Highlights from this week's Google CPG Industry Newsletter - 8/19 Edition

Thursday, August 18, 2011

WHAT’S HOT

1. Patrick Pichette (Google CFO) in McKinsey Quarterly: Check out McKinsey’s wonderful interview with our laid-back Canadian CFO.

2. Google to acquire Motorola Mobility: Since its launch in November 2007, Android has not only dramatically increased consumer choice but also improved the entire mobile experience for users. Today, more than 150 million Android devices have been activated worldwide—with over 550,000 devices now lit up every day—through a network of about 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers in 123 countries. Given Android’s phenomenal success, we are always looking for new ways to supercharge the Android ecosystem. That is why I am so excited today to announce that we have agreed to acquire Motorola.

3. Games now in Google+: My family has a games closet. Inside you’ll find a few decks of cards, two decades’ worth of board games and a Twister mat for those times when we’re feeling limber. Playing games is a great way for us to spend quality time with each other (and a little healthy competition never hurt anyone either). Today we’re adding games to Google+. With the Google+ project, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life.

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GOOGLE NEWS

Google+ Ads Would Perform Well
An eye-tracking study conducted by EyeTrackShop suggests that if Google+ offered brands an option to place ads on the social network, site visitors would spend at least as much time gazing at them as they would with ads on Facebook.

YouTube Starts to Look Like a TV Network

Lollapalooza livestream just the latest step (AdWeek)

Two Things Every CPG Marketer Should Do to Win in Mobile

Friday, August 12, 2011

Your customers are on mobile; as a marketer, you need to be on mobile, too.

So, you may be asking, what are the two things that a CPG marketer should do to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the growth of mobile? Here are our recommendations:

1) Create a mobile-optimized site. Consumers become extremely frustrated when they go to a mobile website that's tough to use. Harris Interactive, in a March 2011 mobile interactive experience study commissioned by Tealeaf, found that:

• 23% of shoppers had cursed, 11% had screamed, and 4% had gone as far as to throw their phones when mobile sites did not display or function properly. Screaming and cursing are not key drivers of purchase intent!
• 63% of all online adults would be less likely to buy from the same company via other purchase channels if they experienced a problem conducting a mobile transaction.

There's even a website, http://mobilemarketingfail.com, which writes snarky blog entries about poorly designed corporate mobile sites. Don't be their next entry! Talk to your media agency or Google team representative today about how to get started.

2) Separate mobile search campaigns from desktop and optimize, optimize, optimize: Mobile campaigns perform better when they're created separately from desktop campaigns. Consumers use different search keywords when they're on their mobile phones than they do when they are on their computers. Work with your search agency or media team to ensure that you have a separate mobile campaign. Then, track your performance and optimize.

Studies Show Search Ads Drive 88% Incremental Traffic for CPG Brands

Monday, August 08, 2011

Today's post is a guest post by Lizzy Van Alstine, Research Evangelist on Google's Quant Management Team

Advertisers often wonder whether search ads cannibalize their organic traffic. If search ads were paused, would clicks on organic results increase, and make up for the loss in paid traffic? Google statisticians recently ran over 400 studies on paused accounts to answer this question.

In what we call “Search Ads Pause Studies”, our group of researchers observed organic click volume in the absence of search ads. Then they built a statistical model to predict click volume for given levels of ad spend. This model generates estimates for the incremental clicks attributable to search ads (IAC), or in other words, the percentage of paid clicks that are not made up for by organic clicks when search ads are paused.

On average, the incremental ad clicks percentage across verticals is 89%. This means that a full 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This number was consistently high across verticals. For the CPG vertical, the mean incremental ad clicks percentage was 88%. Check out the video below for an overview of the study's findings.

The full study can be found on research.google.com

Highlights from this week's Google CPG Industry Newsletter

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Here are the top highlights from this week's Google CPG industry newsletter. Happy Reading!

WHAT’S HOT

1. Think Quarterly: At Google, we aim to help people and organizations navigate a world gone digital. That's why we created Think Quarterly. We don’t want to review what’s happened; we want to prepare you for what happens next. For each issue, we tap our homegrown visionaries, plus heads of industry, innovators and experts, to lend their insights and outlooks on the digital future. We hope it gives a view into what drives us as a company and inspires those of you who lead the way. We hope you find the content engaging and insightful. Included are insights from Dennis Woodside on his vision for our industry, as well as SVP of Advertising, Susan Wojcicki’s Eight Principles for Innovation. Think Quarterly is very much an experiment, and like any other Google product we aim to iterate, so please let me know what you think. And if you like it, +1 it!

2. What Do You Love? Would you like to find out everything you can about the things you love in one place? Now you can. Check out What Do You Love? Type in something you love: monkeys, photography, or Merlot, whatever comes to mind. Enjoy.

3. New Tablet Targeting Options Now Available: You can find the new "Tablets with full browsers" targeting option under the Networks and devices section of the Settings tab within your AdWords account. Read more on the Inside AdWords blog here.

4. Google+ Project Update - Sparks: Remember when your Grandpa used to cut articles out of the paper and send them to you? That was nice. That’s kind of what Sparks does: looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share.

GOOGLE NEWS

How brands can get started on Google+
Marketers shouldn't wait around to get started with Google+, writes Heidi Cohen. Even if Google won't let your brand carve out a page of its own, it's important for individual marketers to climb aboard, so they can start figuring out the site's features and check out how the potential audience is using the network. "As a marketer, it's critical to get onto Google+ and start kicking the social media tires," Cohen writes.

"Android is Top Mobile Operating System in the U.S., Says Nielsen" (ReadWriteWeb, July 28):

"Today Nielsen is reporting that Google's mobile operating system Android now has the largest smart phone operating system (OS) market share here in the U.S. The top three mobile OS's, according to this new data, are Android (39%), Apple's iOS (28%) and RIM (20%)."

MOBILE UPDATE

Brand marketers see a future in mobile
About half of brand marketers have mobile strategies but their spending remains minimal, with a majority planning to lay out less than $50,000 this year and only 7% budgeting more than $300,000, according to an IAB-sponsored survey of 300 top brand marketing executives. But 72% of those surveyed said they planned to boost mobile spending over the next two years, with branded mobile sites and display ads cited as two of the leading strategic components.