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We’re pleased to announce that professor registration for the 2012 Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC 2012), our global student competition, is now open!

Student registration, however, will open January 31, 2012. In order for student teams to participate in the competition, their professors must first register.

But what is this challenge, you ask? 

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a global online marketing competition for students from any higher education institution in the world. Students must develop and run a successful online advertising campaigns through Google AdWords for a real business or non-profit organization, exercising advertising and consulting skills and summarizing them in the campaign reports.

Once the campaigns finish running, Google and a panel of independent academics from all over the world will select the winning teams. Their selections will be based on the success of the campaigns and the quality of the competition reports.

There are exciting prizes awaiting the winners:

• Trip to Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California for the Global Winners
• Trips to local Google offices for Regional Winners
• Opportunity to win donations worth $30,000 for the non-profit organizations the students partner with 
• A brand new award category for GOMC 2012 - The Best Social Media Page Award - more details to follow!

Last year’s challenge featured 50,000 participants representing 100 countries, and this year’s challenge is expected to boast even more. Students, here’s your chance to make a global impact!

To learn more about the Google Online Marketing Challenge, please visit our website: www.google.com/onlinechallenge.

Posted by AJ Pascua and Anndrea Moore, GOMC Team

Think With Google's December Adventure finishes this week with tips on measurement and analytics. We hoped you enjoyed our insights and daily tips this month on the Think with Google Plus Page. If you missed them or wanted to review, here are the previous weeks' recaps for:

• Week 1: Search insights and tips
• Week 2: Mobile insights and tips
• Week 3: Display insights and tips

Here are the three tips and insights covered this week (and a bonus treat):

#1. Monday - According to the Google ebook Zero Moment of Truth, consumers now consult an average 10.7 sources before making a purchasing decision.
Use Multi-Channel Funnels reporting in Google Analytics to see a user's interactions beyond the last click prior to conversion.

#2. Tuesday - 44% of searches for last-minute gifts and store locations are predicted to be from mobile devices
See how well your mobile site is facilitating conversions with mobile reporting in Google Analytics.

#3. Wednesday - Use Real-Time reporting to see the impact of your holiday promotions within seconds
Use Real-Time reporting in Google Analytics to monitor the immediate impact of email offers and other campaigns that drive customer purchases.

And as a bonus holiday treat...
Holiday measurement tips - straight from the source!
As our final posting for Think with Google's December Adventure, we've wrapped up a handy video from Google's Digital Marketing Evangelist (and best-selling author) Avinash Kaushik on how to measure your holiday campaigns.


To see future insights and tips, please follow Think with Google on Google+.


Happy holidays from Google!


Posted by Andrew Truong, Inside AdWords Crew

Last month we introduced Google+ Pages to provide a new way for you to build a public identity on Google+. We’ve been listening closely to your feedback and today we’re introducing several new tools and controls to help you better manage your pages. These new features will start appearing in Google+ accounts over the next couple days; so if you don’t see them today make sure to come back and look for them later this week.

Multiple Administrators and Ownership Transfer
Starting today, you’ll be able to add up to 50 managers who can login and manage your page with their own accounts. Managers can publish posts, respond to comments, add photos, change profile information, and even add/remove other managers.

We've also added the ability for you to transfer page ownership. Ownership of a page can only be transferred to an existing manager. To do so, click the ‘Transfer Ownership’ link in the new Page Settings panel and then choose one of the managers you’d like to transfer ownership to.

Notification Settings
Another feature we’ve added is a way for you as a page owner to get notifications about actions on your page. With this change, you’ll be able to customize the notifications for your business page separately from your personal profile, allowing you to choose the level of detail that’s most appropriate for you. These new settings allow you to change the email address where page notifications are sent, customize what you’d like to be notified about, and adjust how you’d like to be notified.

To adjust these settings click on the Page Settings link and look for the “Set delivery preferences” section. There, you can set what actions you'd like to be notified about and optionally specify a different email address (than your personal email address) for your page notifications. If you have multiple managers on your account, you might want to change the address to a team address that everyone will have access to.

Unified +1 & Circle Count
We’re also making a change to the +1 count shown on your Google+ Page. Starting today, the bold count on your page will include both your +1’s on Google+ and across the web, as well as the number of people who have added you to a circle. This change will not affect the way +1’s are counted or displayed on ads or search results.

We believe that this simple change will better highlight the number of ways people have chosen to recommend and follow your business with Google.

You can learn more about these new features in the Google+ Help Center. We’re working on even more ways to improve the Google+ experience for your business, so please keep sending us your feedback and stay tuned in 2012!

Michael Nestler, Google+ Pages Engineer

Think With Google's December Adventure finished its third week with a focus on display and trends from 2011.

Here are the five insights and tips we covered this week:
Click on the titles to view the original posts and comments.

#1. Monday: Rich media ads are 2.7x as effective in driving purchase intent vs. basic Flash

• Be sure to make video a core component of your display advertising mix to maximize holiday sales.

#2. Tuesday: 96% of people visiting a website leave without completing a transaction

• Use remarketing to follow-up with targeted shoppers who browsed your products and left, or abandoned their shopping carts part-way through the purchase process.

#3. Wednesday: Rich media ads grew 66% last year and are predicted to be over 50% of all display ads by 2015

• Browse our Rich Media Gallery or our new ad formats for mobile to check out some of our "best of" examples to get your creative juices flowing.

#4. Thursday: Use Google Zeitgeist 2011 to see the hottest gifts and trends for holiday shopping lists

• Our year-end Google Zeitgeist launches today, and it's chock full of fascinating tidbits about what's been burning up the search queries this past year

#5. Friday: The search for holiday gifts is on!

• Find out what's burning up the search charts as we approach the holidays with this week's top shopping queries.

To learn more, follow Think with Google on Google+ or add this helpful holiday calendar to automatically see these tips on your Google Calendar.

Posted by Andrew Truong, Inside AdWords Crew

Is your online campaign performing as well as it could be? Do you want to get more out of your digital marketing campaigns and increase your ROI?

We’ve heard from many of our users that with so much data, it can be hard to know where to begin. If you’d like to get a deep dive on how to increase your conversions, then please join us on Thursday for a Learn with Google webinar:

Webinar: Driving Conversions Using Google Products 
Date: Thursday, December 15
Time: 11am - 12pm PST / 2pm - 3pm EST
Sign up here! 

This webinar will teach you how to optimize your AdWords account for conversions on Search, Display, and Mobile. Learn to navigate Conversion Tracking, Search Funnels, and the many product features that can help you get your ad in front of the most relevant audience to drive more conversions.

The webinar will be presented by Tiffany Bristol, a Google account manager, and will include Q&A.

Posted by Dora Nagy, Product Marketing Manager

Think With Google’s December Adventure continued this week with a focus on mobile.

Here are the four mobile-related insights and tips we covered this week (and a fun factoid):
Click on the titles to view the original posts and comments.

#1 Monday: Search from mobile devices up 5x in the past two years!

• Capture the mobile opportunity with separate campaigns targeting mobile devices only. Advertisers with mobile-optimized sites and mobile-targeted campaigns have seen an average 11.5% increase in mobile CTR.

#2 Tuesday: 59% of users visit a business and 40%+ make a purchase after using their smartphones to find local information

• Use AdWords location extensions to showcase key business information, including your address, phone number and driving directions.

#3 Wednesday: 65% of tablet owners use their tablets at least one hour per day

• Target tablet devices as part of your AdWords campaigns and, if you have tablet specific products or services, create tablet-only campaigns.

#4 Thursday: 51% of consumers are more likely to purchase from mobile-optimized websites

• Get best practices and personalized tips on how to make your website more mobile-friendly at www.HowToGoMo.com.

#5. Friday Fun Factoid: One, Two, Dial my Smartphone

• Sign of the times: We agree with this article and predict that more kids will know how to use a smartphone than know how to tie their shoes. Watch endearing video on the post to see just how important it will be to market your content to the four screens: mobile, tablet, laptop and TV.

To learn more, follow Think with Google on Google+ or add this helpful holiday calendar to automatically see these tips on your Google Calendar.


Posted by Andrew Truong, Inside AdWords Crew

If you’re focused on conversions and CPA (cost-per-acquisition), you may already be using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC to optimize your campaigns to get you more conversions at a lower cost. To ensure that your campaign settings are also in line with your conversion goals, we plan to migrate existing campaigns using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC with “Optimize for clicks” ad rotation to “Optimize for conversions” ad rotation. Our studies have shown that campaigns moving from “Optimize for clicks” to “Optimize for conversions” see a 5% increase in conversions on average. This migration is scheduled for February 2012.

To get answers, we partnered with Ipsos to measure the relative and combined effects of YouTube in-stream ads and TV ads on ad recall and brand metrics across six advertiser campaigns.

After conducting tests of 15- and 30-second spots on YouTube pre-roll instream ads and TV ads, the results revealed that YouTube and TV ads work better together. People who watched both YouTube and TV ads showed a 2X increase in brand recall than people who only saw TV ads. Those that only watched a YouTube ad had a brand recall rate 1.5X those who only watched a TV ad.

In March, we introduced the +1 button on search results to make it easier for people to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching. Then in early October we expanded that to include Google Display Network ads across the web on both desktop and mobile.

Today, we’re excited to expand this capability to publishers who sell their ad space directly to advertisers using a new creative template available in DART for Publishers and the new DFP. Using the Image or Flash with Google +1 custom creative template, publishers can now add the Google +1 button to their ads so that people can share your offers with others across the web.

If you’d like to learn more about how publishers can integrate the +1 button on your direct-sold ads, please visit the DART or new DFP help centers.

Posted by David Flinner, Product Manager.

As we announced earlier this week, we'll be sharing insights and daily tips this month on Think with Google's Plus Page, to help you make the most of your holiday marketing.

Here are the four search ad related insights we covered this week (and a fun factoid):
Click on the titles to view the original Google+ posts and comments.

1. Monday: 57% of shoppers still plan to do most of their holiday buying after Cyber Monday – Prepare for the big shopping days ahead by scheduling budgets to meet demand. Learn how in the "budget scheduling" section of this helpful article to learn how.
2. Tuesday: Online ads are surprisingly under-served during the holidays – Take a look at the seasonal spike in shopping queries versus the level supply of ads. Grab people's attention with ads at the top of the page by taking advantage of our newly launched options for Automated Rules.
3. Wednesday: Searches for "layaway" are heating up – Layaways are catching fire again with budget-conscious consumers at retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart - especially in the Southern US. Geo-target your campaigns to areas where holiday shoppers are looking through the Location Targeting Tool.
4. Thursday: December has arrived, bringing eight projected $1 billion+ online shopping days – Target those last-minute, undecided buyers with keyword terms such as "quick and easy gift ideas." The rush to purchase gift cards has also started, so make sure you have relevant keywords and ads.
5. Friday Fun Factoid: The Cold Truth – Did you know people in the US catch an average of three colds a year, per person? At about 1 billion colds annually, that's nothing to sneeze at. And this year's cold season could be worse than usual: Cold- and flu-related searches on Google are up by 61% so far over the same period last year. That means we'll see 14.1 million more cold- and flu-related searches this December than last December. So wash your hands before hitting the keyboard and bundle up, folks!

To learn more, follow Think with Google on Google+ or add this helpful holiday calendar to automatically see these tips on your Google Calendar.
Posted by Andrew Truong, Inside AdWords Crew