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People are constantly connected, moving seamlessly between screens, sites and apps while on-the-go.  This makes the best ads more than just messages sent to various devices.  Instead, ads are now most effective when they connect people with the information, content and places that matter most to them, at the moments they are looking.

This morning, over 170 search marketing experts attended the AdWords Performance Forum where I shared our latest AdWords updates (you can watch a replay of the livestream here).  We’re excited to see how large and small advertisers around the world will put these new products to work, to grow their businesses and find new customers.  These new features will all roll out over the course of the next few months, and we’ll provide more details for you, right here on the Inside AdWords blog, as they launch.

Shiny, appy AdWords!

People are living their lives online, looking for the content that’s most useful for them -- sometimes this content is on websites, sometimes in mobile apps.  For many years, we’ve offered popular formats through Google search ads and our AdMob network  to help you promote your app.  Since they launched, we've helped businesses drive hundreds of millions of app downloads with these offerings.  Today, I announced the next generation of these features across Google search ads, our Display Network and YouTube. Learn more.

1. Better discovery: For businesses looking to promote app installs on the AdMob network, we’ll enable you to reach people who are your most likely customers, based on the apps they use, the frequency of use and the types of in-app purchases they make.  For example, if you exercise regularly and use an app to measure how far you run, you might see an ad for an app that helps you measure the foods you eat and calories consumed.  On YouTube, we’re enabling app installs as an enhancement to the current TrueView offering.

2. Easier re-engagement: Lots of businesses are able to get their apps onto a device, but might never see their customer again.  Today we announced a new app re-engagement campaign type in AdWords for both search and display so that consumers can be taken directly into already-installed apps.  For example, if someone has the HotelTonight app installed on their phone and searches for “hotels in San Francisco” on Google.com, they can go directly to the specific page in HotelTonight about SF hotels, instead of being taken to the app’s main landing page.

3. Enhanced measurement: In AdWords you’ll soon be able to measure conversions across the entire lifecycle of the app - from install to re-engagement to in-app purchases.  

Better measurement = better campaigns

Last year, we introduced Estimated Total Conversions to help you measure the full value of your campaigns, including phone calls and conversions that occur across devices.  Many businesses are already using this to inform their bidding and budgeting decisions, and to find new customers.

For example, photo publisher Shutterfly measures 60% more conversions when factoring in mobile-to-desktop conversions.  With this insight, they decided to include all their keywords on mobile devices, which has helped them find a lot more customers.

The feedback on Estimated Total Conversions has been great, so we’re continuing to invest in this product. As people search more online for local businesses and then go into the store to make purchases, we're testing ways to measure the effectiveness of search ads at driving in-store sales, using anonymized purchase data from retail partners. RKG and fashion retailer, Express, very early testers, found that overall return on ad spend increases 102% when including offline sales in online advertising results.

We’re excited to invest here because over time it will give people a better experience, as more businesses see the value and invest in local information like directions, inventory information, promotions and offers.

Enterprise-class tools
For businesses looking for new customers, the increase in constant connectivity means that the scale of your campaigns is growing, and you've told us you want help to manage your campaigns more effectively. So, we're bringing enterprise-class workflow, reporting, and optimization tools to AdWords.

1. More bulk actions: With new bulk capabilities for extensions and settings, you'll be able to easily set up campaign settings like location targeting and ad rotation across all your campaigns (even if you have thousands of them!). This should be particularly useful for big seasonal promotions, when you might want to update all of your campaigns at once.

2. Automated bidding: Building off of the momentum that we’ve had with automated bidding, we’re adding the ability for you to maximize the number of conversions or the total value of conversions. For example, if you’re a car maker, you’ll be able to set up your campaign to allocate your budget in a way that maximizes the number of people who visit your site to design a custom vehicle.

3. Advanced reporting: To help you analyze your data better (without the endless downloading and re-formatting of data) we’re providing you with new multi-dimensional data analysis and visualization tools so you can perform most, if not all of your data analysis, right here inside AdWords.  We’re also making it easy for you to turn your data into tables, graphs and charts so that you can download them and share with your teams.

4. Your own lab: One of the great benefits of AdWords is that it offers an incredible platform to test and tweak live campaigns.  So we’ve built a lab inside AdWords for you to prepare ideas for your campaigns, see what they’ll look like, and then run tests with live traffic as an experimental trial.  You can experiment with almost anything in your campaign, including bid changes, new keywords, different campaign settings, special bids for times and locations, different kinds of ad formats, and more. We think you’ll like it!

It’s always inspiring for me to hear how AdWords is delivering useful information to people at the right moment and helping businesses succeed.  Thanks to everyone who attended the AdWords Performance Forum or watched the livestream.  I’m excited to see how you put these new features to use, and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Jerry Dischler, Vice President, Product Management, AdWords

Welcome to the Inside AdWords livestream! Today, Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management, AdWords, announces the next generation of advertising innovations. Tune in to the livestream on YouTube or watch below. We look forward to engaging in the conversation with you at #StepInsideAdWords.

Next Tuesday, April 22nd at 9am PT and 12pm ET, we invite you to step inside AdWords as we share our next generation of advertising innovations with you, live, right here on the Inside AdWords blog. As part of this global livestream, we will announce 10+ new AdWords products, features, and research studies that we have worked hard to develop over the past year. We built these innovations with you in mind, using customer feedback to inform our product development decisions. Register for the livestream here.

As we met with advertisers, both large and small, and conducted consumer research, we learned the following:

1. It’s no longer about devices.  Consumers are constantly connected, and the average American today owns four digital devices and spends 60 hours per week consuming content across platforms.* In this multi-device world, the way people use desktops, laptops, notebooks, tablets, and smartphones is blurring. This means people don’t think about which device they’re using, they just expect the right content to appear seamlessly wherever they are ready to engage.
2. Context matters more than ever. The ways people connect -- whether that’s on a computer, a mobile website or an app -- have become increasingly important in showing people the right content -- and the right ads. With more insight into people’s contexts, we can make more meaningful connections and create better consumer experiences.
3. Connecting people to content. With more consumer touchpoints than ever, it can become increasingly complex to reach people in the moments that matter. At Google we work hard to develop innovations that let technology do the hard work so that businesses can focus on reaching their customers.  

With these insights, our team of product managers and engineers went to work to build a brand new set of AdWords innovations to help businesses continue to grow while saving time and improving efficiency.

Join us for our big announcements. Our livestream is on Tuesday, April 22nd at  9am PT / 12noon ET -- right here on the Inside AdWords blog. Register here.

Posted by Your Inside AdWords Team

Google has been a longtime supporter of this effort and we’ve partnered with the industry, the Media Rating Council and the IAB, as part of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, to help guide the definition and adoption of a viewable impression standard. Last April our viewability measurement solution Active View received accreditation by the Media Rating Council and, in the coming months, we’ll be making Active View reporting available to all DoubleClick customers across our platform. We believe that giving marketers, agencies and publishers access to a common, integrated viewable impression metric will set the foundation for viewable impressions to become an actionable currency.