Host: Matt Lawson (Vice President of Ads Marketing)
Speaker:
Sridhar Ramaswamy (Senior Vice President of Ads)
Nicky Rettke (Group Product Manager, Video Ads)
Anthony Chavez (Product Management Director, Google Ads)
Kim Spalding (GM and Product Management Director, Small Businss Ads)
Philip McDonnell (Group Product Manager, Google Ads)
Payam Shodjai (Product Management Director, Google Marketing Platform)

(Transcript of Google Marketing Innovations Keynote)

Matt Lawson (Vice President of Ads Marketing, Google): Hi, and welcome to Google Marketing Live. I’m your host Matt Lawson. We’re coming to you live from the heart of Silicon Valley in sunny San Jose, California. It’s great to have you joining us from over 200 countries around the world as we bring together today’s top industry leaders. This is our largest ad innovation event of the year, where we unveil the latest products and features designed to help your businesses grow. This year our Senior Vice President of Ads, Sridhar Ramaswamy, is going to share new innovations designed to deliver more value, more transparency for your brands. And his teams are here to ready to unveil a host of new ads innovations. But first let’s take a look at the other moments happening around the events. The Sandbox is where attendees get to demo the newest features and hear from our product leaders direct. And for the first time, you’ll be able to see these expert talks from the Sandbox after the conference on our YouTube channel. But that’s not all. Make sure to stick around following the keynote as we continue the live show with an exclusive half hour of specials, guest interviews, and deep dives into today’s major announcements. Industry giew ruer Fred Vallaeys and Googler Ali Miller are going to join us to share their thoughts on new products we’re go to announce along some behind the scenes analysis. Trust me, you don’t want to miss this. But if you have to, we get it, work calls. Meetings, lunch. We’ve got you covered. We’ll be posting recordings of the keynote, post show, and significances from the event on our YouTube channel for you to watch on your own schedule. Okay, the show’s about to start, so I’m going to head inside and grab my seat. While I do, check out this preview of how we put this event together, and don’t forget to join us for the post show. Thanks. ??

** Please welcome Senior Vice President of Ads, Sridhar Ramaswamy.

** Sridhar: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Google Marketing Live. This event is always one of my favorite moments of the year. I’m thrilled to share the next couple of days with all of you. In my anticipation, I got a bit nostalgic. The first time we hosted this event was five years ago. There were 100 of you in the room. And there’s roughly 25 times that number here today. Not to mention, over 100,000 people are going to be joining us on live stream. But my job is to still make it feel intimate, still make it feel like there are 100 of you in the room, to make it feel like this is a private conversation. You know what? That’s your job too. There are a billion more people on the Internet today compared to five years ago. There are twice as many people on smartphones. But that doesn’t change the fact that every user interaction with digital is still one-on-one. And people still expect you, as marketers, to deliver on what they need, as individuals, time and time again. We believe that you can only deliver on a powerful and consistent experience like that for people if the principles driving your work are equally powerful and consistent. And for us, they have been. We’ve always aimed to deliver advertising that works for everyone. Whether it’s consumers, advertisers, or publishers, we’re committed to ads that are valuable, transparent, and trustworthy.

Let’s think about consumers. Advertising at its best, at its most effective, always puts people first. From the earliest AdWords ad, for a small business selling lobsters, we’ve focused on delivering experiences that are useful and relevant to a person’s intent. Simply put, we’ve always believed that ads should add value. When we first hosted this event five years ago, we were doubling down on what valuable ads should mean in a mobile-first world. People wanted more help in the moment, so we gave it to them. For example, we launched new innovations to ensure that people would get the most useful message based on their context, like when they were at home researching ideas or on the go needing to purchase something quickly. Our innovation journey has always centered on enhancing this type of value for people.

We’ve also always focused on transparency and trust, working to ensure that people see ads for real products and can control

what they see. We’ve made huge investments here. Think back again to five years ago when we first held this event. We had just launched the Mute This Ad feature giving people that control and the ability to signal when they just weren’t interested. Last year, consumers gave us more than 5 billion pieces of feedback about our display ads using this feature. Things like this have always mattered to us.

Flash forward to today and, wow, the world’s a lot different, a lot more complex. For one, we know we’re dealing with a consumer who’s a lot more curious, demanding, and impatient. Being there for them and being useful is more important than ever as their expectations and savviness just continues to rise. People have become so much more research obsessed. They are even actively researching what not to buy. And they’re not just researching products and services, they’re searching for countless things to help navigate their lives. For example, mobile searches for “things to do tonight” have more than doubled. And people are also more demanding when it comes to mobile experiences. They expect more personal relevance than ever before. Even the always-fascinating “near me” search is evolving in interesting ways. Traditionally “near me” has been used to find nearby places or businesses, like a pharmacy or a gas station. Today people increasingly use “near me” to find and discover the specific things that they need. For example, “cowboy boots near me,” or “rolled ice cream near me.” But impatience continues to rise too. People want to snap their fingers and get what they want. In the past two years there’s been more than a 10-X increase in mobile searches for “open near me tonight.” And, of course, people aren’t changing in a vacuum. Technology itself has been changing at an unrelenting pace. With mobile, and now machine learning, there’s been a step-change up for the consumer experience. It’s getting so much faster, more personalized, and more intuitive. And the more empowered people get, experiencing the possibilities that technology offers as realities, the more they expect it, not just from Google, but from all of you. And every time. And if what they get isn’t helpful, personal, and frictionless, forget it, they’re off.

And finally there is no question that the entire dialogue around our industry has changed too. Digital is no longer the underdog. It is now a meaningful part of people’s lives and marketer spend. Consumers are more aware of how they’re being marketed to and how their data is being used. And they want more control. They’re frustrated with slow experiences and annoying and deceptive ads, and they expect better.

Change is something that they’re all accustomed to, and it’s always hard and complex. But what keeps us anchored and inspired are those same enduring principles: That advertising should be valuable, transparent, and trustworthy for everyone. And today, advertising that works for everyone means assistance that works for everyone. So let’s think about what assistance means through the lens of these principles. What does valuable advertising look like for consumers today? It’s worth repeating, at Google, delivering valuable ads for people always starts with understanding and satisfying intent. But this means something different now. It used to mean giving people quick answers based on something that they typed into a search box. But today, because of mobile and machine learning, people expect more than answers; they expect meaningful assistance. They want you there whenever they’re looking for help. They expect you to understand and figure out what they need in that moment, even anticipate it. They want you to help them get things done. To save them time and money. And more than ever before, we can help. Google is where the world turns to for assistance billions of times a day across multiple properties and surfaces. This gives us deeper insight into consumer needs throughout their journey, and allows us to understand and satisfy intent in new ways. Just look at Search. It used to be that a search for “jogging stroller” would have directed someone to a website through a blue link. Today, we can be much more helpful, surfacing information tailored to their needs, like images, pricing, reviews, and even nearby store locations and inventory.

On YouTube, brands cannot only reach that same person with messages that are super relevant to what they care about, like running and kids, but also make it easy for them to take action, like purchasing a specific stroller shown in a video. Or on Google Play, that same person could be recommend some useful apps related to both fitness and parenting. And these are just a few examples of how valuable and assistive advertising is becoming today.

But people don’t see value in advertising if they don’t feel valued by advertising. So we enable these assistive experiences to happen in a privacy-sensitive way, giving people the transparency and choice that they expect. And consumers deserve to know that we’ve got their back. That’s why Google uniquely allows people with a single switch to opt-out of ads personalization across devices. That’s a key feature of Google’s My Account, which lets you access your own data and control what you want to do with it, whether that means downloading it, deleting it, or controlling how it’s used to personalize your services. And we’re seeing that when offered such transparency and control, consumers generally choose ads that work for them.

Advertising that’s valuable, transparent, and trustworthy applies to advertisers too. Everything starts with delivering this for end consumers, but these same ideas have always applied to our advertisers as well. In fact, these principles fuel our approach to innovation and directly inform the products and tools we build to make you more assistive and more successful. When it comes to offering value, we are committed to helping you drive your most important goals and in the simplest ways possible. And I know that’s why a lot of you are here today. And we have a lot of great announcements in store for you.

You’ll hear how we’re applying machine learning to ensure you’re delivering the best possible ad to each person searching on Google and how our new YouTube solutions lets you harness the explosive growth and potential of video to drive specific business objectives. You’ll also hear about new campaign types that make it even easier for those just getting started with digital to get their ads up and running, and for retailers to achieve their goals, whether that’s driving e-commerce sales or foot traffic to their stores. And you’ll get to hear about how we are updating our platform solutions to enable more collaboration across enterprise marketing teams. And we’re really excited about the value these things can drive for your businesses and your teams. At the same time, we know that their usefulness is limited if they’re not also simple and integrated. It should be easy to figure out how different things fit together and which solutions are right for you.

That’s why later this month Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads. This may seem like a small change, but we’re really excited about it. Google Ads better represents the full range of advertising capabilities that he with offer, giving you a simpler and more cohesive way to buy ads across Google properties and networks. That means Search, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Play, and much more. Delivering advertising and tools that are valuable for you is a primary goal. But it isn’t enough. For marketers using our platforms, it’s also critical that you have transparency and choice when it comes to the media you buy and how you measure. That’s why we’re also combining our enterprise advertising and analytics platforms to create Google Marketing Platform. This solution brings together our DoubleClick advertising product and the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help you plan, buy, measure, and optimize digital media and customer experiences all in one place. Transparency and choice, over both the media you buy and how you measure it, sit at the core of Google Marketing Platform. For example, it supports over 100 integrations with exchanges, measurement solutions, and other technology providers.

And finally, trust. Whether you’re using Google Ads or Google Marketing Platform, you should be able to trust us as a partner. You should have confidence that your ads are in places that are safe for your brand and your consumers, but your consumers also need to be able to trust you.

In today’s consent-driven world, the media and technology you use impacts the trust. That’s why our advertising products and platforms across the board provide people notice and choice. So that the relationships you build through advertising are trusted ones.

Advertising that works for everyone. Advertising that is valuable, transparent, and trustworthy. These core principles continue to drive everything we do at Google and keep us inspired and excited about the future. It’s true that consumers have never been harder to please, but marketers have never had more opportunities to please them. Advertising will only continue to become more valuable to people as new, more assistive, and trusted relationships are formed.

We’re really excited to be on this journey with you and eager to start sharing some of the newest tools and capabilities to take your marketing to the next level. So without further ado, let’s welcome my team to the stage to share more about how our newest innovations, inspired by our principles, will deliver better results, simpler experiences, and stronger collaborations for you. Let’s kick it off with Nicky to talk about what we know marketers care about the most: Better results. Thank you.

[ APPLAUSE ]

** Nicky: Thanks, Sridhar, and good morning everyone. I’m Nicky Rettke. As Sridhar mentioned, today’s consumer is curious, demanding, impatient. She expects assistive experiences that are more relevant and useful than ever before. But at the end of the day, advertising is about driving better results, and that’s something that has always set Google apart. Getting better results requires more than just the right keyword or the right bid. You need to be relevant to consumers across their entire journey, assisting them at every step of the way. This kind of relevance is critical to capturing attention. In fact, our research has shown that 91 percent of smartphone owners bought or plan to buy something after seeing an ad that they described as relevant. And people pay three times more attention to video ads that are relevant to them.

Relevance drives results. And being relevant starts with understanding consumer intent, which is the very core of what we do. That’s why, today, we’re bringing together Google’s understanding of intent and context to help you drive better results in three key ways: By helping you drive performance on YouTube. By helping you create better, more relevant search ads, and by helping you find insights that make it easier for you to assist your customers.

So let’s get started by talking about how we can drive performance on YouTube. You may already know that YouTube is one of the largest video destinations in the world, with over 1.9 billion signed-in users visiting every month. What you may not realize every day these users are watching a billion hours of video to entertain themselves, connect with others, and learn new things. But YouTube isn’t just for entertainment. People are increasingly turning to YouTube to inspire and inform purchase decisions both large and small. In fact, overall conversions driven by YouTube ads grew by 150% over the last year globally. And looking at the Nielsen studies that we’ve run to date, we’ve seen that over 70% of campaigns have also driven a significant lift in in-store sales. To make the most of these intent-rich moments on YouTube, marketers need solutions that are built to deliver results.

That’s why this year we’re introducing new options for ads on YouTube to better align with your objectives and to deliver more accountability from your video advertising. TrueView for reach brings our primary in-stream format together with the simplicity of impression based buying. Optimized for efficient reach, this format helps you raise awareness among a broad set of customers, all within YouTube’s 95 percent viewable and 95 percent audible environment. TrueView for action is optimized to drive conversions on your Web site. With TrueView four action, a prominent call to action appears throughout the video and even remains after the video completes. This branded banner can be tailored to a specific goal, such as “book now” or ,” you know, buy or” learn more.” Later this year we’ll be bringing form ads to TrueView for action, helping you generate leads directly from your video ads, which makes it even easier for people to follow through on your call to action. This format is especially powerful when paired with jewels like custom intent audiences.

For example, if you’re a clothing retailer, you may want to connect with people who search on Google.com for” buy a new sun dress “or” polo shirts on sale .” Using TrueView for action and a custom intent audience, you can reach this exact group with a relevant actionable message right when they’re ready to buy. And beyond driving conversions, many marketers turn to YouTube to help increase brand consideration. To help accomplish this, we’re introducing a new bidding strategy, maximize lift, that uses Google’s machine learning to help you reach people who are more likely to consider your brand after exposure to an ad. These new enhancements help you get the most out of videos, assisting people while driving concrete, measurable results.

Take MasterClass, for example. MasterClass is an online education platform where you can learn from the experts. I mean, seriously, you can learn how to shoot three-pointers from Steph Curry. Pretty cool. The brand was looking to grow online sign-ups through YouTube at an efficient cost per acquisition. To help make videos more engaging and actionable, they tested TrueView for action. By featuring a prominent call to action and optimizing for conversions, MasterClass was able to increase their class sign-ups by 140%.

Dick’s Sporting Goods is another favorite example of mine. One of the largest sporting goods retailers in the US, Dick’s wanted to reach in-market consumers during last year’s holiday season to drive traffic online and in store. To do this, the brand used YouTube as a full funnel solution. To start, the Dick’s Sporting Goods team used TrueView for reach to build awareness of an inspirational message showing their commitment to youth sports. They built on this with standard yin stream, TrueView yeem and 62nd bumper ads to deliver prom moments messaging to in-market audiences. And then they followed up with TrueView for action to drive people to their website to buy. This strategy moved their customers seamlessly through their entire purchase journey and the had a return on ad spend of ten to one. The TrueView for reach and action formats are now available, and you can look for the maximized lift bid strategies to come out later this year.

All three will be supported across both Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform. And joining us now is Anthony, whole tell you about the all new search ads and insights that help you drive results.

** Anthony: Thank you, Nicky. So how are we innovating on Search Ads to help you get better results? No big surprise here: it’s machine learning. When you’re looking to get something done on Google, you expect an ad that’s relevant, useful, and unique to your needs every time you search. As an advertiser, this can seem like a big challenge, but this is where Google can help. We can apply the power of machine learning to help deliver the best, most relevant ad to someone right when they’re looking for what you have to offer. Now, many of our features already make use of this technology today. With optimized ad rotation, our system prioritizes the right ad within an ad group to help drive performance. Smart bidding optimizes your bids in real-time by factoring in a wide range of signals about the intent and context of every search.

Over the past year, we’ve been working hard to bring this same level of intelligence to our search ad formats. That’s why today we’re introducing responsive search ads. Responsive search ads are more flexible ads that simplify the ad creation and testing process, while delivering better results. Powered by Google’s machine learning, these ads mix and match multiple headlines and descriptions to find the best possible combination, making it easy for you to deliver unique and tailored messages to potential customers. But these ads aren’t just responsive; they also give you more flexibility. Responsive search ads can display up to three 30-character headlines and two 90-character description lines. This is an increase of 90% compared to today’s search ads, giving you more opportunity to convey the features and benefits that will resonate with users.

Here’s how responsive search ads work. You provide Google with up to 15 headlines and four description lines. Our machine learning system then builds ads by selecting headlines and descriptions to show in different combinations and orders based on what is most relevant to the searcher. If you’re interested in trying them out, keep an eye on your account in the Google Ads blog. Responsive search ads will be available to English language advertisers over the next few months, and we’ll be expanding the beta to more languages through the rest of 2018.

Now, while better ads are key to driving results, even the best ads may not perform if your landing pages aren’t up to par, especially on mobile. While half of all Web traffic now comes from mobile, we’ve found that mobile ad experiences often fall short of consumer expectations. Did you know that half of all the smartphone users would not make a purchase on a mobile site because it just takes too long to load? I mean, Heck, I’m getting annoyed just looking at this phone. It’s not even real. This can have a dramatic impact on your results. And one of the best ways to get better results on mobile is to improve the speed of your landing pages. Historically optimizing for speed hasn’t always been a priority for businesses. And that’s understandable. Many of you don’t have an easy way to gauge your landing page load times or how they impact your performance. That’s where our new mobile landing page speed score can help. Starting today, we’ve been rolling out a new column on the “Landing Pages” page in Google Ads, featuring this new mobile speed score. Ranging from very slow to extremely fast, this 10-point scale will tell you how fast each of your landing pages load on mobile devices. This is based on a number of factors, including the relationship between your page speed and your potential conversion rate. Using this score, you can determine which pages are delivering a less than ideal user experience and prioritize the most important to tackle.

And this data will be updated daily, meaning that you can use it to track how your landing page optimizations are working overtime. And to improve your site speed, consider adopting Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP. AMP is supported natively in Google Ads and is a powerful and easy way to supercharge your mobile site speed. Tools like the landing page speed score and AMP help you drive results with better landing pages, and that’s great. Driving results is critical to any advertising campaign. However, making sure that you accurately measure those results is equally important. All businesses need to reach new customers to grow, and you reach these new customers with your marketing. Better measurement helps you understand how to best allocate your limited marketing resources.

But measurement in today’s mobile-first world can be a challenge. There are more mobile devices than ever before and people move between devices throughout the day. You need tools that can accurately measure the impact of your marketing across devices to help you run smarter, more precise campaigns. That’s why we’re introducing Cross Device reporting and re-marketing in Google Analytics.

[ APPLAUSE ]

** Anthony: Cross Device reports in analytics combine data from people who visit your site multiple times across different devices. For the first time, you can get a consolidated view of how users behave on your site, no matter the device they’re using. One important note: Our Cross Device reports only display aggregated data from users who have agreed to share it. Individual user data is never exposed. These new reports link moments together, revealing trends and insights that you couldn’t get before. By better understanding the holistic customer experience, you can make more informed product and marketing decisions. This may seem like a small change, but it’s a big opportunity.

Let’s say you’re a shoe retailer looking to reach your top customers, people who’ve bought more than $500 of shoes. If a customer buys $300 on their phone and another $300 on their desktop, they’re just as valuable as one who spent $600 on a single device. With these new Cross Device capabilities, analytics understands that these two customers actually spent the same amount. So now you can measure, report, and take action based on a comprehensive view of your customers. Going forward, your shoe company won’t overlook anyone when you run re-marketing campaigns to reach your highest-value customers.

It’s more important than ever to understand consumer behavior. With Cross Device reporting coming to Google Analytics, it’s easy to measure the full value of your marketing across channels. And it’s available now, so try it today. Brands now have more ways to drive results with relevant, useful ads. With these new products and more to come, we look forward to helping you connect and engage with more of your customers. With that, I’d like to welcome Kim to the stage. She’ll discuss how we’re making things easier for marketers, through simpler experiences that reduce complexity.

** Kim: Good morning. Simplicity is important for all advertisers, but it’s especially important for businesses that are small. I know because for nine years I was a small business owner. My husband and I ran a winery in Seattle, Washington. We got into the business because we wanted to focus on our craft, making single vineyard syrahs. But like many small business owners, we fiewnd we spent a lot of time on other aspects of the business, like accounting and working with distributors, and we used Google AdWords to help us find new customers. The tool was great but it was sometimes hard to find the right keywords for our niche business. That’s why my team here at Google has a mission, to help small businesses grow with easy tools so they can stay focused on their craft. We had a vision, could we help small businesses get up and running with ads in just a few minutes. That vision became the new advertising solution for small businesses that we announced two weeks ago. We call this new campaign Smart campaigns, and it’s rolling out to advertisers this year. We’ve taken the innovation and technology of Google Ads and tailored the experience for simplicity.

Smart campaigns are simple, save time, and focus on the results we know small business owners care about, like making your phone ring, driving actions on your Web site, and bringing customers to your stores.

Let’s take a look at smart campaigns through the eyes of a small business owner. Meet barbecue supply company, Chicago, Illinois. In 2010 they opened a small takeout spot. Now they’ve grown. Two restaurants, a catering business, and a barbecue training center. With smart campaigns, we have their ads up and running in just a few minutes. We learn about their business from their Web site and Google My Business listing. We automatically create sample ads that focuses on what makes them unique. Their ads run across Google Search, local search results, and 3 million sites and apps available through Display. And we leverage machine learning to optimize their campaign and help them find new customers. That way they can focus on their craft, serving business in my favorite, curating a barbecue specific wine list. Automating ads experience is good, but we knew we could do more. Did you know that nearly half of small business owners in the U.S. don’t have a website? And even those that do, like us, few have the time and expertise to tailor that Web site for ads. That’s why as part of the Smart campaigns, we’re testing the ability to automatically create Web pages that are optimized for ads. They showcase the right information about your product and services and match that to the ad creative. And conversions are built right in to help you get the most from your advertising dollars.

We have been working on Smart campaigns for a long time and the early results look great. Smart campaigns are about three times better at getting your ads in front of the right audience. Let’s take a look at some examples.

** As a small business it’s so important for us to have a presence online. I just knew that I would be advertising with Google.

** Vic’s is fourth generation family owned and operated restaurant. Not a lot of changes here. I think that’s part of our success, is that — the consistency of the look, consistency of the food has carried through the ages.

** Having a business all about dogs, our customers are dog lovers.

** When I first opened yoga, I really wanted to introduce members of the military community to yoga because it can be a powerful way to heal and strengthen the mind and the body.

**Now that we’re starting to advertise to future generations, we knew that we had to modernize our marketing. Advertising on Google, I was actually very surprised at how easy it was.

** My goal was to get people to call us. Actually pretty magical because since we’ve launched our Google Ads, our phones started ringing off the hook.

** One of the key challenges for us is getting people through the door. When people search for us they’ll find us.

** As soon as phone calls started coming in, we realized there’s all this untapped potential out there.

** Having Google Ads frees me up on time and do things I love the most like playing with dogs.

** Since launching Google Ads, we had to expand our hours, hire more staff.

** One of my favorite things about being a business owner is bringing families in and provides jobs.

** Google Ads was definitely an investment in our future.

[ APPLAUSE ]

Kim: I find these small businesses so inspiring. Building Smart campaigns is just one way that Google is helping small businesses. For example, we know digital skills are critical for online success. That’s why we’re offering free training through a program called Grow with Google to help small business owners promote their business online. Today 6 million people have been trained on digital marketing and business development skills. We’re also helping small businesses get listed on Search and Maps through Google My Business. In addition to your free listing, you’ll get access to free tools like Q&A and messaging to help you make direct connections with your customers.

And this is just the beginning. Google is doubling down on small businesses. From Google Ads to our other products, we’re committed to helping even the smallest business be successful online with easy tools. Because we know when small businesses grow, so do our communities. As we take a moment to welcome Phil to the stage, he’s going to share some other ways we’re using machine learning to create simpler experiences for advertising. Thank you.

** Phil: Hey, everyone. I’m Phil. And as you heard earlier from Sridhar, mobile has enabled today’s shoppers to become more research obsessed. In any 48 hour period, over 80% of Americans are shopping for something. And they’re researching products in many different places. They’re searching online, they’re watching videos, they’re reading blogs, and more to find ideas and inspiration. This creates a huge challenge for retailers, large and small. Across your entire portfolio, how do you know you’re showing the right product to the right person at the right time? So it starts with getting your products online. In the past, managing a feed to give Google information about your products has been a long and manual process, one involving daily checks to make sure products are up to date. So we’re continuing to invest in simplified solutions to help you bring your products online and make them easier to maintain.

Later this year, Automated Feeds for Shopping ads will launch to make it quicker for retailers globally to create their first product feed. Automated Feeds crawls your Web site, gathers the relevant details, and automatically builds a feed from your online inventory. So there’s no more complex setup required to upload your product data and get started. So after you set up your product feed, the next step is building an effective campaign, one that surfaces the most relevant products to your customers at the right times.

In May we announced a new type of shopping campaign, that automatically optimizes the goal you select. It runs your shopping ads across Google’s major properties and includes display re-marketing. This dramatically reduces the complexity of managing Shopping Campaigns, while helping you hit your online revenue goals. So if you think about it, what this new campaign offers to both large and small retailers is similar to what Smart campaigns, which is what Kim just talked about, offers to small businesses. So that’s why we’re calling this “Smart Shopping Campaigns.” So in early testing advertisers have seen that on average they drive over 20 percent more conversion value at a similar cost when using Smart Shopping campaigns.

Culture kings, a strait wear retailer, is one example of a with you company finding success combining our new Automated Feeds with Smart Shopping campaigns. With Automated Feeds they got their product feed running in just one day to cover 35,000 products on their Web site. Next, they tapped into a lot of automation machine learning with this new campaign. Culture Kings saw quick results. They drove over 30% more online revenues by beating their return on ads target by 77%. That’s pretty cool. So we have more exciting features coming soon for Smart Shopping Campaigns. First, we’ve introduced integrations with leading e-commerce platforms, like Shopify, to make it seamless for you to on-board on to these campaigns. It started last December. We made it possible to sync your real-time inventory from Shopify with Google’s Merchant Center to create and maintain your product feed on an on-going basis. By the end of this month you’ll all’s be able to manage your Smart Shopping campaign directly from Shopify. So what this means, you can work from one single interface to manage your campaigns without having to switch back and forth between Shopify, Google Ads, and Merchant Center accounts.

Next, we’re introducing additional goals for Smart Shopping campaigns. Because we know you have other goals in your business beyond just online revenue. For example, three in four people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a related business within 24 hours. By optimizing for online revenue alone, you might miss out on these other opportunities, like finding new customers that start online and then go in store. So in the coming months, we’ll be adding two new goals: Driving store visits and acquiring new customers, in addition to maximizing conversion value. This will allow retailers to optimize the performance of your ads for both on and offline conversions, and new customers. However you define success.

Now, introducing additional goals to Smart Shopping campaigns will help retailers maximize both on and offline goals. But for many businesses, including retail and other types, there’s times where you want to focus solely on driving more foot traffic to your brick and mortar locations. So, for example, you might be a restaurant. Now, maybe you’re launching a new menu, or maybe you’re an auto dealer and you have a big end of year sale, that’s why we’re introducing a new dedicated campaign type that helps you drive local conversions, such as store visits. We’re calling this Local campaigns. In a few easy steps, Local campaigns can help you promote your local business to consumers across Google’s properties and networks.

Let me walk you through a demo. So, okay, let’s imagine I’m Phil McDonnell, furniture king of California. So, all right, I’ve got 20 store locations across the state. My existing campaigns drive a lot of store visits on top of online sales. But having a big summer sale coming up — I have a big summer sale coming up and I want to get as many people into the showroom as I possibly can. So I’ll go ahead and set up a local campaign. First, we’ve simplified the process for linking business locations to your account. Your feedback has been loud and clear, finding the right Google My Business account can be pretty painful. Local campaigns will eliminate the guesswork by automatically surfacing relevant Google My Business accounts for you. Okay, next, tell us your daily budget. Finally, upload your creative assets, including your ad text, and your logos, and now your videos.

And that’s it. With these inputs, Google’s machine learning technology automatically optimizes your campaign to maximize store visits and promote your locations across Google properties. So in my case, I’ll be able to connect consumers to the big sale at Phil’s furniture outlet and hopefully dial up my in-store traffic. So whether you’re a digital marketer trying to drive more store visits or sales or maybe you’re a marketing manager with local budgets trying to grow your presence online, Local campaigns can help you achieve those offline performance goals.

Okay, now, let’s turn our attention to another type of business that relies on in-person connections: Travel companies. Travelers, like other consumers, are increasingly turning to mobile to plan and book their trips. In a recent survey people said they turned to their mobile devices for travel recommendations nearly four and a half times as often as they did offline sources. That would be like travel agents or maybe your friends and family.

A few years ago we introduced Hotel ads on Google so people can quickly see available rooms along with the rates and then make reservations with just a few clicks. And in the first six months of this year, Hotel ads grew leads to partners by 65% versus the same period last year. To open Hotel ads to more advertisers and simplify the process of managing them, we’re excited to launch new Hotel campaigns right in Google Ads. So with Hotel campaigns, you can easily group hotels by important attributes, like brand and class. You can utilize powerful bidding controls and machine learning to help you maximize bookings at your ROI goal. So whether you’re a hotel owner trying to fill your rooms or maybe you’re an online travel agent just wanting to drive more leads, Hotel campaigns can make it easier than ever to connect with travelers at scale.

Okay, so let’s recap. Been a lot here. Kim and I introduced four new campaign types that use our latest machine learning technology to optimize your ad placements across a wide range of Google and partner inventory. So use Smart campaigns if you’re a small business just getting started with online advertising. Use Smart Shopping campaigns if you’re a retailer looking to optimize for online revenue, as well as other business goals, like store visits or new customers. Use Local campaigns if you operate brick and mortar locations and want to drive more store visits as your main goal finally, if you’re a hotel or travel advertiser, use Hotel campaigns to drive more room bookings. With hope the new campaign types will make a big difference in how you manage your campaigns and improve your ability to hit, even exceed your goals. I’d now like to introduce Payam to the stage who’ll talk about how we’re helping enterprise marketing teams collaborate better with Google Marketing Platform. Thank you.

** Payam: Thank you, Phil. I’m excited to dive into the last theme Sridhar mentioned: Stronger collaboration. We know how important collaboration is for any organization, especially when it comes to understanding customer insights. And technology is supposed to make collaboration easier for everyone, from analysts, to creative agencies, to media buyers. If the teams in your organization can collaborate better, you

can deliver more relevant marketing. This is why we recently announced Google Marketing Platform. Google Marketing Platform unifies our advertising and analytics platforms into a single solution. It is a complete set of tools that work together to help you plan, buy, measure, and optimize media and consumer experiences. First, the Google Analytics 360 Suite is now part of Google Marketing Platform. This includes Google Analytics, as well as tools for optimization, surveys, and data visualization.

Second, DoubleClick advertiser products are also joining Google Marketing Platform. And, yes, that means we are bidding farewell to the iconic DoubleClick brand. Does anyone know when DoubleClick first launched? That’s right, 1996. In fact, a lot of great things were launched in 1996. The Motorola StarTAC. Anyone remember that? The movie Space Jam with Academy Award winner Michael Jordan? And my favorite song of all time, “I Want You Back” by NSync. Thank you to the one person who clapped over here. And, yes, this is actually me with my first NSync poster.

[LAUGHTER]

** Payam: And a few years later, I was inspired to join my own boy band. These are not photo-shopped. I feel like I’m probably sharing too much here.

[APPLAUSE ]

** Payam: But as you can see, we performed in dark basements. We sang sappy love songs. And thought it was so cool to wear sunglasses indoors. But anyways, enough about my boy band. As we retire the DoubleClick brand and put my formative and embarrassing years behind us, we have some new product names to share with you. First, Search Ads 360 is the new name for DoubleClick search. Search Ads 360 helps you plan, buy, and measure Search Ads on Google and other search engines. Second, Display & Video 360 brings together features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio, and Audience Center. Display & Video 360 allows you to manage your display, your video, your TV, audio, and other advertising channels in one place. And I can’t wait to demo some of the features in a bit.

And finally, we’re building new capabilities into the overall platform. Marketers like you have told us that your number one priority is to better understand your customers. But all too often your tools don’t work well with each other and lead to a pretty fragmented understanding of customers. That’s why we built a new Integration Center to make it easier to connect products and share insights. For example, you can use Integration Center to connect Analytics 360 and Display & Video 360 in just a few clicks. And once the connection has been made, you can use Analytics 360 audiences in Display & Video 360 to create more relevant campaigns. So what results are advertisers seeing? Well, let’s take a look at BookIt. They’re an online travel company that helps people find and book tropical vacations. Now, they saw a 20% increase in sales by using audience insights from Analytics 360 and Display & Video 360. By the way, Integration Center will also help you connect with third-party tools. As Sridhar mentioned, Google Marketing Platform has over 100 integrations with exchanges, measurement solutions, and many other technology providers. So this is really a platform designed to offer choice.

And for media, choice means deciding what to buy, how to buy it, and how to measure it. You can buy the best of Google inventory, you can buy the best of nonGoogle inventory. We also support the different ways you want to buy it, whether it’s through traditional reservations or programmatic buying. And for measurement, choice means letting you pick which measurement provider to use for viewability, verification and reach. And more on measurement later. So, that’s Google Marketing platform.

Now, let’s take a look at how an and I knowvative marketer, Adidas, is using the platform to collaborate and get Berts results.

** At Adidas collaboration is one of the things we focus on as a company overall to make sure we’re all working more closely with each other. We talk a lot about the consumer journey being very linear. It’s very difficult to know when the consumer is going to come in contact with your message and because of that makes it much harder to deliver the right message at the right time. One thing we do a lot more now is use data to help us in a singular environment like Google Marketing Platform you’re able to see the audience insights and information, you can share across all those departments from a brand perspective, from e-commerce perspective, retail perspective. What we found is if we’re sharing insights we know when someone should be receiving a brand message versus a product message. When they’re thinking about buying or when they’re actually ready to purchase.

** Being in brand marketing for so long there was this initial push back on data and the science behind it because it was an art. But what we’re seeing now is the ability for data and insight to really inform the art of storytelling. It allows us to understand the impact that we’re having in real-time.

**Real-time is incredibly important to us. We want people to know that the shoe on our basketball player who just had a triple double is our shoe and it’s important for us to push media out there quickly. We want a platform that allows us to do that. You have a very easy to use plarm but you already have audiences built in. You see traffic and sales both increase across the board was great for us.

** Starting every meeting with data and insights, that’s something that we want to take outside of just the marketing organization and really infuse it across our culture here at Adidas.

** Payam: I really enjoyed that video, especially the soccer scenes, and there were actually a few amazing scenes with me driving across Lionel Messi but for some reason the footage was lost so couldn’t make it into the final cut. Anyways, it’s inspiring to see how a culture of collaboration is helping Adidas transform their business and how Google Marketing Platform helps them achieve their goals.

Now, we want to give all marketers tools that help teams work better together. And one example is the new creative workflow in Display & Video 360. I’d like to show you how this workflow comes to life with a demo for a hypothetical retail brand called Corner. Corner helps people find and buy household essentials in their retail stores as well as online. Corner’s brand manager, let’s call her Mariah, wants to drive in-store sales for the upcoming holiday season. To kick things off she creates a new holiday campaign, then she chooses her objective, in this case to drive in-store sales, and she selects video as her primary channel. So that’s it. Now she can invite JT, the designer from her creative agency, to use Display and Video 360. Now, in the past, JT would have to e-mail back and forthwith Mariah to get the creative brief and understand many of the campaign details. But now with Display & Video 360, the brand manager and the designer can work together in the same tool with access to the same information. So JT begins by browsing a gallery of beautiful creative formats, and all of these formats are mobile first, they’re respectful of the user, and drive great results for advertisers. And I love the automatic previewing. So JT chooses a panorama format, and then he can just quickly customize the format by dragging and dropping a few assets. The live preview lets you see the ad come to life as you make updates. It’s really fast, super easy, and with a click of a button, JT can create variations of the ad customized for different audiences, such as new homeowners and cooking enthusiasts. Looking pretty good so far. And then of course he creates the most important version of the ad tailored for those boy band lovers. And as you can tell, we picked a handsome model for this ad. And finally, JT can map each version of the ad to the audiences that Mariah created earlier. So think about how much more relevant your marketing can be when it’s this seamless to custom creative.

Now, JT hands it off to his buddy Lance, the media planner. And Lance visits Marketplace to see what inventory will best help drive in-store sales. Now, I want you to notice a couple of things here. First, the inventories is automatically filtered by the campaign goals and settings as you can see here on the right. And, second, publishers are ranked by their historical performance with the brand. This helps you save time and find the best inventory for your campaign. So Lance starts by choosing a few publishers. He can also explore packages of recommend video content. All of my favorite Discovery TV shows are here, including Shark Week. And with a few clicks he can send an RFP to all these publishers at once. We’re really streamlining what can be a really painful and tedious process. Think about how happy the “Lance” at your agency will be. Now that the campaign is up and running, we’re done.

Well, almost. With any campaign you need to be able to see what’s working and respond to changes as quickly as possible. So we’re bringing speed and simplicity to reporting in Display and Video 360 with a new feature called Instant Reporting. And with Instant Reporting you can build custom reports directly in the UI with data loading literally in seconds, something that used to take minutes or even hours. We know some of you would go for coffee breaks, maybe even watch the World Cup highlights while your reports were running. But sadly those days are over. Now you too can run your reports instantly and stay glued to your chair all day long. For example, JT, the designer, can build a report to measure the performance of different video creatives. So he chooses a set of creatives and then he can check the completion rate, can quickly sort by the completion rate to see which creative is performing best, and then he pivots by device to see whether mobile users are more likely to finish watching the video ads. And they are. How quick was that? Billions of events, automatic pivot tables, there’s a reason we call this Instant Reporting. Oh, and by the way, charting is just a click away. JT can quickly see which creatives are performing well. I know with font this small you probably can’t read this, but the boy band ad is performing really well on the far left, and he can make real-time creative changes to improve performance. Best of all, Instant Reports are always fresh, including saved reports.

So if JT gets a last-minute request from his boss, the insights he needs are just one click away. I can’t wait to see how your teams make use of Instant Reporting. So, how long do you have to wait to get your hands on these new tools? Well, the good news is that Google Marketing Platform and the Display and Video 360 features I just demoed will start rolling out to all customers in the next few weeks. But we know this is just the beginning of the next chapter of our platform story and we look forward to working with you to continue improving the platform.

Now, shifting gears a little bit, I want to talk about one specific challenge, which is measurement, something that all of our customers face, whether they are using Google Marketing Platform or Google Ads. No not only do you need to measure the impact of your efforts, but you need to do so in a way that gives you confidence in the numbers. And we are committed to helping you get accurate and trustworthy measurements with solutions that are based on industry standards, like MRC. And while we strive to build great measurement solutions ourselves, ultimately we believe it’s up to each of you to choose what’s right.

That’s why we’re announcing Google Measurement Partners. This is a new program that brings together 23 new and existing partnerships across critical areas like viewability, brand lift, and brand safety. These partners have worked closely with us to meet rigorous standards and provide measurement solutions for Google’s media that you can trust. For example, we partner with Integral Ad Science and Company Double Verify for viewability, variation, and brand safety. We partner with Nielsen and I.R.I. for sales lift and marketing mix modelling. And we’re working closely with these partners and industry bodies to ensure you have the measurement tools and standards you need to drive your business forward. We’ve now sadly reached the end of the keynote, but before I sing “bye-bye bye” — sorry, I mean, say good-bye, I want to thank all of you for attending and watching the live stream. It’s been a pleasure sharing what we’ve been working on, and we are excited to partner with you over the coming year. If you want to learn more about the announcements we featured today, or stay up to date on innovations coming in the future, check out these links for Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform. Thank you.

** Matt: All right. Welcome back. For those of you just tuning in, I’m Matt Lawson, Vice President of Ads Marketing here at Google. This is an exciting moment for us. For the first time, we’re bringing all of the goodness of Google Marketing Live to you. In the next half hour we’re going to be breaking down the keynote, diving deeper into a few key points and checking in with trusted industry leaders and Google experts. As a quick reminder, after this show, stay tuned to our YouTube channel, where we’ll be sharing demos of our newest products and breakout sessions to make sure you have all the best practices you need to be successful. And don’t forget to get involved. Connect with us by using the hashtag GoogleMarketingLive. We want to hear what you have to say.

So let’s get started with our first big headlines today: Google Ads. That’s right, it’s no longer Google AdWords. Hopefully all of you can help us get the word out. Now, I know this seems like a small change, but, really, it’s not. Check this out. Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads. Google Ads, we are using Google Ads natively in Google Ads. Google Ads. Google Ads. All will be supported across both Google Ads. Google Ads or Google Ads.

** Matt: Not sure if you caught that, but it’s now Google Ads. (Ding). So after ten years of working with ad words, this is a welcome change. It represents the full range of advertising capabilities we have across Search, Display, you YouTube, and so many other properties. As a previous marketer, I have fond memories of AdWords. My fondest was trying to buy a search term for a girl I was dating. Didn’t go so well. Behind every great marketing campaign there’s a group of marketers who bring it to life. We want to encourage you to use the hashtag BehindtheAds to share your story with those here at the event. This change to Google Ads isn’t the only big news that came out of the keynote today. We also announced some great things for marketers. But instead of me talking about it, I’m going to have a few experts join me here for some Q&A on YouTube ads, Shopping Campaigns, and more. Come on over here.

All right. Hey, guys. So I’m joined here by Fred Vallaeys from Optymizer, and Ali Miller, group product manager for YouTube ads. Why don’t you start by telling us a little about yourself.

**I’m Ali Miller. Been at Google now for 12 years. So a long time. Always been in ads. Started on the sales side. Moved to Product Management, now I’ve been working on YouTube ads for about five and a half years. Really excited to be here at Google Marketing Live.

** I’m Fred Vallaeys. I started in PPC back in 1998 out of my college dorm room. Took me about four years to see the life of this AdWords thing, or I should say Google Ads. Joining Google got to work with Ali actually for many years, did that for about ten years, and then left Google started my own company and we work with a ton of advertisers. Really excited to these product announcements and how it’s going to make life easier through ads online.

** Matt: Glad you saw the light. Ali, why don’t you kick us off. Lots of interesting news today on the live stream with YouTube. Talk to me about how it can help drive performance.

** Ali: Definitely. We’ve definitely seen a lot of changes in consumer behavior over the years. That’s really dramatic on YouTube, especially in usage of the app in the site. The stuff that blows my mind that Nicky mentioned this morning is a billion hours of web time. As you can imagine there’s tons of different types of behavior that viewers have when they’re watching YouTube. So it’s an entertainment destination of course but also an information hub. It’s a place where people come to learn things, to research products or services they may want to buy. So we have this opportunity to tap into all that different viewer behavior to drive more specific goals for advertisers. So starting at the top of the funnel, we have TrueView four reach, which Nicky mentioned today is a great way to marry our traditional TrueView skippable format with the simplicity of CPM buying. This can cast a broad net across a lot of different viewers on YouTube. Get your brand awareness, reach out there in a really, efficient way. So down the funnel then we have these sort of mid-funnel objectives, so driving consideration, for example. And this can be really useful if you have a longer purchase cycle for the product or services that you sell and this new maximized lift bid strategy is a great way to drive the most consideration that’s possible for your campaign. We try to identify viewers who are most likely to go from not considering a brand or product or service to considering it after seeing the videos and use the power of our brand lift measurement to actually now in real-time optimize for the results that you previously can only see after the fact as a measurement tool. So we’re really excited to kind of get into the game of these smart bid strategies and having come from the Search world this is familiar with a lot of folks so YouTube is really starting to make a lot of progress there.

** Matt: Really cool. Cool new way to use machine learning to direct awareness and consideration. I also heard on live stream there’s a new format around TrueView four action. Tell us more about that.

** Ali: TrueView for action is one of our most exciting new formats. Familiar to many trade marketers, you want to drive leads, sales, conversions. And so TrueView for action offers an action button directly below the video ad that continues playing after the ad is over. You can see, for example, Book Now or Get a Quote or Visit Site button directly there so the consumer can view that, take action, and drive a conversion. And then the next thing for business is making that even simpler. If you want to drive leads, follow by leads, we’ll be introducing a form that can show directly below the ad. The viewer can without even reading YouTube, fill out their information, send that information along to you the marketer and then you can really build that super quickly and drive a lot of leads very efficiently. These are both going to be available both with target CPAs and then our new bid strategy will be maximize conversion. So if you don’t have a target CPA in mind you’ll be able to simply drive as many conversions as you can for your budget.

** Matt: That’s awesome. It sounds like YouTube can now hit every stage of the funnel, awareness, consideration, purchase, all the way down.

** Ali: Exactly. We’re really excited about it. ** Matt: Fred, you’ve always been a hardcore performance guy. Talk to me about what you think about the new Smart Shopping campaigns that just launched today.

** Fred: I think shopping is this amazing thing. If you look at some industry research, there’s about 60 percent clicks Google for retailers at least in the United States come through the shopping ad format. Yet it’s crazy because when Ali and I worked at Google they were called product working ads and they were horrendously difficult to set up. If you didn’t know the special syntax to do these things you literally couldn’t get started. Sridhar made the point that it should be advertising that works for everyone and I think this is really what that is, right? So you’re no longer limited as an advertiser because you can’t figure out how to set up your crawler feed. That’s the first step to do shopping ads. If you don’t want to worry about the media, what’s the right bid, budget, all these things that require so much Excel work, now you give it to Google and they can do it for you. But at the same time I think it’s also exciting that it’s not just for the newbies getting started with this, but these new bidding formats, basically a goal based campaign. My goal is to maximize revenue but that’s not always the thing that you’re really trying to do, at least it’s not just the online revenue and have to have these goals for driving store business trying to sell stuff at your brick and mortar locations. That’s great. The other one I think going to get picked up by the industry is acquiring new customers. I mean, that’s a big deal because sometimes if you look at what’s the easiest way to advertise online to spend your budget is to spend it on people who already come to your website and do market there. Is that really growing the business I don’t he ever all in the bigger picture, this is going to enable automation that can be sophisticated advertisers the results that actually matter foyer their business.

**Matt: Great. One of the things you were talking about is the simplicity for marketers. Talk to me about the benefits that marketers get with more simplicity.

**Fred: Simplicity, automation, we have to figure out in this new world of AI and machine learning, what is my role as the people see markets, and may be good news, bad news for some people depending, and spreadsheets maybe you don’t have to spend as much time figuring out spreadsheets and you actually get to go back to being a marketer and say, hey, listen, this one to one marketing, so what is the methods that’s going to resonate with someone and I can do experimentation with that. I can work on my lifestyle. We heard that landing page convert better — it’s pretty well known, now you have time to do your landing pages to really enhance that experience because the gains that you make on converting more people on your website, that’s huge sometimes in comparison to just changing the bid and that’s going to come back and make you more competitive because you can bid higher because you sell more stuff because you have time to go back and improve that experience.

** Matt: One more time optimizing the whole user experience.

** Fred: Exactly. The more holistic feature. Let the machines do what they’re good at, then we can focus on what we’re best at.

** Matt: That’s great. There was a format today not just for retailers. Local campaigns can be used to drive people into the store. Talk to us a little bit about how you see advertisers using that. ** Fred: Yeah, report campaign sides and I think this to me is the most exciting because it’s brand-new inventory. Clearly this Google Ads, it’s working. How many people are here today at the event and so to get access to more new inventory than before that’s certainly something I will try. I think everybody should be trying that. And then also I love how it’s directly connected to the goal. So if somebody is doing that local search, they want to go to the location and that’s actually what Google’s going to measure and try to optimize for you. Again, get out of the spreadsheet, focus on putting better images of your business, better special offers, do the things that marketers do to drive more results.

** Matt: All right. Fred, Ali, thank you so much for your time. Now we’re going to hear from fellow Googlers Karen and Payam as they dive peep into the changes we have for Google Marketing platform. Hey, Karen, and Payam. Thanks for joining us today.

** Karen: Thanks, Matt. Hello everyone, and I’m here with Payam Shodjai who gave us everything Google Marketing Platform. I managed to steal him away so he can answer questions about what’s to come.

** Payam: Thanks Karen. It’s get to be here at Google Marketing Live and welcome to all of you’re live stream viewers.

** Karen: Now, I have to say I learned just as much about you in that keynote as I did the platform. Who knew you had such an affinity for boy bands?

** Payam: They did a great job of digging up embarrassing photos of me as a teenager.

** Karen: Please thank your mom for digging up those photos. Being in a band is very similar to marketing. It requires stronger collaboration. What is it about Google Marketing Platform that helps teams work better together?

** Payam: Well, first and foremost, it union identifies our advertising and analytics platform as a complete set of tools. We combine Google Analytics 360 with DoubleClick products for advertisers because most of our advertisers use bulk sets of a platform. So this unified platform helps an advertiser plan, buy, measure, and optimize all of their media in one place.

** Karen: Right. In fact, you gave us a demo about how the platform helps marketers in the campaign process, and the Display and Video 360 part of the platform really helps them with that. So what’s unique about it?

** Payam: Well, it enables teams to work in one place and get access to the same information. It will offer more than Bid Manager’s existing programmatic capabilities. So you’ll be able to perform campaign management, cross platform measurement, and creative and audience capabilities all in one place. So marketers can fully manage their reservations, their programmatic and programmatic guaranteed campaigns across display, video, TV, audio, and other channels all in one platform.

** Karen: What’s something else that marketers should look forward to? What’s the first thing they should get their fingers on when they start using Google Marketing Platform?

** Payam: During the keynote I mentioned a key part of Google Marketing Platform is the Integration Center. And we built the Integration Center to more easily connect products and share insights. So in addition to showing users which Google product you can connect, Integration Center will also help you connect third-party tools. So this is really a platform designed to offer choice, has over a hundred integrations with exchanges, measurement solutions, and other technology providers. And you can buy the best of Google and non-Google inventory in this.

**Karen: Well, that sounds like a very efficient and effective way for digital marketing teams to work together. What advertisers have started seeing results from using Google Marketing Platform?

** Payam: So we showed this pretty awesome story of how Adidas is using the platform to help their brand and performance teams to work better together. And use consumer insights to inform their storytelling. And as a result, they’ve seen tremendous lift in both traffic and sales.

**It Karen: Amazing, Payam. Thank you so much for taking time to walk us through Google Marketing Platform, integration, and Display and Video 360. Now, before we throw it back to Matt in the studio, let’s all take another look at that great story behind Adidas.

** At Adidas, collaboration is one of the things we focus on as a company overall to make sure that we’re all working more closely with each other. We talk a lot about the consumer journey no longer being linear. It’s very difficult to know when the consumer’s going to come in contact with your message and because of that makes it much harder to deliver the right message at the right time. One thing we do a lot more now is use data to help us in a singular environment like Google Marketing Platform, you’re able to see audience insight and information you can share across all those departments from a brand perspective, from an e-commerce perspective from a retail perspective. What we found, if we’re sharing insights we know when someone should be receiving a brand message versus a product message. When they’re thinking about buying or when they’re actually ready to purchase.

** Being in brand marketing for so long, there was this initial push back on data and the science behind it because it was an art. But what we’re seeing now is the ability for data and insight to really inform the art of storytelling. It allows us to understand the impact that we’re having in Realtime.

** Realtime is incredibly important to us. We want people to know that the shoe on our basketball player who just had a triple double is our shoe. So it’s important for us to push media out there very quickly. Google Marketing Platform helps us do that. You have a very easy to use platform where you already have audiences built in. The usual brand lift and brand affinity lifts go up, see traffic and sales go up across the board was great for us.

** Starting every meeting with data and insight, that’s something we want to take outside of just the marketing organization and really infuse it across our culture here at Adidas.

** Matt: All right. Welcome back. Quick note on that Adidas story, if you like it, you can find a lot more about it at Think with Google.com. Now I’m joined by Sylvanus Bent, who’s one of our product managers on Google Ads. Sylvanus, you want to maybe introduce yourself a little bit?

** Sylvanus: Sure, Matt. I’m product manager on Google Ads. I’ve been here roughly two years and I’ve worked primarily on Search Ads.

** Matt: Great. And you work a little bit on responsive search ads.

** Sylvanus: That’s correct.

** Matt: Can you tell us a little bit about what responsive Search Ads are.

** Sill advance news: Sure. This is a brand-new ad search and the whole new idea is as a marketer you focus on the message and let the Google do the hard work of figuring out what are the different combinations of messages that are most relevant to your customers? We do all this using Google’s machine learning.

** Matt: That’s awesome. Tell me a little bit more about what makes them responsive.

** Sylvanus: So the ad can adapt to show multiple different combinations on different formats. And also one of the whole points is we can use the creative signals, for example, on different devices to show what is the right set of messages that are relevant to that particular search and the way the person is searching for your product or service.

** Matt: That’s great. One of the things you said earlier was the marketers get the input and the machines do the rest. Tell me a little bit more about the controls and levers that marketers have.

** Sylvanus: Marketer can add up to 15 headlines and four descriptions. In any given ad we show, we’ll select up to three of those headlines and two of those descriptions and show them in a different order based on what’s most relevant. If it’s really one, you help advertisers to say, hey, what are the messages working best, but also we’ve actually created more than 90% more creative text they have to work with. You get a lot more room to share your message, describe your product. We think this is just a great new feature. In addition, remember the ads and the content can show in different order, but if someone really has control that they want to, for example, show the brand message, so they really want to make sure the brand shows the ad, you could write that in the headline, you could pin it into place, for example, to the first position, so that every ad that is shown will always include your brand in the first part of the headline while still allowing the rest of the ad to be dynamic.

** Matt: But it sounds like with this thing so dynamic, it sounds like you’re able to test a lot of different things. Does this save marketers time?

** Sylvanus: Absolutely. Imagine if you were to write 15 headlines and four descriptions manually and you have to write out every combination in every order, I mean that’s a lot of different ads. And then you’d have to be on top of it running the tests making sure you’re watching everything going on. It just becomes a nightmare for management. Imagine doing this on a really large account at scale. Instead with one responsive search ads, just give us the creative assets, let us assemble and do the work to find out these are the combinations working best.

** Matt: That’s great. So in some ways it’s leveling the playing field, making it easier than ever for anyone to get in there and do some testing and optimization. What should people be doing today to get ready for this?

** Sylvanus: So this is a new ad type. I would actually take some risks and be creative. This is something new to Google, to marketers. You have this new ad format you can entered 15 headlines and four descriptions. Try multiple different things. If it’s something you know the message that you have been curious about you can add it as a response to that headline. Try it out and machine learning, ads or messages that are learning, you’ll see them used often. Messages not relevant or not working it will be clear to see these messages aren’t working. Take risks, be creative and try something new.

** Matt: So it sounds like you got some insights from potentially people in the beta. Can you tell us any creative tips that they could use?

** Sylvanus: Sure, I’ll share three best practices. The first one is focus on your headlines. By that we mean when you write your first three headlines, for example, try writing them as if they’ll appeal together in order because, again by default they show in different order I know that can be hard to grasp. Just think of it as one of these three are going to appear together. The second thing they’ll focus on is be sure to include key words in at least some of the headlines. You don’t need a keyword in every single headline. Again, our machine learning will figure out the right headlines to use, but make sure that you have at least a few key words in a few of the different headlines. The third thing is you want to focus on providing as much unique content as you can. So maybe you want those first three headlines and then you say can I come up with three or four more ideas that are completely different from the first three and you do that as much as you can. If you get to the point where you can’t come up with anything more you and still have room to go, then maybe you create variations of the content you’ve already created. So I think that kind of idea will help you create a really good response that gives you a lot of variety and options.

** Matt: That’s great. So focus on the headlines. Don’t forget to include the key words, and then take some chances with your creative. That’s great. So last question for you, when can people get their hands on it.

** Sylvanus: Responsive Search Ads — we’ll be rolling this out over the next several months and through the end of the year. So if you’re interested, stay tuned, reach out. There are reps and, yeah, be a part of the beta. Be on the lookout in your Google account.

** Matt: When you tell us we’re going to launch this, keep me posted. All right. With that, that’s all we have for our show today. Remember to check out our Google Ads YouTube page next week for all the breakout sessions happening here. We’ve got a lot of best practices on how to reach and connect with your customers. And definitely continue to join us in the conversation at hashtag GoogleMarketingLive. We loved having you here today. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next year.