Car insurance Channel

It’s been a busy year for our customers. We’ve been inspired to learn from all of you -- advertisers from around the world, large and small, across so many industries. Thank you for the feedback you have given on our products as well as the insights you’ve shared. As we come to the end of 2014, we want to share some customer stories that we hope inspire you as much as they have inspired us.

L’Oréal Paris builds brand love with search.
L’Oréal Paris uses Search insights to get ahead of beauty trends and develops product and messaging to respond to consumer interests. The brand rejuvenated the home hair care color category and brought 50% new consumers to their Feria Ombré product. Learn more.
Sephora creates engaging mobile experiences for shoppers online and in stores.
Sephora uses the smartphone to showcase their beauty products with local inventory ads, which drive consumers to buy on Sephora’s website or in-store. In addition, Sephora engages their in-store shoppers with an app that allows them to scan products for more information. Learn more.

Hyatt drives engagement across the web with rich media.
Hyatt creates iconic video creative to attract female business travelers to book a room at a Hyatt hotel. The brand ran Lightbox Ads across the Google Display Network and TrueView video ads on YouTube. The result gave the brand exposure to 17M business travelers with a 26% lower cost per engagement than the campaign average. Learn more.

Extra Space Storage uses new innovations to reach customers in the most relevant and engaging way.
Extra Space Storage develops ads in real time with the newly launched ads customizers to make sure they are reaching their customer with the most relevant message. In a recent campaign, these ads led to a 113% increase in CTR. Learn more.

1-800 Flowers unlocks full customer value.
1-800 Flowers wanted to understand the full value of AdWords search ads - including the impact of click-to-call ads. They tracked estimated cross-device conversions to better understand how their customers interact across devices. They uncovered a 7% increase in overall conversions, and 8% to 10% of their overall AdWords revenue came from click-to-call. Learn more.

Point It implements automated bidding to save time and increase efficiency.
Point It, a Seattle-based search marketing agency, wanted to save their account managers time so they could focus on more strategic initiatives. The agency added automated bidding, and client performance boomed. The agency saw a 47% increase in ROAS, with CPAs that were 4% lower and revenues were 8% higher. Learn more.

We look forward to the year ahead - when we’ll share more product innovations, best practices and customer stories.

From our AdWords family to yours -  happy holidays, and we’ll see you in 2015.

Posted by Jenna Sandoval & Perla Campos, Product Marketing Managers, Performance Ads

People are living their lives online, using multiple devices throughout the day to shop, communicate and stay entertained. This constant connectivity means customers are engaging with your business in new ways after seeing your online ad -- they might call your business, download your app or go to your store. Last year, we introduced Estimated Total Conversions (ETC) to give you a more complete picture of how AdWords drives these new conversion types. Since then, we’ve been steadily improving ETC to measure phone calls, in-store purchases and cross device conversions.

With the holiday season upon us, it’s clear that the majority of sales for many industries still happen in person - in fact, roughly 95% of retail sales take place in physical stores.¹ And online activities are influencing offline transactions more than ever, bringing together the digital and physical worlds. Thirty-two percent of consumers say that location-based search ads have led them to visit a store or make a purchase,² so it's more important than ever for businesses to understand the impact that search ads have in driving visits to your physical locations, whether that’s a store, hotel, auto dealership or restaurant.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out store visit measurement to eligible advertisers in the U.S. as the latest enhancement to ETC. Learn more.

New paths to purchase increase consumer expectations, compelling businesses to re-think experiences and measurement

Constant connectivity brings with it an epic shift in the way businesses build experiences for their customers. Consumers are demanding more touchpoints with businesses -- more than 70% of consumers who have used ad features such as directions or the call button say it's important to have location information in ads,³ 74% of shoppers want to see how much inventory there is for a product at a nearby store.⁴ Getting better insight into these new, complex purchase paths can can help you optimize your online marketing programs, design better experiences for your customers and allocate budget more effectively. Store visit measurement is key to unlocking these insights. Here are a few ways that businesses are seeing value so far.

PetSmart, the nation's largest specialty retailer of pet supplies, uses store visits data to improve its customer shopping experience -- today, this often starts with people researching online and then visiting a store. Based on the insight that 10-18% of clicks on search ads lead to a store visit, PetSmart is now investing more in ads that reach customers across screens. For example, PetSmart has increased use of location extensions in their ads to show maps and directions to help people find nearby stores when they are searching for products like puppy treats or aquariums.
Office Depot, Inc., formed as part of the merger of Office Depot and OfficeMax, is a leading global provider of products, services and solutions for every workplace -- whether your workplace is an office, home, school or car. The company uses insights from store visits data to understand which products, such as laptops, printers or backpacks, are driving people to visit one of its 2,000 Office Depot and OfficeMax retail locations. These insights help Office Depot, Inc., decide which products to include in its local inventory ads. These ads show whether or not a product is available in a nearby store and where the nearest store is located. This makes it simple for customers to discover what products are in stock as they’re shopping and researching online. Christine Buscarino, VP of E-Commerce Marketing at Office Depot, Inc., says her team is now able to provide "contextually relevant information, where and when customers need it."
This feature has been carefully designed to keep data private and secure.  We never provide anyone’s actual location to advertisers. Instead, store visits are estimates based on aggregated, anonymized data from a sample set of users that have turned on Location History. This data is then extrapolated to represent the broader population.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can start using store visits in ETC, contact your AdWords account representative for more information.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Director of Product Management, Mobile Search Ads

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¹ eMarketer: Total US Retail Sales Top $4.5 Trillion in 2013, Outpace GDP Growth, April 2014
² Google/Ipsos MediaCT/Purchased, Research: Understanding Consumers’ Local Search Behavior, May 2014
³ Google/Ipsos MediaCT/Purchased, Research: Understanding Consumers’ Local Search Behavior, May 2014
⁴ Google/Ipsos MediaCT/Sterling Brands, Digital Impact on In-Store Shopping, October 2014

A few months ago, we introduced ad customizers, a new AdWords tool that lets you show highly relevant text ads to your customers, in real-time, even when you have thousands of products, services, and promotions—all changing by the day. Check out this video to see how you can put ad customizers to work in your accounts.
Use ad customizers to boost performance this holiday season

As the holiday season continues, there’s no better time than now to use ad customizers to connect with your customers at scale with the products and promotions they’re searching for, in real-time. Cameron Urry, Senior Interactive Acquisition Manager at Extra Space Storage, says: “We loved the ability to use the same ad template across multiple ad groups, while still being able to share a unique and relevant message to our potential customers.” To learn how Extra Space Storage used ad customizers to dynamically insert their daily inventory details, and increased their CTR by 113%, check out their story on Think with Google.
Elite SEM, a performance driven digital marketing agency, also implemented ad customizers for their client, Clarks USA, to help them dynamically count down the number of days left in their Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions, influencing customers to convert on their site. Kylie Beals, eCommerce Marketing Manager at Clarks Americas, says: "When using countdown ads over the Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend, we noticed a 32% uplift in CTR. The ads proved effective at driving urgency once the consumer was onsite because conversion rates increased 3% over static ads."

Introducing the new countdown widget

And, to make it even easier to dynamically count down to important events like promotions in your ads, we are rolling out the new countdown widget to AdWords over the next few weeks. Now, you can easily set up a countdown to an event just by typing “{=” into any line of ad text as you’re creating text ads in the ‘Ads’ tab. You can also preview what the countdown will look like in your ads before setting them live.
This holiday season, don’t forget to use ad customizers to dynamically show your customers:

• the number of days, hours, or minutes left to ship their holiday presents in time
• daily discounts or promotions for your hottest deals
• most-up-to date inventory availability on your products, or even the number of flights left to make it home in time for the holidays

To learn how you can set up ad customizers in your account, visit our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Karen Yao, Group Product Manager, AdWords

In AdWords for video, you add targeting and budgets to YouTube videos to make video ad campaigns. Until now, advertisers looking for info on how their videos performed outside of when they appeared as ads would need to jump over to YouTube Analytics for that data. Today we’re excited to announce a revamp of Videos reporting to offer more YouTube Analytics-style performance metrics right in AWV, bringing a greater focus on video creative to campaign management and optimization.
As you can see in the above chart, the new Video Analytics page prominently features a visualization of your video’s views, split by paid and non-paid to give a holistic sense of how your video is doing. The page also brings the powerful audience retention graph to AWV (formerly only available in YouTube Analytics) – with this you can fine-tune your creative by visualizing when audience interest waxes and wanes. For example, are you seeing a steep viewer drop-off at a certain point? This alerts you to an opportunity to re-cut your video to hold their interest longer.
This new reporting page also offers a panel that provides a sense of a video’s contribution to overall account performance, letting you see which videos are over or underperforming across all your campaigns, and more fully depicts how your video creative is helping to build your audience on YouTube.

For more information please check out the Help Center article here. We hope this new feature provides more context for your video ad creative, and helps you make ads people choose to watch.

Posted by Avi Fein, Product Manager, AdWords for video

There are millions of mobile apps with more introduced every day. But as we talked about during our livestream yesterday, how do you get people to find your mobile app?  And once they do, how do you keep them coming back? We’ve created best practice guides to help you do both.

The first guide, Tapping into Mobile App Installs, and its one-page checklist will show you how to drive installs of your app and grow a valuable user base. You’ll find out how to:

• Estimate the value of a user for your mobile app
• Attract potential users with compelling ads and app store pages
• Track and optimize the app downloads acquired through display, search, and video

The second guide, Tapping into Mobile App Engagement, and its one-page checklist will show you how to keep users coming back into your app for more. You’ll find out how to:

• Track what happens after users install your mobile app
• Create enticing ads that will re-engage users and deep link them to the most relevant parts of your app
• Drive engagement with your app by reconnecting with users through display and search

Building an app is only the first step. If you want it to be found and used often, download these guides today.

Check out these and other Google Best Practices over at g.co/GoogleBP.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

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¹"CEOs of Target, Macy's, and Others Weigh In on Black Friday Sales." Fortune.com, November 28, 2014. http://goo.gl/lz3s0t
²"Digital Impact on In-Store Shopping." Google/Ipsos MediaCT/Sterling Brands, October 2014. http://goo.gl/4TU0sY
³ibid

Advertisers have been using interest category marketing since 2009 to connect with people across the Google Display Network based on their interests.  Since then, we've added new and more powerful interest-based capabilities: affinity (for enthusiasts), custom affinity (for niche segments), and in-market audiences (for ready to buy shoppers).

As these more sophisticated audience tools offer advertisers more flexibility and control, “Other interests” will no longer be a targeting option for new and existing audience campaigns starting on January 15, 2015.

Current campaigns that target “Other interests” will continue to run until June 2015, after which they’ll be automatically upgraded to one of these options:

• Affinity audiences: Reach TV-like segments at scale to drive brand awareness.  Kraft used affinity audiences to reach cooking enthusiasts to build awareness for their new ‘Fresh Take’ brand. 
• Custom affinity audiences: Find niche segments that you custom-tailor for your brand. Electronic Arts used custom affinity audiences to engage fans of specific NFL teams in their recent Madden GIFERATOR campaign. They created 32 custom affinity audiences, one per NFL team, to reach fans of specific teams with display ads timed to the real-time action on the field.
• In-market audiences: Reach consumers while they’re actively browsing, researching or comparing products related to a category you choose. For example, the online car dealership Autobytel uses in-market audiences to reach customers actively researching specific models, price comparisons, and consumer reviews, as opposed to casual car enthusiasts. 

Additional details about this upgrade will be shared on this blog and in email communications to advertisers undergoing this change.

To learn more visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Max Maxwell, Product Manager, Display Ads

Whether you’re building out new campaigns or making critical budget decisions, we want to help you start off the new year with everything you need to connect with your customers, wherever they may be online: across the web, on mobile-sites, and in apps.

On December 10, 2014 at 12:30pm PT / 3:30pm ET, AdWords product managers and I will be hosting a half-hour livestream to look back at this year's new features, offer best practices, and share customer success stories.


Join us to:

• Understand how app developers are driving installs and re-engagement across search, display, and YouTube on all those shiny new devices people will unwrap this holiday season.


• Learn how LendingTree and Blinds.com are making more informed business decisions by measuring cross-device conversions and phone calls.


• Discover essential best practices for automated bidding and app promotion.


• Wrap up the year with an announcement you won’t want to miss. We think you’ll like it.

We hope you’ll join us December 10th, here on the Inside AdWords blog as we click through AdWords in 2014.

Posted by Jerry Dischler, Vice President, Product Management, AdWords

More than ever, people are searching on their devices at all hours and places. As a result, we’ve seen a 3.5X increase in shopping searches coming from smartphones year-on-year, and this continues to grow.¹ And we’re currently sending more mobile traffic to retailers per week from Google Shopping than we did during the peak of last holiday season.² So we're making it easier to find the information and images people need to make shopping better on mobile.

Providing richer mobile shopping experiences

Shoppers often want to see more detailed information about a product before making a purchase decision. Now, when they search for a specific product on their smartphone or tablet, we show an expandable product card with rich product content such as reviews and details for that item. For example, on a query such as the Nexus 10, results will show the image of the product along with merchants who carry this tablet, detailed information on the product, and product reviews from customers.


And for shoppers who procrastinate buying gifts until Christmas Eve (or can't wait for presents to arrive in the mail) we’re bringing the local shopping experience to more people with local inventory ads on tablet. Shoppers can now find products nearby using any device, which means that advertisers can promote their local products throughout the holiday season - even after the holiday shipping cutoffs have passed.


We're also helping to bring products to life on Google Shopping by allowing people to view images from multiple sources and explore products from any angle. Shoppers can now rotate selected products in 360 degrees to see them in more detail on mobile.


To ensure your products are visible to smartphone shoppers this holiday season, be sure to take advantage of Auction insights segmented by device. Evaluate how you stack up against your competition, identify missed opportunities and refine your bid modifier strategy to gain a greater share of voice on mobile. Check out our recent post on new reporting launches for more information on new insights now available in Shopping campaigns.

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¹Global Google Internal Data, Week of 10/25-10/31 ‘13 to ‘14. Shopping searches are defined here as queries from a smartphone that trigger a Product Listing Ad.
² Global Google Internal Data, Week of 12/2-12/8 ‘13 compared to 11/1-11/7 ‘14. Mobile traffic is defined here as traffic from smartphones.

Want to get more impressions and clicks for your Shopping campaigns? Or want to know how to spot missed opportunities in your bidding strategy and find your mobile share of voice? We introduced competitive landscape data last year so you can start answering those burning questions, and today, we’re excited to announce a handful of additions that’ll help you find new ways to optimize your Shopping campaigns and engage shoppers on all devices.

• Auction insights report lets you compare your Product Listing Ad (PLA) performance to other advertisers participating in the same auctions as you are. With impression share, overlap rate and outranking share, you’re able to see trends amongst your peers and strategic opportunities to improve your bidding strategies.

• Search impression share has been revamped to be more useful and aligned with text ads. You can now analyze your share of voice at the granularity you want with Search impression share in the Dimensions tab. You’ll know which campaigns are limited by a low budget with Lost IS (budget) and which ones need further optimization with Lost IS (rank). Note that we now calculate Search impression share at account level so you may notice a change in impression share between October and November.

• Device and time segmentation are available to help you refine your bid modifier strategy. You can see if your peers received more mobile impressions than you over the weekend with the Auction insights report segmented by device and day.

• Bid simulator columns show you what your advertising results could’ve been had you set different bids. You can add these columns in your Product groups tab and, for example, find product groups that’ll drive the most incremental clicks.

• Flattened view of your product groups presents another way to analyze your performance. It allows you to sort your product groups within an ad group based on performance data and easily identify which to optimize. For example, you can sort by impression share, find a few product groups with the lowest impression share, and fine-tune those bids within a matter of clicks.

We hope these additions will help you identify easy-wins for the holidays and unlock new, more actionable ways to optimize your Shopping campaigns. We’ll continue to explore other reporting needs so you have relevant and useful data at your fingertips. Visit our help center articles for more information on Auction insights, Search impression share, bid simulator columns, and the flattened product groups view.

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager, Google Shopping

Great product data is at the core of what drives successful Product Listing Ads (PLAs). As you’re preparing your Shopping campaigns for the upcoming holiday season, it’s important to ensure that your data is free of issues so your products are shown to shoppers. To help identify issues with your product data, we're excited to introduce the Diagnostics tab in Google Merchant Center.

The Diagnostics tab provides consolidated issue reporting for your Merchant Center account, feeds, and items. Through this tab, which replaces the Data Quality tab, you gain better insight into the health of your product data, making it easier and faster to prioritize key issues and get your products online.

The new Diagnostics tab also features new reporting tools to find:

• A historic overview of item eligibility status to spot and investigate changes that have caused recent item disapprovals
• A downloadable report containing all affected items and the reasons for disapprovals
• Traffic and impact metrics to help you identify how many items are currently impacted by specific issues

Try out the new Diagnostics tab today in your Merchant Center account. To learn more about changes to the tab, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Tom Beyer and Sven Herschel, Product Management, Google Shopping

Two years ago, we launched Merchant Promotions to retailers in the US, enabling them to show promotions alongside Product Listing Ads on Google search results and Google Shopping. Based on positive feedback, we’re excited to make Merchant Promotions available to retailers in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia and India.

Example of Merchant Promotions on Product Listing Ads on Google.com

Example of Merchant Promotions on Google Shopping

Participating US retailers have seen improved performance from their Product Listing Ads. For example, Venus’s PLAs with Merchant Promotions had a seven percent higher clickthrough rate (CTR), a two percent higher conversion rate, and an 11 percent lower cost-per-click (CPC) than their standard PLAs. Read more about Venus’ success with Merchant Promotions here.

Get started with Merchant Promotions
If you’re interested in learning more about Merchant Promotions or planning on running promotions this holiday season, please review this Getting Started Guide and fill out the interest form to get in touch with our team.

Posted by Christina Ilvento, Product Manager, Google Shopping

The Internet gives us more to look at every day: more information, more reviews, more offers. In fact, 49% of customers now visit 2 to 4 sites before they decide to buy¹. One powerful lever to re-engage these qualified customers and close the sale is RLSA.

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Automating your bids with AdWords can deliver better, more informed bids while saving you time.

In order to help people make the most of these strategies, we’ve put together A Bid for Every Auction, our new guide to Google’s automated bidding solutions. This best practices guide is for anyone looking to implement or improve their automated bidding.

This guide covers key topics like:

• An in-depth look at auction-time bidding and why it’s important to take advantage of it 
• Choosing the automated strategy that makes the most sense for your account 
• The best way to test bid automation in your account 
• Making a successful automated campaign perform even better 

If you’re considering taking the plunge with automated bidding, or if you already have and want to improve performance, download our guide or the one-page version of our automated bidding checklist today. Smart automation can lead to better results and more time saved.

Check out these and other Google Best Practices over at g.co/GoogleBP.

A few months ago, we announced ad customizers, a tool for optimizing your ad text and connecting with your customers in real-time. This kicked off a series of Tools for the Power User built to help you simplify campaign management, and act on key business insights at scale.

As the holiday season approaches, advertisers are busy ensuring their campaigns are set up for success, making it more important than ever to manage time-sensitive updates and make changes to your campaigns quickly and efficiently.
This month, we’re turning our focus to scalable and efficient workflow management in AdWords. Our goal is to help you find time-saving ways to manage these tasks at scale using simpler, integrated workflows within AdWords, so you can focus on your core business.

Our workflow tools fall into three core areas:

1. Bulk editing directly within AdWords
Advertisers need to manage multiple campaign tasks directly in the AdWords interface more efficiently. We’ve added new tools for editing your settings and extensions in bulk across your campaigns and ad groups. For example, you can edit location targeting or ad rotation settings across multiple campaigns, or update your ad extensions -- like sitelinks, callouts, and apps -- to promote your latest holidays deals across hundreds of your ad groups with just a few clicks.

Change multiple sitelinks using the Edit menu in your +Extensions tab

CarsDirect.com was able to add sitelinks across its accounts using the new bulk editing features, and saw a 13% increase in CTR, and 6% decrease in CPC. Allison Query from CarsDirect says, “The bulk feature for ad extensions has been crucial for keeping us competitive in the search results! It has trimmed our work time from hours to minutes."

You can also take advantage of other existing bulk workflows supported in AdWords to scale your work. Save time by using the copy and paste feature to swiftly copy over your existing keyword lists, ads, and ad groups into your new campaigns.

Advertisers need easier ways to make quick changes offline in spreadsheets, and apply them directly into AdWords where and when they need them. The improvements to bulk uploads include more intuitive spreadsheet formats, in-context options to upload changes directly into the appropriate campaigns and ad groups, and the ability to preview your updates and check for errors before posting them. Now, you can quickly upload new seasonal keywords into your ad groups, update your budgets across several campaigns, and post your changes with confidence because you can review them before you post them.

Review your spreadsheet edits with the preview tool before applying them to your campaigns

3. Advanced tools for more customized changes across your accounts
Earlier this year we launched AdWords Scripts for MCC to help advertisers with more complex editing needs quickly make customized changes across multiple accounts. You can use simple JavaScript code to make cross-account changes, create customized reports, send automated emails, and even pull data into and out of Google Spreadsheets. Learn more.

Many agencies are using AdWords Scripts for MCC to power customized ad text changes across their customers’ accounts, save time, increase relevancy, and improve their ad performance. iProspect uses Adwords Scripts to dynamically insert sitelinks into Cleartrip’s ad units and change their landing pages on the fly, resulting in a 34% increase in CTR and 24% decrease on Cost-of-Acquisition. Performics is using AdWords Scripts for MCC to update ad parameters with real-time discounts across their customer's accounts. Using MCC scripts for MonShowroom, Performics cut their workflow time by 60%.

These are just some of the tools we’ve created to help you move faster, and make changes at scale across AdWords. Stay tuned as we continue to improve AdWords Editor -- another important tool to help with complex changes at scale. New updates are coming soon!

Check out our Hangout on Air on Tuesday, November 4th at 9:30 am PST / 12:30 PM EST to learn how you can put these tools to work in your campaigns.

Posted by Ali Miller, Product Manager, AdWords

The trend of profit-driven marketing continues to gain traction.  Marketers are starting to shift the perception that they should really be viewed as profit drivers instead of cost centers.

Last quarter, we launched two resources to help you drive the conversation about profits from AdWords:

• Leading the Conversation on Profits: An Executive’s Guide to start enabling your teams for profit-driven marketing
• Leading a Conversation on Profits: A Practitioner’s Guide to defining profit and convincing stakeholders that it’s a better KPI

We hope that these guides have started some very interesting discussions across  your organization, most notably around how important marketing’s role is for growth.

To help advertisers bring these conversations to life, we’re excited to share our latest best practices guide called Making a Bid for Profit - Profit-Driven Bidding Tactics with AdWords.

This guide will show you how to:

• Discover profitable opportunities by running manual bid tests
• Find these opportunities faster by testing on a broader scale, and 
• Save time by scaling your bidding strategy so it’s easier to manage. 

Consider this a treasure map for finding untapped profits in your account. Download the guide today.  Happy hunting!

You can check out more Google Best Practices at g.co/GoogleBP.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Updated Nov 5 to include a link to the AdWords Express iOS app

Originally posted on the Google and Your Business Blog

Running a successful small business is about finding and connecting with the right customers. Business owners are increasingly using their smartphones, and so today we are making enhancements to both the Google My Business and the AdWords Express apps. We hope this makes it easier to find the right customers, whether they are looking for you at their desktop computer or on their phone on the go.

We've all heard the theories that people who do research online no longer care about the in-store experience … or don't even go to physical stores any more. Or that shoppers who use a smartphone in a store are looking to buy elsewhere.

Google decided to find out how much of this is true. We've just run a research study¹ with Ipsos MediaCT and Sterling Brands with the goal of discovering how smartphones and online information have changed the in-store experience.

The results, as they say, may surprise you.

The full details are available at Think With Google. But here's a sneak peek at what we learned.

First, the study confirmed two things most of us have suspected:

• Yes, today's consumers are better-informed than ever before. 
• They crave information throughout the shopping process, and often use smartphones to get it.

But we also learned that three pieces of "common wisdom" were really more like myths:

Myth #1: Search results only send consumers to e-commerce sites.

The reality: The things people find in search results actually can send them to local stores. In fact, 3 in 4 people who said they found local information in search results helpful also said what they learned made them more likely to visit a store.

Myth #2: Once an in-store shopper starts looking at her smartphone, the store has lost her attention and her sale.

The reality: In-store smartphone moments are actually a good opportunity for brick-and-mortar stores to connect with shoppers and to help them make a decision. 46% of those shoppers say they look at the retailer's own site or app for information. Only 30% look up details from a different retailer’s web site or app.

Myth #3: With so much information available online, shoppers only go to stores to transact.

The reality: Shoppers actually want more, not less, out of their in-store experience. They want informed, customized experiences. 69% of shoppers said they gathered information from physical stores at some point in their shopping cycle. The catch is that 2 out of 3 shoppers said they didn't find all the info they wanted.

What does it all mean? Simply this: smartphones are a friend, not an enemy, to in-store shopping.

There are new opportunities for brands and stores to engage with customers in creative ways before, during, and after the customer’s shopping journey — one that may begin online and end up in-store. Search results, mobile ads, and mobile sites and apps can be magnets that draw consumers into stores and engage them while they're there. Smartphones and online information can also be a powerful way to create customized experiences for the consumer.

We discovered plenty of surprising insights in our study. See all the details at Think With Google. Plus, check out videos of Macy's, REI, and Sephora marketing execs sharing their approach for linking digital to store here.

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Originally posted on the Google Analytics blog

Plan ahead.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the holiday rush begin earlier and earlier. And we’ve also noticed that the shopping frenzy is extending beyond the traditional season, with transaction rates in 2013 boasting lifts even after Christmas. These trends make for a lot of opportunity for online retailers, but you need to play your cards right. The most important thing you can do to ensure seasonal success is to plan your digital strategy now.  We’ve analyzed transaction behavior from a portion of our Google Analytics accounts over the 2013 holiday season to develop a guide for seasonal success.

Which days drive the most transactions?

In order to develop a successful holiday retail strategy, it’s important to first understand the days that drive the most sales for your business. Once you understand this, you can craft a strategy that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.

As digital retailers are well aware, Cyber Monday is THE digital shopping day of the year.  It generates the most transactions of any single day and, in 2013, saw a transaction rate lift of 170% over average.  In second place is Black Friday, a day that has increased in digital importance over the last three years. By 2013, the transaction rate on Black Friday was 114% higher than average.  Beyond these two stars, the table below shows you the top days in 2013 by transaction volume and the lift in transactions rates on each day.
In general, beyond Cyber Monday and Black Friday, the Mondays and Tuesdays before Christmas in December tend to generate the highest volume of transactions.  Interestingly, the highest transaction days are not correlated to the days with the most sessions (traffic to your site), so avoid using the top session days as a proxy for the top transaction days.
How can I drive sales on the top transaction days?

The holiday season generates some of the highest transaction rate spikes and the lowest dips for the entire year. In order to drive digital sales successfully, it’s important that you adjust your bids for auction-based media, such as search ads, appropriately to account for higher transaction rates on key dates and throughout the season.  As you navigate the holiday season, use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier for auction-based media (learn more about bid adjustments). This adjustment schedule reflects the increased value of clicks that are more likely to convert, and helps ensure that you stay ahead of competitors and get in front of the right consumers. The transaction rate lift for the top days are shown in the table above, while the chart below gives you an idea of the lift for the weeks surrounding the holiday season.
As you can see, the top days generate some of the biggest transaction rate lifts, but there’s also plenty of upside in the weeks preceding Thanksgiving as well as right before Christmas.  A smart retailer will generate a bid schedule for the entire season, starting 4-5 weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Marketing to consumers is notoriously tricky and often trend-driven, making the holiday season a difficult and uncertain time for retailers. However, with proper pre-season preparation, digital retailers can set themselves up for seasonal success in 2014.  If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach to your business, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking tool.  For more strategies for the holiday season, check out our holiday tips blog post and best practices checklist.

About the Data

In order to perform this analysis, we looked at billions of sessions across millions of Google Analytics accounts. We used session and transaction trends; and we looked at the percentage of sessions that included a transaction to calculate transaction rates. The data includes only accounts that have authorized Google to share website data in an anonymous way (read more). For questions, comments, or praise please contact us at gaqi@google.com

Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Jocelyn Whittenburg from the Google Analytics team.

This holiday shopping season will be our most connected ever, with devices at our fingertips helping us hunt for deals in short moments—whether it’s on a laptop at work or on a smartphone right before bed. In fact, one third of all shopping searches on Google happen between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.¹ That’s because shopping doesn’t stop once the mall closes. Today’s shopper spends more time than ever researching purchases online at all hours of the day; we’ve gone from midnight snacking to midnight shopping.

To understand how digital trends will impact this year’s shopping season, we conducted our annual Holiday Shopper Intentions research with Ipsos MediaCT, surveying consumers on their shopping behavior. We found that people are shopping earlier, using online video to help with research, and turning to smartphones as personal shopping assistants.

Black Friday is becoming a month-long event
People are starting their research early and retailers are stretching Black Friday promotions across November, changing the focus from just one day to a month-long event. More than half of consumers surveyed said they’ll start their research before Thanksgiving, with 26% of shoppers having started before Halloween.²

Shoppers are also spending more time consulting more sources before making a decision. In 2010, shoppers used five sources of information on average before purchasing, but that has more than doubled with shoppers consulting at least 12 sources last year.³ This means that October through November has become a crucial period for retailers to reach shoppers online, being present with offers, information, how-tos and content.
Online shopping is the new window shopping
Shoppers are going online for inspiration at all points of their day, not just to research specific products but to see what their friends and favorite influencers are wearing. Sites like YouTube and Pinterest have become the new window displays, and a new generation of fashion influencers like Bethany Mota are influencing shopping decisions.

Shopping-related content on YouTube, from unboxing videos to product reviews, is becoming an important part of the holiday research process and is trending up year over year. Haul videos—or the YouTube equivalent of telling your best friend about your latest shopping purchases—spike during key shopping events and hit their peak during Black Friday weekend. Videos with "haul" in the title have have been watched more than 1.1B times on YouTube, and views are up 1.7x this year compared to last year.⁴
And shoppers aren’t just using YouTube for research ahead of time, they’re also looking up videos while they’re in stores to help them make decisions. One in four shoppers say they've used YouTube to search for a video related to a product they're considering while in a store.⁵

Your phone: The ultimate shopping assistant
One of the biggest enablers for shopping throughout the day is our mobile devices. Our research found that 75% of smartphone shoppers plan to use their phones in-store this holiday season.⁶ It used to be that shoppers came to the store with little knowledge, and the sales associate educated them on products. Now shoppers are coming into stores teeming with information, and are turning to their phones as personal shopping assistants. One in three shoppers use their smartphones to find info instead of asking store employees.⁷

We’ve found that when retailers understand mobile behavior in stores, they can meet shoppers online with helpful information. In fact, 46% of shoppers who use their phone in a store still end up making a purchase, an 11 point increase from 2011.⁸ Consumers are coming into stores more purposeful and informed than before, and savvy retailers are turning this into an opportunity.

Want to know more about the 2014 holiday shopper? Check out more research and case studies at Think with Google.

Posted by Beth Thomas, Industry Development Manager, Google

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¹ Google Shopping search data, July - September 2014
² Google / Ipsos MediaCT 2014 Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, September 2014
³ Google and Inmar, 2013
⁴ Google data, January 2013 - September 2014, Indexed views on YouTube
⁵ Google Consumer Survey, September 2014
⁶ Google / Ipsos MediaCT 2014 Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, September 2014
⁷ Google Mobile In-Stores study May 2013
⁸ Google Nielsen, November 2013