting the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in about 60 days. Please view this article for an in-depth look at the differences between using Keyword Tool and Keyword Planner.  Going forward, you'll have to log in to AdWords to use Keyword Planner, which will enable you to get customized results and estimates. We hope that this integrated workflow will help you build and grow your campaigns even more efficiently. To learn more about Keyword Planner, you can also visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar, Product Manager, AdWords

Whether they are searching for a rental car near their office or a bakery close to a relative’s house, people expect fast, relevant and useful results from Google Maps. Great local commercial listings have always added useful information to Google Maps and helped businesses connect with consumers.

Ads in the new Google Maps
This past Wednesday at I/O, Google’s annual platform developers event, we provided a glimpse of the future of Google Maps. The new Google Maps instantly draws immersive, uniquely tailored maps for each person that adapt with every click and search to highlight the things that matter most.

We’re testing new ways to show ads in the new Google Maps:

• Search ads with location extensions can appear directly on the map and just below the search box
• Search ads without location extensions can appear just below the search box

Ads can appear just below the search box and directly on the map

Just like in the current version of Google Maps, the best way to have your ads seen by potential customers in the new Google Maps is to run search ads with location extensions. You’ll also need ensure you’re including search partners in your campaign network settings to appear on Google Maps.

Posted by Nabil Naghdy, Google Maps Product Manager

With over 85 billion app downloads across the Google Play and Apple App stores, advertisers need to know how to promote their apps as efficiently as possible. They need to understand what channels drive the most engaged users and find ways to increase user engagement within their apps. With AdWords, advertisers can accomplish these goals by attributing app downloads to the right channels, measuring in-app activity, optimizing media spend towards the most valuable channels and reaching existing users with targeted messages.

Join Google on Tuesday, May 21st (10am PT/1pm ET) for a webinar about how you can drive deeper engagement with your app users. The webinar will walk you through Google’s basic app promotion tools and introduce new features.

Sign up for our webinar today by registering here.

We look forward to seeing you on May 21st!

Posted by Cameron Grace, Display Product Launch Lead