1. Prepare — Unify your data for insights and action, add more data to maximize conversions, use labels to track your promotions, and integrate offline data
2. Automate — Use bulksheets, automated rules, and inventory-aware campaigns to make your life easier
3. Measure — Gain valuable insights by setting up scheduled reports, budget pacing reports, formula columns, and Floodlight activity columns, then analyze and monitor your performance
4. Optimize — Use real-time data to make adjustments with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite, Adaptive Shopping campaigns, and remarketing
5. Plan ahead — Create executive reports, review purchase details to see how well you did this year, and save your budget pacing reports

If you can’t measure it, how do you know it worked? With this simple principle in mind, we’ve been investing in a broad set of measurement solutions for brands through a combination of product innovation with our own solutions like Brand Lift and Active View and partnerships with leading third parties like comScore and Nielsen on GRPs.

Viewability has long been a focus for us. Built on the foundation of our Active View technology, we launched the ability to buy only viewable impressions on the Google Display Network back in December 2013 and recently completed moving over the last advertiser campaigns from CPMs to viewable CPMs. We’ve worked to ensure viewability rates on YouTube are amongst the industry’s highest. And Active View now works seamlessly across video, display, mobile web and mobile apps (on YouTube and for publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers), and has been adopted by over 80% of advertisers using the DoubleClick platform.

With the MRC-defined industry standard as a base-line for viewability, we are also helping advertisers and agencies go beyond transacting on the industry standard to also measure individual viewability objectives. In order to support this we have begun launching supplementary metrics in Active View, like the ability to see average viewable time and soon when an ad is 100% in view for any length in time. These are the first few in a lineup of supplementary metrics that will provide advertisers with additional data points relevant to their specific campaigns and needs.

Announcing 3rd party viewability reporting on YouTube - bringing you more choice

Today, we're continuing our approach of driving product innovation and supporting choice by announcing that we're broadening the options for advertisers measuring viewability on YouTube. Along with Active View, advertisers will also be able to choose from third party vendors.

Moat, Integral AdScience, comScore and DoubleVerify are a select set of third party vendors that have been approved to report ad viewability on YouTube, beginning with Moat in early 2016. Through these partnerships, we’ll continue to expand measurement options for marketers on YouTube, while maintaining the highest levels of security and privacy for users, advertisers and creators.

“Independent 3rd party verification is extremely important to ensuring that our clients’ media is running as effectively and efficiently as possible. As a long-time partner, IPG Mediabrands is pleased to see Google continue its work to move the industry forward on viewability by allowing independent verification of YouTube, and applaud this recent decision.”
Mitchell Weinstein, SVP Ad Operations, IPG Mediabrands

Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Unilever added:

"Having partners like Google address these challenges helps to push the entire industry forward. This move will generate better industry-wide standards across viewability and third party verification practices and continues the momentum in the right direction."
Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Unilever

Stay tuned for continued investments in the viewability space, including ongoing product innovation updates to Active View as well as additional partnerships. Together with our partners, our goal is to help our clients measure every moment that matters.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari
Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google

Mobile has changed the marketing world. Today we're launching an executive guide that shows how brands like Sephora, Virgin America, Walgreens and Home Depot are conquering that new world. It's called Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile.

Smartphones have given marketers billions of new daily moments to connect with people. Some of those moments are better for marketing than others, of course: you’re not looking for brand engagement as you post your vacation photos from Bermuda to make your friends jealous.

But there are many more moments when we all turn to our devices and welcome what brands have to say. Those are the I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I want-to-do, and I want-to-buy moments when we look for answers, plan ahead and make decisions. At Google, we call these micro-moments.

In these micro-moments, consumers are often more loyal to their immediate needs than to a particular brand. In fact, 65% of smartphone users say that when searching on their smartphones, they look for the most relevant information regardless of the company providing the information.

That makes micro-moments a real land of opportunity. And there's a clear way for brands to win: Identify the moments that matter to their customers, commit to being there with relevant and useful content, and deliver frictionless experiences across devices and channels.

It's essential to be useful: only 9% of users will stay on a mobile site or app if they can't find what they want, it's too slow or it just doesn’t satisfy their needs.

Our new micro-moments guide can help your brand win the shift to mobile and crack the micro-moments code. It’s full of actionable insights to help you...

• Be There: Anticipate the micro-moments for users in your industry, and be in place when they happen.
  
  
• Be Useful: Be relevant to consumers’ micro-moment needs and connect them to the answers and content they’re looking for.
  
  
• Be Quick: Deliver a fast and frictionless mobile experience.
  
  
• Connect the Dots: Reshape your measurement strategy and teams to extract the full value of micro-moments on all screens and channels.

Download the micro-moments guide and look over the executive summary. We hope the brand studies in particular will inspire ideas for your clients’ content, campaigns and mobile site and app experiences.

Wherever travelers go, they're online. Whether planning a trip, navigating a new city, or sharing vacation memories, they turn to the web, using whatever device is at hand. This has completely reshaped the path to purchase, creating many moments of intent. 

As a brand trying to reach consumers in today’s increasingly fragmented media landscape, it is critical that you understand the impact of your ads on brand metrics such as awareness and consideration.

Viewability is the starting point, an initial understanding of whether the ad had a chance to be seen. We have talked before about why measuring the viewability of advertising matters.

In December 2014, we shared insights on the state of display ad viewability across the web. As a continuation of that effort, in May we released new insights from our video ad platforms, including YouTube, to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.

We wanted to take this research a step further, by analyzing the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

To do so, we took our Brand Lift solution, which gives you insights into what impact your ads have on the consumer journey - from awareness, to ad recall, to brand interest - and tied the data to viewability metrics from our Active View technology for a set of YouTube TrueView ads. By connecting these two solutions, we were able to draw out some insights about the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

Sight, Sound and Motion Combined Drive Higher Lift

When it comes to brand metrics, ad recall is a foundation for measuring the impact of your ad. As a brand advertiser, knowing if your ad breaks through with users is a key first step to understanding the overall impact of an ad on a suite of brand metrics. In this analysis, we were able to analyze how being able to hear and see your ad affected a user’s ability to recall your ad.

Our data shows that users exposed to even one aspect of your video ad (audio or video only), exhibit significant lift in ad recall. However, the full immersive experience of sight, sound and motion delivers more ad recall than either audio or video alone. In fact, the impact on ad recall was 23% higher when users were exposed to ads with audio and video together versus ads with just audio alone.

The Longer in View, the Better You Do (on Brand Metrics)

Time in view also plays a large role when it comes to moving the needle on brand awareness and consideration. We recently introduced the ability for Active View users to measure average viewable time - the average time, in seconds, a given ad appeared on screen - in Doubleclick Bid Manager. By connecting these measurements, we can see the relationship between viewable time and brand metrics.

We found that there is a consistent relationship between how long an ad is viewable and increases in brand awareness and consideration. The longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in these two important brand metrics

What the Results Mean for Your Brand

These results prompt you to think about your brand advertising in a few important ways:

• Are users viewing your creative for longer periods of time? Brand metrics continue to get higher the longer a user views your ad.
• Are you buying the right media to have an impact on brand metrics? YouTube’s opt-in TrueView ads are uniquely suited to deliver long-form video content at scale for brand advertisers.
• Finally, are you thinking beyond viewability to capture effectiveness metrics? You want your ads to move consumers at the moments that matter, and measuring the impact on brand metrics will make for more effective ad spend.

This is just the beginning of understanding what impacts brand metrics for video ads. As brands look to measure the effectiveness of their digital video advertising, a continued understanding of what factors drive brand metrics will be crucial to more effective brand spend.

Read further research on the impact of online video.

To read all of our research on viewability, check out thinkwithgoogle.com/viewability.

To see how viewability is measured, visit our interactive Active View demo.

Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement

We dubbed last week #HTML5Week and Google Web Designer launched multiple HTML5 resources, hangouts and product updates to help make it easier to build all your ads in HTML5. Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of our Google Web Designer Certification exam and training resources.

• Google Consumer Surveys: make confident business decisions with fast, accurate, and insightful market research
• Google Trends: Anticipate industry trends before they happen, with real-time insights into search behavior
• Google Correlate: See how seasonality, location, and world events affect search behavior relevant to your industry