A look at how display builds brands for marketers today

Last week, we shared examples of how direct response marketers are driving strong results with display advertising. But you’ve heard it before -- beyond driving immediate clicks and conversions, display builds brands. And as digital budgets accelerate, for an increasingly growing number of brands, display advertising has become an important part of their strategy. In fact, in the recently conducted Advertiser Intelligence Reports study, by Advertiser Perceptions, advertisers are planning on spending more digital display dollars in the next 12 months for brand goals than direct response.1

So this week, we’re turning our attention to pioneering brands who used display advertising as a critical component in their overall marketing mix to connect with their audience, engage them emotionally, and as a result, drive meaningful results. Let’s take a closer look.

Animal Planet attracted 1.6MM viewers for the season premiere of River Monsters, putting it in the #1 spot among its target audience, by running an integrated video and rich media campaign across YouTube, AdMob, and the Google Display Network. (read case study)

Volvo drove an 88% lift in purchase intent for its new S60 sedan by leveraging the YouTube homepage and masthead unit, interactive video ads on AdMob, and standard IAB ads on the Google Display Network. (read case study)

Sealy reinvented its Posturepedic brand using YouTube promoted video ads and in-stream video ads, which drove 46% of its website traffic during the first week of the campaign. (read case study)

At OMMA Global this week, we shared a simple framework for brand building that we developed after analyzing the campaigns of our most successful brand advertisers. These “better practices” focus on three key areas: connecting with the right consumer at the right moment, delivering an engaging message, and measuring the metrics that matter.

Connecting with the right consumer at the right moment. As consumers continue to access the internet more frequently throughout the day, from a multitude of devices, it’s increasingly important for brand marketers to create device-inclusive, rather than device-specific, campaigns. And by targeting a combination of audience and contextual signals, it’s now easier than ever to reach the right person, at the right time, on the right device through the Google Display Network or DoubleClick AdExchange.

Engaging them emotionally. The best display ads don’t just leverage sight, sound, and motion, but also harness display’s interactive capabilities that drive deep engagement with a brand. Our research shows that rich media ads drive significantly better brand performance than standard Flash ads--1.7X for brand awareness, 2.7X in purchase intent, and 5X increase in brand favorability.2 We also see that newer ad formats, like mobile display and in-stream video, are even more effective at moving consumers down the brand funnel. Lastly, we’ve seen masthead ads on the YouTube homepage garner an 11% interaction rate and drive a 4X lift in engagement compared to standard ads.3

Measuring more robustly. Looking beyond simple clicks and conversions, brand marketers use Campaign Insights to measure increased awareness and interest through the lift in search queries and website visits. Paired with Google Analytics and Multi-Channel Funnels, advertisers can see a complete picture of the chain of online and offline media that drives brand engagement. And to close the loop, many of our brands match geo-targeted display campaigns to offline sales to measure the true impact of a display ad campaign.

More and more studies show that brand marketers who focus on these three levers see the the greatest return on their display ad investment. With display’s ability to connect more precisely with your target consumer, engage more emotionally with interactive messages, and measure robust metrics along all parts of the purchase funnel, it’s no wonder that display builds brands.

Watch this space.
google.com/watchthisspace

(1) Advertiser Intelligence Reports (AIR) study, Advertiser Perceptions, August 2011
(2) The Brand Value of Video and Rich Media Ads, DoubleClick, September 2011
(3) YouTube Homepage Impact Study, Compete, December 2010

Posted by Brian Zeug, National Sales Director, Display and Video

Introducing Google Analytics Premium

We built Google Analytics on the principle of democratizing data-- giving all website owners, big and small, the ability to learn from their visitors. Many websites use Google Analytics, ranging from personal blogs to large enterprises whose products and services we use daily.

We learned from some of our largest customers that they have some specific needs that the current version of Google Analytics can't meet in their entirety. Today we're addressing these needs by announcing a new option built for our largest customers: Google Analytics Premium.

We developed Google Analytics Premium around these pillars: more data, advanced tools, dedicated support and guarantees. Here’s a summary of what that covers:

• Extra processing power - increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
• Advanced analysis - attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
• Service and support - experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call - all backed by 24/7 support
• Guarantees - service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Google Analytics Premium was developed in close coordination with some of our largest clients. During our pilot phase, we’ve been working with Gucci, Travelocity, TransUnion, eHarmony and others, to make sure Google Analytics Premium meets their needs. We’re very happy with what we’ve built and we’re now ready to make it available to all interested clients.

Google Analytics Premium is available for a fixed annual fee in the United States, Canada, and the UK. You can get it directly from Google or through Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers. To learn more about Premium, you can contact the Google team or our authorized resellers. We've put together a short video:



We're more committed than ever to providing our customers, large and small, with options to measure and improve their marketing efforts. Google Analytics will continue to offer a powerful, free product as it always has and you’ll see plenty of new features and enhancements in the future. We’re pleased to help all of our customers to work more effectively with Google Analytics. Happy analyzing!

Posted by Enrique Munoz Torres, Product Manager, Google Analytics team

What’s happening on your site right now?

The web is getting faster, and not just the speed of the pages, but also the speed of change. Before, it was fine to build a website and modify it only when new products were launched. All of us avid Analytics users know that’s just not good enough. We need to be constantly on the lookout for problems and opportunities.

Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens.




Measuring social media impact
One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet. With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.

For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post. By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.




Campaign measurement
Another way I’m using Real-Time is to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a campaign. When getting ready to launch a new campaign it’s critical to make sure your measurement plan is working before you start driving visitors to the page. With the Real-Time reports you can find out in seconds whether you’re getting the data you want in Google Analytics.

Accessing Real-Time
You’ll find the Real-Time reports only in the new version of Google Analytics. If you’re not already using the new version, you can start by clicking the “New Version” link in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Time reports are in the Dashboards tab (though they will move to the Home tab in the updated interface next week) . You will have access to Real-Time reports if you are an Administrator on your Analytics account, or if you have access to a profile without profile filters. Real-Time does not support profile filters.

We just turned the reports on for a number of you, and over the coming weeks, everyone will have access to Real-Time. If you can’t wait, sign up for early access here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/. We’d love to hear about how you are using (or planning to use) Real-Time, so please share in the comments.

Posted by John Jersin, Google Analytics Team

Design updates to the new interface coming next week

In March, we unveiled the new version of Google Analytics that included, along with many other improvements, a redesigned user interface. Since then we’ve heard from many of you on how we can improve different aspects of the design.

Designers from our User Experience team took a step back objectively asked "How can we make Analytics better?" They focused on the core organization (our information architecture) and way-finding as areas that could be improved. What followed were a series of brainstorming sessions with engineers and product managers, analysis of your feedback, customer interviews, card-sort studies, and general user testing – all done to iterate on our product while keeping our users involved in the process.

Next week we’ll release these changes. The biggest change you'll notice is that we have simplified the primary navigation into three tabs – Home, Standard Reporting, and Custom Reporting – to give you quicker access to the information that matters. We also incorporated the second layer of navigation that appeared in "My Site" throughout the Home and Standard Reporting tabs.




Here's what you can expect in each tab:

Home: The Home tab holds all reports and features that allow you to quickly understand what is happening on your site. You’ll find your custom dashboards here as well as your automatic and custom alerts from Google Analytics Intelligence.

Standard Reporting: All the built-in reports to understand your audience, advertising impact, traffic sources, conversions, content, and more are now displayed in one central place.

We're also excited about the addition of a report finder in the Standard Reporting tab. This will allow you to type the name of a report you’re interested in and quickly navigate to it without needing to hunt for it in the proper section.




Custom Reporting: Google Analytics lets you build your own reports to get exactly the data you need. With the new tab, we’re making Custom Reports a more important part of the interface. You’ll be able to access any reports you’ve created here and build new ones.

So what's next for our designers? We have a number of improvements planned to the overall Analytics interface to bring more focus on data, as well as exciting new features that will make analyzing data faster and easier.

If you'd like to help shape Google Analytics and want to participate in future user studies, please register here.

UPDATE: 10/14/2011 11:25am PST - And we're back. The design updates are back on for everyone.

UPDATE: 10/7/2011 9:30am PST - We've temporarily turned these updates off for a couple days to fix an issue. They'll be back in a couple days.

UPDATE: 10/6/2011 3:00pm PST - These updates are now live in the new version. Enjoy!

Posted by Lucas Pettinati, Lead User Experience Designer, Google Analytics team

Learn to predict the present with Think Quarterly

In July, we launched our first issue of Think Quarterly, a publication that packages up the insights and ideas that we learn from both inside and outside of Google. Today we’re launching our second edition, the “People” issue. It explores the latest technologies connecting us and the big ideas driving society forward.

One way we can gain insight into people’s actions, intentions, and future actions is through their search behavior. When looked at in aggregate, queries can speak volumes. In “Predicting the Present”, our chief economist Hal Varian talks about how you can use publicly available tools like Insights for Search and Google Correlate to this end. In his words:

“If you type ‘weight loss’ into Google Correlate you find ‘healthy smoothie’ and ‘meal replacement.’ Not too surprising. But you also see terms like ‘vacation destination,’ ‘cruises to,’ and ‘wedding checklist.’ And if you look at the searches that occur three weeks after the ‘weight loss’ query, you see ‘weight loss plateau’ and ‘not losing weight’ at the top of the list.”

Hal’s team has uncovered a number of interesting relationships by analyzing query data. For example, here’s an infographic that shows the online and offline spending behavior of people throughout a typical week.

(click for full-size image)

For more, read the full article here. We hope you enjoy (and +1) it!

Posted by Andrew Truong, Inside AdWords crew

It’s now easier to set up Google Analytics Site Search tracking for your Custom Search Engine

Cross-posted from the Google Custom Search blog

Google Analytics Site Search reports provide extensive data on how people search your site once they are already on it.  You can see initial searches, refinements, search trends, which pages they searched from, where they ended up, and conversion correlation.  In the past we admit that setup was a little challenging, but we’re happy to announce that now we’ve made it easy to setup Site Search tracking directly from your Custom Search Engine.

If you are already a Google Analytics user (and your site has the Google Analytics tracking code on its pages), go to the Custom Search Engine management page, select your CSE’s control panel and click on Google Analytics from the left-hand menu. We’ll display a list of your Google Analytics web properties so you can select one and tell us the query and category parameters that you want to track.

Once you save your changes, we’ll generate a new code snippet.  Copy it from the Get Code page, paste it into your site and setup is complete!

You can then access Site Search reports from the Content section of Google Analytics.

Happy analyzing!  If needed, you can find help with setup here and an explanation of the differences between Google Analytics and Custom Search statistics here. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by Zhong Wang, Software Engineer

Google Analytics Webinar: Getting started with Multi-Channel Funnels

A few weeks ago we launched Multi-Channel Funnels, a powerful tool to help you understand all the online interactions that lead your users to conversion. With five insightful reports, you can now measure the full conversion path, from first interaction to last click. More important, Multi-Channel Funnels provides actionable analysis about how your marketing channels work together, and answers key questions such as:

• How much time does the average user take between first interaction and conversion?
• How many interactions does it take to convert?
• Which of my marketing channels are “assisting” conversions and which are “closers”?

To help you get the most out of this tool, we’ve scheduled a webinar to walk through the new reports and go over common uses with Bill Kee, the Product Manager for Multi-Channel Funnels.

Title: Getting started with Multi-Channel Funnels

Date: October 11, 2011

Time: 10am PST

Register for the webinar

Have questions about Multi-Channel Funnels? Send them to us ahead of the webinar so we can make sure to answer them. You can also vote for the questions you want to see answered most. You can submit your questions on our Google Moderator page.

If you can't attend the webinar, please check the Google Analytics YouTube Channel for a recording about a week after the live event. You can also read more from the initial announcement of Multi-Channel Funnels and watch a video about the tool.

We hope that you will be able to participate!

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics team