26 Jun 2019
The Official Google Blog
3 ways to improve video viewability and grow revenue
Video content has reached new heights and more screens than ever before, making video ads one of the most engaging and effective ad formats today. But as people gain more control to watch video content anytime and anywhere, there are still a number of design and technical factors that can get in the way of people actually seeing those video ads. For video ads to work, people have to be able to see them-that's where viewability comes in.
Higher viewability can lead to better viewing experiences for users, better results for advertisers, and increased demand, fill rates, and revenue for publishers. In fact, increasing the viewability of video ads from 50 percent to 90 percent can result in more than an 80 percent revenue uplift for publishers (averaged across desktop and mobile sites) according to internal data.
To help publishers capture these opportunities and improve the viewability of their instream video ads on websites and apps, we've identified the 3 P's of viewability-premium experiences, placement, and player.
1. Premium experiences, everywhere people are watching
A premium video experience can drive more value for your viewers and make your video ad inventory more appealing to advertisers. By making your videos load quickly, easy to find, and offering captivating content across screens, viewers will keep returning to your platform and your viewability rates can increase.
An impactful update you can make is to improve the speed of your website or app. Start by using tools like PageSpeed Insights or App Speed reports to understand your existing speeds. Then, try implementing solutions like lazy loading for article pages (waiting to load a video until someone scrolls down to it on your website or app), which can decrease latency and increase viewability rates.
2. Placement-making it easy for people to find and watch your video content and ads
The placement of your videos can make a big difference in your viewability. To make it as easy as possible for people to find and watch your video content and ads, place videos in an optimal location. You can run tests to identify where users spend time on your website or app and place the video player in those locations. To do this, try moving your video player to a different location on your website or app, and then measure if viewability rates change in your Google Ad Manager viewability reports.
3. Player-implementing larger video players can maximize viewability
Typically, the larger the video player, the more viewable the ad. By increasing your instream video player size to fill the majority of the screen, you can increase the viewability of your video ads. For example, according to the State of Ad Viewability report published in September 2018, a 2560 x 1440 video player has the highest viewability rate at 95 percent. Evaluate your video ad inventory sizes and move away from smaller video ads that don't deliver the viewability rates desired by you or your advertising partners.Using Ad Manager to measure your video viewability
If you're just getting started with video viewability, make sure you have the Google Ad Manager Interactive Media Ads SDK implemented on your websites and apps to enable Google's MRC-accredited viewability solution, Active View. We also recommend using the Open Measurement SDK for mobile apps, which offers publishers a single SDK that can be used by multiple measurement providers to measure in-app viewability.
Google Ad Manager offers a variety of reports to help you understand and optimize your video ad viewability. You can combine different reporting dimensions, such as creative size and custom criteria such as above-the-fold or below-the-fold placements, to understand potential areas for improvement and ways to implement the 3 P's of viewability.
Following these best practices can have a big impact on improving the viewability of your video ads, and make the video ad experience better for everyone-users, advertisers, and publishers. For step-by-step recommendations on ways to improve the viewability of your video ads and measure your viewability in Google Ad Manager, download our guide on Video Viewability Best Practices for Publishers.
26 Jun 2019 5:00pm GMT
Get your campaigns ready to reach the always-on deal seeker
Marketers recognize Black Friday and Cyber Monday as major shopping holidays to prepare for. But did you know that only 18 percent of shoppers consolidate their holiday shopping to these days?
Consumers are on the lookout for deals year-round-about 60 percent say that finding a great deal is what they enjoy most about shopping. So whether you're gearing up for July 4th in the U.S., Bastille Day in France, or back-to-school shopping around the world, check out new tools coming soon to help you highlight in-store promotions, factor seasonal sales into your bidding strategy, and reach in-market consumers this season and beyond.
Heat up in-store sales with new Local campaign features
Before they're heading to the store, local shoppers are hunting for deals: searches for "on sale near me" have grown by 250 percent since 2017.
With Local campaigns, you can dedicate your entire campaign to offline sales and complement other channels like TV or print that also help deliver foot traffic to your business during important promotions. In fact, in recent global studies with 10 advertisers, we found that Local campaigns helped brands drive a median five times greater incremental return-on-ad-spend from their business locations.
We have new features coming for Local campaigns to make it available to more advertisers and improve how you manage your locations and creatives. In the next few weeks, you'll be able to set up your Local campaigns to drive calls to your business locations-even if you don't have store visits measurement. By expanding Local campaigns to optimize for calls, more advertisers will now be able to access it and highlight what makes their stores unique across Google Search, Maps, YouTube and more.
Starting today, you can also create location groups to make it easier to promote a subset of business locations. For instance, if you're selling special back-to-school product bundles at certain locations, use location groups to tailor your budget and messaging to this offer. Finally, asset reporting has started rolling out to give you better insight into creative performance. See what kinds of messaging and assets work best and use these learnings to improve your current and future creatives.
Sanborns, a leading department store in Latin America, is one brand using Local campaigns to drive results during key promotions.
We're excited to work with Google's new technology to help us grow our business. For Father's Day in Mexico and for a major sale we ran at the end of May, we used Local campaigns to make our in-store offers more prominent. It's amazing how we can get exposure with customers at the right time, and this helped us drive a 10x increase in store visits during these promotions year-over-year.
- Grupo Sanborns' marketing team
Put your in-store promotions front and center in local inventory ads
We're also making it easier for retailers to highlight in-store promotions for specific products through Shopping ads. Today, retailers have connected over 2 billion offers to physical store locations globally using local inventory ads. Now, you can add a promotion to your local inventory ads. Call out in-store offers like "20% off" or "buy one get one free" for inventory you have in stock and drive more nearby deal-hunters to your physical locations.
We're rolling this out in the U.S. and Australia, with more countries coming soon. If you're a retailer interested in participating, request to join the whitelist here.
Improve Smart Bidding performance by factoring in seasonal sales
Smart Bidding automatically optimizes your bids for every auction to help improve your return on investment. And while it factors in seasonality as a signal, we know there are key moments for your business-like during a big sale-when you can anticipate changes in conversion rates well in advance. For these occasions, we've introduced seasonality adjustments.
Let's say you're running a promotion for grills as people get ready for their summer cookouts. Based on past promotions, you predict seeing a 50 percent increase in conversion rates during your sale. Use seasonality adjustments to let Smart Bidding know to expect and prepare for this conversion rate increase, and help our systems ramp up performance more quickly.
Reach shoppers in the market for your products
In-market audiences for Search help advertisers drive more conversions by reaching qualified shoppers who are actively considering products or services to buy. These are aggregated and anonymized groups of consumers who've recently demonstrated an intent to purchase. This gives you a great opportunity to help your business stand out with compelling offers or deals when people are making their final decisions about what to buy.
We've recently rolled out more in-market segments across popular categories like beauty, sports, education and real estate. This includes over thirty new categories for retail, just in time for your seasonal sales.
No matter what season you're ramping up for around the globe, we hope these new products set you up for success!
26 Jun 2019 4:00pm GMT
Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Google adding features for advertisers to promote deals, drive in-store purchases
Local campaign updates, seasonality adjustments and more.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
26 Jun 2019 3:39pm GMT
Searchmetrics: Google’s diversity update did impact search results
Here is another study on the Google diversity update that shows the update did help with diversity.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
26 Jun 2019 12:41pm GMT
Using structured data to create a semantically enhanced web
At SMX Advanced, speakers Cata Milos and Max Prin highlight the rise of structured data for Bing and Google - and the work being done to expand its practical use.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
26 Jun 2019 12:21pm GMT
25 Jun 2019
The Official Google Blog
Extend the reach of your site personalization in Google Optimize
Personalization features in Google Optimize help businesses customize sites so their customers can find exactly what they're looking for, when they're looking for it. For example, marketers can display a special promotion on their site for all visitors, or provide product recommendations based on customers' previous purchase behavior.
Multi-page experiences in Optimize help you more easily deliver what your customers are looking for. Now, when you create a personalization or experiment, you'll see an option to add additional pages so that you can extend its reach throughout your entire site-from the initial landing page to the final checkout page. Let's take a look at two examples:
Coordinated customization across your entire site
Picture this: You're planning for a sale next month and will be offering a 20 percent off discount code to all visitors. You want to see if displaying this code across your entire site will increase site conversions. Because each type of page on your site has a unique layout, you need to find a different spot to display your promotion on each page.
Now with Optimize, you can test this idea by creating a single experiment and adding multiple pages to it using the "+ Add page" button.
From there, you'll have the option to edit those pages so that you can display the promotion wherever it looks best in each case-whether that's at the top of your site on the homepage or next to the pricing on your product page.
When you are happy with the results of the multi-page experiment, you can turn it into a multi-page personalization with just one click.
The right experience to the right audience
If you're using Optimize 360, you have the added ability to focus your experiment or personalization to your Google Analytics audiences.
Using the same sale example, let's say you want to offer a 35 percent off discount to your most loyal customers. You can create a multi-page personalization in the same way as described above. You can place the 35 percent discount banner and copy in all the pages that your loyal customers visit. When this personalization is launched, your loyal customers will always see this discount as they move from the home page, through your site, to the checkout page.
Want to learn how you can use this feature? Visit this article on our Help Center.
Multi-page experiences are already available to all Optimize and Optimize 360 accounts. You'll be able to ensure your customers see the right message at the right time-even as they explore multiple pages on your site. And by creating a more valuable online experience, they'll keep visiting you again and again.
25 Jun 2019 6:30pm GMT
04 Nov 2018
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
Halloween 2018: Crab claws!
Do you need something to cheer you up? You got it: I should explain this costume a little bit. At the US Digital Service, we do a thing called "crab claws." Crab claws is like visual applause-you pinch your fingers up and down to say "great job" or "congratulations" or "way to go." We do […]
04 Nov 2018 8:02pm GMT
08 Mar 2018
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
Some terrible personal news
Cindy Cutts, my wife and best friend, passed away earlier this week. While I was traveling for work recently, Cindy went to visit her family in Omaha, Nebraska. On Sunday, while enjoying time with family, Cindy started having trouble breathing. Her family quickly called 911 and paramedics took Cindy to the hospital, but Cindy lost […]
08 Mar 2018 12:17am GMT
22 Jan 2018
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
Talking to Mr. Money Mustache about the US Digital Service
Last week, I passed my one year anniversary as head of the US Digital Service (USDS). So when Mr. Money Mustache asked for an interview, I was delighted to talk about some of the work that the USDS does. If you aren't familiar with Mr. Money Mustache, he writes about a philosophy of badassity in […]
22 Jan 2018 6:58pm GMT
01 Apr 2017
Google Operating System
Google April Fools' Day 2017
April Fools' Day should probably be called Google Fools' Day, since there are so many Google hoaxes.
Google Japan developed a "bubble wrap" version of the Japanese keyboard. "The Google Japanese input bubble wrap version is a keyboard that realizes 'I want to press in my mind, I want to keep pressing'," according to Google Translate.
Another product for your smart home? Meet Google Gnome, "a voice-activated, hands-free tool designed to make backyard living effortless. Need to know what animal is squeaking in your bushes? Stay still and ask Gnome what sound an opossum makes. Running low on birdseed? That's where Gnome comes in. You can even use Gnome's proprietary high-intensity lasers to trim your hedges into whatever shape your heart desires."
The Chrome OS team brings the most popular mobile accessories to the Chromebook, which already blurs the line between mobile and desktop. Chromebook Groupie Stick, Chromebook Cardboard, Chromebook Workout Armband will soon be available in the Google Store. "To take advantage of beautiful, high-resolution displays, as well as great photo editing apps, we've carefully engineered the first Chromebook-sized selfie stick. Never again will you miss the perfect groupie."
Haptic Helpers make VR even more immersive. "We're taking VR to the next level with Haptic Helpers. Using a modest set of everyday tools, these VR virtuosos can simulate more than 10,000 unique experiences, all from the comfort of your own home. Smell the roses. Listen to the ocean. Feel a fluffy dog!"
You can now play the classic arcade game MS. PAC-MAN in Google Maps. "Avoid Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Sue as you swerve the streets of real places around the world. But eat the pac-dots fast, because this game will only be around for a little while." Just go to the Google Maps site or open the Google Maps app for Android or iOS and click or tap MS. PAC-MAN at the bottom.
Google Cloud Platform expands to Mars. "By opening a dedicated extraterrestrial cloud region, we're bringing the power of Google's compute, network, and storage to the rest of the solar system, unlocking a plethora of possibilities for astronomy research, exploration of Martian natural resources and interplanetary life sciences. This region will also serve as an important node in an extensive network throughout the solar system. Our first interplanetary data center - affectionately nicknamed 'Ziggy Stardust' - will open in 2018," mentions Google.
Google Netherlands came up with Google Wind, a machine learning technology that controls the weather. "The Netherlands has many windmills, some no longer in use, we can connect to Google Cloud Platform. So we use the existing Dutch infrastructure, machine learning, weather patterns to control the network of windmills when rain is approaching. The first test results are very promising: we seem to be able to provide sun and clear skies for everyone in the Netherlands," mentions Google Netherlands blog.
Google's search app for iOS is now optimized for cats and dogs. "On the Google app for iOS, you can now use 3D Touch on the app icon or head to settings and select I'm Feeling Woof or I'm Feeling Meow to let your dogs and cats get info on topics they care about-whether that means squeaky toys or a bowl of milk!"
Google also launched Google Play for Pets, a new category of Android games designed for cats, dogs and other pets.
Google Translate's Word Lens feature supports a new language: Heptapod B, the alien language from the movie "Arrival". "The challenge with understanding Heptapod B is its nonlinear orthography. Fortunately, Google's neural machine translation system employs an encoder/decoder system that internally represents sentences as high-dimensional vectors. These vectors map well to the non-linear orthography of the Heptapod language and they are really the enabling technical factor in translating Heptapod B."
01 Apr 2017 7:25am GMT
19 Feb 2017
Google Operating System
Gmail Blocks JavaScript Attachments
If you try to send a JavaScript attachment using Gmail or if you want to download a .js attachment, you'll get a new anti-virus warning: "Blocked for security reasons", "1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled".
.JS has been added to the long list of file types that are blocked by Gmail for security reasons. The full list: .ADE, .ADP, .BAT, .CHM, .CMD, .COM, .CPL, .EXE, .HTA, .INS, .ISP, .JAR, .JS (NEW), .JSE, .LIB, .LNK, .MDE, .MSC, .MSI, .MSP, .MST, .NSH .PIF, .SCR, .SCT, .SHB, .SYS, .VB, .VBE, .VBS, .VXD, .WSC, .WSF, .WSH. "To prevent against potential viruses, Gmail doesn't allow you to attach certain types of files, including: certain file types (listed above), including their compressed form (like .gz or .bz2 files) or when found within archives (like .zip or .tgz files), documents with malicious macros, archives whose listed file content is password protected, archives whose content includes a password protected archive."
The GSuite Blog informs that "for inbound mail, senders will get a bounce message explaining why the email was blocked. If you still need to send .js files for legitimate reasons, you can use Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, or other storage solutions to share or send your files."
You can still send JavaScript files using Gmail if you change the extension. What about downloading old .js attachments? Try the workarounds from this post.
19 Feb 2017 10:39am GMT
25 Jan 2017
Google Operating System
Google Image Search Shows Colorful Suggestions
Google Image Search has a different way to display suggestions: it now shows a long list of colorful boxes with related searches. You can click one or more boxes to dynamically refine search results.
For example, when searching for [sportswear], Google shows suggestions like: [women basketball], [tennis], [badminton], [golf], [volleyball], [nike woman], [alexander wang], [adidas], [fashion], [performance], [vintage], [trendy], [urban], [school], [gym], [90's], [70's], [vogue], [luxe], [avant garde], [korean], [italian], [french] and more. It's interesting to notice that each category of suggestions has a different color.
Here's the old interface, which had fewer suggestions and displayed thumbnails next to suggestions:
25 Jan 2017 9:39pm GMT
11 Nov 2011
Search Engine Watch - Latest
Google’s Timeline Search Option is History
As Google pushes fresh search results, a helpful Google search tool for historical searches quietly vanished earlier this month. Google has confirmed that Google's Timeline search option, which debuted in 2007, has been discontinued. By cl...
11 Nov 2011 9:35pm GMT
Google Releases Think Insights Trend & Research Hub for Marketers
Google has graduated Think Insights from beta. This tool now compiles real-time data from Google search and other platforms, combining those facts with additional studies, infographics, and more. Users can find the site at ThinkwithGoogle.com, a...
11 Nov 2011 8:45pm GMT
Google Snaps Up Katango, Social Contact Sorter Meant for Facebook
Google has just acquired startup Katango, makers of a Facebook friends list generating iPhone app released this July. Shortly after its debut, however, Katango's autogenerator faced serious competition from Facebook itself, as it rolled out ...
11 Nov 2011 7:35pm GMT
26 Aug 2011
Google Blogoscoped
The Emperor's Garden
The Emperor instructed the gardener to set up the new court's garden. "I want you to plant five trees growing the Crataan fruit," the Emperor said, "Because we asked people what fruit they like best, and most named the Crataan fruit!" The gardener replied, "Emperor, that is excellent thinking! But let me make some suggestions: First, how about we make one of the five trees bear the Muran fruit. Only one out of ten citizens loves it, but those peculiar citizens tend to love multiple times as much!" "Second," the gardener continued, "How about we make one of the five trees bear the Dratean fruit. No one loves it, but that's because no one knows it yet!" "Third," the gardener said, "How about we leave one spot in the garden empty. Who knows what new type of tree we'll discover that we can put there in the fut ...
26 Aug 2011 12:12pm GMT
15 Aug 2011
Google Blogoscoped
Color Sound Machine (and what else I've been doing lately)
For those of you who've been wondering whether I had turned to stone, fallen into a bottomless pit, or been climbing the Himalaya... no, none of that is true, even though you probably did notice I'm not actively blogging about Google here anymore*! Just now, a new iPad app I've been working on called Color Sound Machine went live, and this -- and all the other apps and games at Versus Pad** -- are actually what I am doing while not blogoscoping. *I've drafted unpublished posts explaining much more about past, present and future of Blogoscoped, and the history of Google news reporting, but ... oh, for now le ...
15 Aug 2011 4:00pm GMT
25 Feb 2011
Google Blogoscoped
Google drops reverse phone number lookup
One of the earliest specialist services provided by Google was reverse phone number lookup. If you used the "phonebook:" or "rphonebook:" operators together with a 10-digit US phone number, Google would show you the owner of that phone number, unless the number was unlisted. Google no longer provides that service. Not surprisingly, there was no press release marking the closure, but Google employee Daniel Russell has acknowledged the closure of the service in his blog. He hints at the possible pressures leading to the shuttering of the service: "As you can imagine, this was an endless source of hassles for people (who were surprised to see themselves searchable on Google) and for Google (who had to constantly de ...
25 Feb 2011 11:23am GMT