Google Drive: Updates for iOS and Android

[Cross posted from the Google Official Blog]



Every day, more and more people are choosing to live online and get things done in the cloud the cloud. Helping to make this experience as seamless as possible, Google Drive is one place where you can create, share and keep all your stuff. Drive is available on the web, as well as Mac, Windows and Android and iOS.



Updates for iOS

Starting today, if you’re using the Drive app on your iOS device you can also edit Google documents, just as you can with the Android app. From your iPhone or iPad, you can create a new document, edit an existing one or format text. And, just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits instantly as they’re made.

You’ll also notice other new improvements to the iOS Drive app. For example, you can now view Google presentations on your iPhone or iPad, including speaker notes, full-screen mode and the ability to swipe between slides. You can also create new folders, move files into folders and upload stuff (like photos and videos) from your device directly in the Drive app.



Updates for Android 

We’re also updating the Drive app for Android phones and tablets today. You can now add comments, reply to existing comments and view tables in your Google documents. And you’ll have the same new abilities to view presentations and organize your stuff as your friends with iPhones do.



More to come... 

Looking ahead, we have plenty more planned for the Drive mobile apps—including native editing and real-time collaboration for Google spreadsheets. Stay tuned.







Get Drive in the App Store for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and visit the Play Store to get the latest on your Android phone or tablet. To learn more about Google Drive, visit drive.google.com/start. 




Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Senior Product Manager

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). The list below contains some highlights. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Line Item Bulk Edit:  We’re constantly working on improving the trafficking process to enable you to create and change your campaigns more easily and effectively. You can now change the start and end date, the quantity, and the rate of several line items at once by using the bulk edit feature on the order overview page.

New AdMob SDK: The new Google AdMob SDK v6.1.0 for Android and v6.1.4 and v6.1.5 (non-UDID and UDID, respectively) for iOS are available for download. The new versions include the ability to specify multiple ad sizes in an AdView, introduce an app event listener for custom creatives that fire custom app events, and fix bugs reported from previous versions of the SDK.

Available in DFP:

Copy Creative Templates: If there is a creative template that you often use, you can now copy the template if you would like to re-use it for new creatives.

Available in DFP Mobile:

Allow non-matching images in aspect ratio creatives: Offers the ability to upload an image asset which doesn't match the aspect ratio you have selected in the line item.

Suggested ad units: You can now create mobile ad units by approving suggestions generated from actual traffic. When a not-yet existing ad unit generates impressions we will show it after some impressions as a suggested ad unit in the inventory screen of the network where users can approve them to become actual ad units. This saves you time by automatically creating ad units in advance, while still maintaining control over your overall inventory structure.

Multiple sizes for ad units in applications: You can now create ad units with multiple sizes in applications, allowing you to sell high-value custom sizes without compromising your ability to deliver standard banners or use ad networks.

Available in DFP Video:

Pausing / Archiving for Content & Sources: Content and Source will have new status: Archiving. Archiving a content source marks all of its content as archived. You can also mark video content as archived and this will persist until the user sets it back to the "video source setting"

DFP API Hangouts:
On September 18th at 11am PT join the DFP API Team and Ad-Juster in a hangout focused on how Ad-Juster integrates with the DFP API to make Publisher's lives easier. Ad-Juster, a company that helps ad operations teams automate the pulling of countless reports from multiple sources, will present a demonstration of their tool and also discuss how they integrate with the API.  Add questions before and during the live hangout and don't forget to add this event to your calendar. To ensure your computer is ready please follow the instructions prior to the event. Thanks, and see you there!

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

A more dynamic mobile reading experience

Last year we introduced mobile templates on Blogger, and Dynamic Views for the desktop. Since then, over 2 million blogs have started using Dynamic Views on desktop, and users have asked us for more mobile features. So today, we’re bringing the speed and advanced reading experience of Dynamic Views to mobile.  Configuring your blog to use a Dynamic View on mobile will result in a reading experience that mirrors the desktop, but is optimized for mobile.

To configure a Dynamic View for mobile on your blog, select the "Template" tab, and then click on the settings cog under the “Mobile” preview.  

If you’re currently using Dynamic Views on the desktop and have the “Default” mobile template selected, you don’t need to do anything -- your blog will automatically start using the mobile optimized view when viewed from a compatible mobile browser. For more information, see Blogger Help.

Currently, only the “Classic” view, which is best suited for small screens, will be shown on mobile. Tablets with large screens will get the full desktop experience. As with the older mobile templates, supported browsers are WebKit-based browsers (such as Android Browser, Chrome for Android and iOS, and Mobile Safari).  


We hope your readers enjoy the modern, compelling experience that this mobile update provides.

Docs Grow Ears: Google Feedback now in Google Ads Developer Documentation

If you've recently visited any of the Google Ads Developer documentation, you may have noticed a "Feedback on this document" link at the top right corner of a page. That's right—you can now use that link to report errors, comment on existing content, or request further clarification for any of the Google Ads Developer docs:

• Google AdMob Ads SDK


• AdSense APIs


• AdWords API


• DoubleClick Ad Exchange APIs


• DoubleClick for Advertisers API


• DoubleClick for Publishers API


• Interactive Media Ads SDK

In addition to this new channel, you can continue to reach out to us through the developer forums or Google Developers Live events.

Quang Nguyen, Ads Developer Relations Team

Announcing Ad Catalog v2 for iOS

We are pleased to announce the release of Ad Catalog v2 for iOS. Ad Catalog is a sample application which showcases a number of best practices when it comes to integrating AdMob ads into your iOS application.

This updated version shows how to integrate AdMob ads into four different types of iOS layouts - TabbedView, TableView, ScrollView and OpenGLView. Highlights include:

• The TabbedView example shows how to correctly implement a GADBannerView singleton that gets reused across many different views


• The TableView example shows how to correctly reuse a single ad inside multiple cells in a TableView


• The OpenGL and ScrollView examples show how to correctly dock an ad to the top or bottom of your screen, outside of your content

You can download a zip file from the google-mobile-dev download page, or you can get the source by taking a look at our online repository.

If you have any comments, questions, or feature requests for Ad Catalog, please let us know about them on the forum or during our office hours.

 - Raj Parameswaran, AdMob Team

Getting AdMob ads to work with cocos2D Part 2: Handling Autorotation

In the first part of this series, we talked about integrating AdMob ads in a cocos2d application without diminishing performance. However, we conveniently overlooked how you’d go about handling device reorientation. This blog post will outline the two steps necessary for getting autorotation to work using v0.99.5b3 or higher of the cocos2d framework.

Step One: Setting UIKit Autorotation

cocos2d allows you to handle autorotation in two different ways (UIKit and cocos2d). Since we’re working with both UIKit views as well as Open GL views, we want to rely on UIKit autorotation. If not, we’d have to transform our GADBannerView manually. To make sure you’re using UIKit autorotation, set the GAME_AUTOROTATION directive on your platform of choice to kGameAutorotationUIViewController.

Once you’ve done this, check RootViewController.m to make sure shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: returns YES for all of the orientations that you support. cocos2d produces skeleton code that handles this method differently depending on the autorotation method you’re using, so make sure that you modify the code block where GAME_AUTOROTATION == kGameAutorotationUIViewController.

Step Two: Modifying View Layout

The final step is to modify our resizeViews: method so that it takes the orientation of the device into account when laying out the views. Rewrite resizeViews: as resizeViewForOrientation:, using the orientation parameter to lay out your GADBannerView. The code below, similar to the first blog post, assumes you’re laying out your banner at the top of the screen.

- (void)resizeViewsForOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)toInt {
  // If the banner hasn't been created yet, no need for resizing views.
  if (!bannerView_) {
    return;
  }

  BOOL adIsShowing = [self.view.subviews containsObject:bannerView_];
  if (!adIsShowing) {
    return;
  }

  // Frame of the main RootViewController which we call the root view.
  CGRect rootViewFrame = self.view.frame;
  // Frame of the main RootViewController view that holds the cocos2d view.
  CGRect glViewFrame = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] openGLView].frame;
  CGRect bannerViewFrame = bannerView_.frame;
  CGRect frame = bannerViewFrame;
  // The updated x and y coordinates for the origin of the banner.
  CGFloat yLocation = 0.0;
  CGFloat xLocation = 0.0;

  // Move the root view underneath the ad banner.
  glViewFrame.origin.y = bannerViewFrame.size.height;
  // Center the banner using the value of the origin.
  if (UIInterfaceOrientationIsLandscape(toInt)) {
    // The superView has not had its width and height updated yet so
    // use those values for the x and y of the new origin respectively.
    xLocation = (rootViewFrame.size.height -
                      bannerViewFrame.size.width) / 2.0;
  } else {
    xLocation = (rootViewFrame.size.width -
                      bannerViewFrame.size.width) / 2.0;
  }

  frame.origin = CGPointMake(xLocation, yLocation);
  bannerView_.frame = frame;

  if (UIInterfaceOrientationIsLandscape(toInt)) {
    // The super view's frame hasn't been updated so use its width
    // as the height.
    glViewFrame.size.height = rootViewFrame.size.width -
                                    bannerViewFrame.size.height;
    glViewFrame.size.width = rootViewFrame.size.height;
  } else {
    glViewFrame.size.height = rootViewFrame.size.height -
                                    bannerViewFrame.size.height;
  }
  [[CCDirector sharedDirector] openGLView].frame = glViewFrame;

}

Now that you’re handling rotation, you’re going to have to resize your views in two different places. We’ve already covered this in initGADBanner: in the first post (simply use the interfaceOrientation property of UIViewController to call resizeViewsForOrientation: instead of resizeViews:). Here, we also have to call resizeviewsForOrientation: in willRotateToInterfaceOrientation:duration: as well. You can add this call after the skeleton code that cocos2d provides.

Ads inside your cocos2d application should now stay docked in place whenever device rotations occur. You can check out a full example from this blog post here. As always, feel free to direct any questions you have to our forum or join us for our upcoming hangout.

 - Raj Parameswaran, AdMob Team

Getting AdMob ads to work with cocos2D

cocos2d for iPhone is a popular framework for building 2D games for iOS. Integrating AdMob ads into cocos2d apps has gotten significantly easier with the latest version of the framework; This blog post will show you three things to keep in mind using v0.99.5b3 or higher of the cocos2d framework. It is assumed that you already have some familiarity with cocos2d.

Initialization

Create and initialize a GADBannerView in the RootViewController class. You can put this code into a new method knowing that it will be called from the AppDelegate after the view hierarchy has been set up. This code adds to the standard banner view example in the docs.

- (void)initGADBanner {

  // NOTE:
  // Add your publisher ID here and fill in the GADAdSize constant for
  // the ad you would like to request.
  bannerView_ = [[GADBannerView alloc] initWithAdSize:kGADAdSizeBanner];
  bannerView_.adUnitID = @"PUBLISHER_ID_HERE";
  bannerView_.delegate = self;
  [bannerView_ setRootViewController:self];

  [self.view addSubview:bannerView_];
  [bannerView_ loadRequest:[self createRequest]];
  // Use the status bar orientation since we haven't signed up for
  // orientation change notifications for this class.
  [self resizeViews];
}

Performance Considerations

Notice the addSubview: in initGADBanner:. Why did we add the GADBannerView directly to the RootViewController’s hierarchy instead of the cocos2d scene’s hierarchy? cocos2d scenes are OpenGL views, whereas our GADBannerView is a UIWebView wrapped in a native UIView. OpenGL views will usually be refreshed often, whereas our GADBannerView will be mostly static. Placing our GADBannerView on top of the OpenGL view therefore can lead to a performance decrease as the device will have more drawing to do.

You can test if this performance decrease is significant for your specific project by logging the frame rate when you place the ad within the OpenGL view and outside of it. The performance cost is usually only significant when you are dealing with very complex hierarchies.

View Layout

Since we’ve decided to place our GADBannerView into the RootViewController’s view hierarchy, we also need to now make sure to resize our cocos2d view to make space for our GADBannerView. The resizeViews: in initGADBanner: is called for this purpose. The implementation for resizeViews: is below. The main OpenGL view which encompasses all of the cocos2d scenes can be grabbed using the +sharedDirector object. The code below assumes you’re going to display the ad at the top of your screen, and have a device that’s in landscape.

- (void)resizeViews: {
  // If the banner hasn't been created yet, no need for resizing views.
  if (!bannerView_) {
    return;
  }
  // If ad is not showing, no need to resize views.
  BOOL adIsShowing = [self.view.subviews containsObject:bannerView_];
  if (!adIsShowing) {
    return;
  }

  // Frame of the main RootViewController which we call the root view.
  CGRect rootViewFrame = self.view.frame;
  // Frame of the main RootViewController view that holds the cocos2d view.
  CGRect glViewFrame = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] openGLView].frame;
  CGRect bannerViewFrame = bannerView_.frame;
  CGRect frame = bannerViewFrame;
  // The updated x and y coordinates for the origin of the banner.
  CGFloat yLocation = 0.0;
  CGFloat xLocation = 0.0;

  // Move the root view underneath the ad banner.
  glViewFrame.origin.y = bannerViewFrame.size.height;
  // The superView has not had its width and height updated yet so use those
  // values for the x and y of the new origin respectively. The game is in
  // landscape.
  xLocation = (rootViewFrame.size.height -
                        bannerViewFrame.size.width) / 2.0;
 
  frame.origin = CGPointMake(xLocation, yLocation);
  bannerView_.frame = frame;


  // The super view's frame hasn't been updated so use its width
  // as the height. Assume device is in landscape.
  glViewFrame.size.height = rootViewFrame.size.width -
                                      bannerViewFrame.size.height;
  glViewFrame.size.width = rootViewFrame.size.height;

  [[CCDirector sharedDirector] openGLView].frame = glViewFrame;
}

With that, you should now see AdMob ads show up in your cocos2d application. Look out for a follow-up to this blog post where we will discuss how to handle autorotation. As always, feel free to direct any questions you have to our forum or join us for our upcoming hangout.

 - Raj Parameswaran, AdMob Team

Doubling down on mobile in DoubleClick for Publishers

66% of the population accesses the Internet every day on their smartphone (source: Google and Ipsos Our Mobile Planet: Understanding the Mobile Consumer, May 2012), and never leaves home without their device(s).

The prevalence of mobile devices enables users to constantly connect to a publisher’s content, whether on-the-go, at work, or on the couch at home.

For a publisher’s advertising business, this means display advertising has needed to evolve from purely ads in web browsers, to ads across all screens and devices. You have to help advertisers connect with your audience in whatever setting and on whatever screen they're consuming your content.

At the heart of DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), we've built a single platform that enables publishers to seamlessly manage all of their digital advertising under one roof. In the most recent release of DFP, we’re excited to bring even more DFP desktop features to mobile so that trafficking a campaign to your website is no different to trafficking a campaign to your mobile site and application. New features include:

• Frequency capping: You can now enforce frequency caps on mobile web sites and in mobile applications. Frequency caps can be applied to mobile campaigns and to mobile ad units, allowing you fine-grained control over the advertiser and user experience.


• Suggested ad units: You can now create mobile ad units by approving suggestions generated from actual traffic. This saves you time by automatically creating ad units in advance, while still maintaining control over your overall inventory structure.


• Multiple sizes for ad units in applications: You can now create ad units with multiple sizes in applications, allowing you to sell high-value custom sizes without compromising your ability to deliver standard banners or use ad networks.


• Data transfer for mobile: If you are using the data transfer beta, you will now have access to mobile-specific reporting data, including device, carrier and OS information.

In addition to bringing the best-in-class desktop functionality of DFP to mobile, we recognize that mobile is indeed different, and presents publishers with unique advertising opportunities not found on desktop. To help publishers capitalize on new opportunities and the uniqueness of mobile, we’ve recently released the following mobile functionality:

• SDK mediation: You can now connect with major in-app advertising networks, including iAd, via the networks’ own SDKs. You can choose which SDKs to include in your application with our adapter-based approach, minimising application size and giving you control over updates. You also have the option to serve ads from a sequence of ad networks to maximize fill rates and improve RPMs.


• App events: You can now provide a custom advertising experience by extending the Google AdMob SDK. Creatives can pass messages to the application, allowing the application to respond (for example, to change the background color). This enables truly integrated ad formats while still using the SDK to do the heavy lifting.


• Support for pre-loading ads: You can now pre-load ads from DFP Mobile. This enables you to improve the user experience, whether to mitigate the effect of slow mobile connections, or to match the smooth user experience of the rest of your application.

With DFP, we’re committed to giving publishers the tools they need to seamlessly manage and deliver all of their digital advertising in order to take full advantage of the multi-screen world. 

Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

Our engineers have been hard at work during the last few weeks to provide you with some new, exciting features in DFP. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.


Available in DFP:

Teams: Imagine that your organization operates an East and West coast sales team, and you'd like to restrict access to your East coast orders and advertisers so only users on your East coast team can view and edit the campaigns. With the new Teams functionality in DFP, you can now group your network's users into teams, defined by you, enabling you to restrict access to any combination of companies, orders and inventory. Learn more.

Auto-Macro Insertion for Creative Templates: The key to successfully serving third-party creatives and minimizing discrepancies is to make sure that you are properly inserting macros into the third-party code. A macro is a short piece of code provided by DFP that will enable your third-party tags to properly track clicks or track impressions.  In addition to automatically inserting macros for reconginzed third-party creatives, DFP will now also recognize and insert macros for  third-party code in custom creatives and custom creative templates. This provides you with the same macro-insertion support and efficiencies you are used to when trafficking regular 3rd party creatives.

Ad Exclusions: There are situations when you will want to avoid an advertiser running on a competitor's website. For example, if you've got a news story about a plane crash, you probably don't want to run airline ads next to it. Ad Exclusions provide controls to prevent labelled line items to deliver on specific inventory. These labels can additionally be added per default on company level to ensure a smoother workflow for your trafficking operations.


Creative Upload for Standalone Creative Library: The recently launched Standalone Creative Library now supports the ability to upload creatives and creatives sets directly, which can be stored for later use.

Local Time Zone Trafficking: In addition to being able to change the role and language you use DFP in, you can now change a DFP user's time zone to match the user's location. When you do, the displayed times throughout the trafficking sections of DFP will be adjusted to match the time in the location you've set for the user.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Additional Reporting Scheduling options: We’ve added further  granularity to reporting scheduling options to give you more insights into the health of your inventory. You can now schedule your reports with additional breakdowns such as year-to-date, quarter-to-date, month-to-date, and lifetime.

SDK Mediation for Mobile: SDK Mediation is a form of ad network optimization for mobile in DFP which allows you to set up a waterfall (or daisy chain) of networks, where one network after another is called until an impression is filled. Use this new feature to send impressions from mobile applications to ad networks via the ad networks' own SDKs.This is useful when:

• An ad network only accepts requests from its own SDK


• Certain custom formats are only available in the ad network's SDK


• Information provided by the SDK, such as location information or a unique user ID, enables higher CPMs

Available in DFP Mobile:

Frequency Capping: Frequency capping is now available for mobile in two ways:

• Line item frequency capping: For mobile web, this uses cookies in a similar fashion as desktop (the DoubleClick cookie where possible; otherwise the DFP first party cookie). For mobile applications, this uses a double-anonymised identifier generated by the Google AdMob SDK.


• Ad unit frequency capping: Ad unit frequency capping now works for mobile in cases where there is an identifier available.

Available in DFP Video:

• Fallback Image for VAST Non-linear ads: It’s now possible to display a fallback image when VAST non-linear ads fail to render.


• VPAID Creative Validation: DFP will validate hosted linear and non-linear VPAID creatives and notify the user if it's invalid.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

AdMob SDK 6.1 Released

Last week, we released AdMob SDK v6.1 for both Android and iOS. This SDK contains a number of important bug fixes and exciting new features including:

Additional DoubleClick support

DoubleClick publishers will be happy to know that AdMob now provides support for app events, giving them the ability to execute custom code in their application when a creative dispatches an app event. Additionally, the new SDK provides support for multiple ad sizes using the same banner.

Easy access to Google Analytics

You’ll notice we’ve included the latest Google Analytics package in the “Add-Ons” directory. The new mobile app analytics provides the same best-in-class Google Analytics reporting, but for mobile apps.

If you have any questions about the AdMob SDK, please let us know on the forum or hang out during our upcoming AdMob/DFP office hours. For more information about this new SDK, take a look at our release notes.

 - Raj Parameswaran, AdMob Team

Mobile Will Require Advertisers To Redefine How They Measure Success

The following post originally appeared on the Google Mobile Ads Blog.

Mobile introduces exciting new opportunities for measuring the success of marketing campaigns, but connecting consumers’ mobile activities with advertisers’ business outcomes can be challenging.  Increasingly, advertisers are redefining their direct response marketing strategies for mobile in order to more accurately measure the success of mobile campaigns.  We recently sat down with Kerri Smith, Director of Mobility at iProspect, a leading, global digital marketing agency to discuss this topic.

Google: How are you helping your clients to assign dollar values to mobile all along the funnel?



Kerri:  This really depends on the client.  In most cases, clients are assigning value based on a number of factors used to determine the lifetime value of a customer.  For example, one of our brands assigns an average order value (AOV) on app downloads based on the usage they’ve seen through analytics and resulting revenue from their aggregated app users.   For another brand, call extensions have proven very effective, though it’s been difficult to track conversions and resulting revenue as the consumer is taken offline.  Therefore, we use an equation that allows us to measure the likelihood of an actual conversion. Knowing the average call duration, which indicates level of interest, and the agent conversion rate, the brand helped to formulate the following equation:

          6 minute call duration = an interested consumer

          Agents convert 30% of interested consumers

          Interested Consumers * 30% = # of conversions

This allows us to quantify a return where 1-to-1 measurement is difficult, and to understand the impact the channel is having on the brand’s overall business.

Google: What types of clients have you seen be successful with understanding the value of these micro- conversions?

Kerri:  We’ve seen our retail brands be the first to embrace these micro-conversions - especially in the case of location-based responses, due in large part to the known “intent to visit” derived from these and previous testing.  We’ve been able to use coupons to measure the revenue opportunity in stores from mobile and to prove the value in attributing dollars to these actions.  Retailers have seen enough of these trends and subsequent lifts in revenue to value these actions.

Google: What success stories or best in class examples can you share?

Kerri:  One of our clients had a goal of directing mobile users to their app download page to increase conversions, and we worked with Google to help them run a two month test of Mobile App Extensions.  During the test, we disabled all sitelinks, location extensions and product extensions in order to focus on the primary goal of driving app downloads.  The test showed phenomenal results: 92 downloads, 89:1 ROI and a 334% lift in ROI when they began attributing value to app downloads.

Google: What's iProspect POV on where mobile is going?

Kerri:  Where is mobile not going?  Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) have already become so ingrained in our everyday lives that the full impact is literally boundless.  Mobile is the channel that connects all others.  It doesn’t fit in the traditional conversion funnel -- it runs alongside it, involved at every stage.  This presents a challenge to brands who still segment advertising channels with separate budgets and directives instead of focusing on how they impact each other.  Mobile will highlight the need to evaluate all channels together to create a truly integrated approach - one that enhances the consumer’s interaction with the brand.  Applying a value to the multitude of “responses” available in mobile is just the first step.  Advertisers will also need to evaluate the impact of those responses relative to other brand initiatives (both online and offline) in order to determine the role each plays in contributing to their bottom line.  The ubiquity of mobile will force advertisers to redefine their approach and how they measure success.

Posted by Samantha Podos Nowak, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Mobile will require advertisers to redefine how they measure success

Mobile introduces exciting new opportunities for measuring the success of marketing campaigns, but connecting consumers’ mobile activities with advertisers’ business outcomes can be challenging. Increasingly, advertisers are redefining their direct response marketing strategies for mobile in order to more accurately measure the success of mobile campaigns. We recently sat down with Kerri Smith, Director of Mobility at iProspect, a leading, global digital marketing agency to discuss this topic.


Google: How are you helping your clients to assign dollar values to mobile all along the funnel?

Kerri: This really depends on the client. In most cases, clients are assigning value based on a number of factors used to determine the lifetime value of a customer. For example, one of our brands assigns an average order value (AOV) on app downloads based on the usage they’ve seen through analytics and resulting revenue from their aggregated app users. For another brand, call extensions have proven very effective, though it’s been difficult to track conversions and resulting revenue as the consumer is taken offline. Therefore, we use an equation that allows us to measure the likelihood of an actual conversion. Knowing the average call duration, which indicates level of interest, and the agent conversion rate, the brand helped to formulate the following equation:

6 minute call duration = an interested consumer
Agents convert 30% of interested consumers
Interested Consumers * 30% = # of conversions

This allows us to quantify a return where 1-to-1 measurement is difficult, and to understand the impact the channel is having on the brand’s overall business.

Google: What types of clients have you seen be successful with understanding the value of these micro- conversions?

Kerri: We’ve seen our retail brands be the first to embrace these micro-conversions - especially in the case of location-based responses, due in large part to the known “intent to visit” derived from these and previous testing. We’ve been able to use coupons to measure the revenue opportunity in stores from mobile and to prove the value in attributing dollars to these actions. Retailers have seen enough of these trends and subsequent lifts in revenue to value these actions.

Google: What success stories or best in class examples can you share?

Kerri: One of our clients had a goal of directing mobile users to their app download page to increase conversions, and we worked with Google to help them run a two month test of Mobile App Extensions. During the test, we disabled all sitelinks, location extensions and product extensions in order to focus on the primary goal of driving app downloads. The test showed phenomenal results: 92 downloads, 89:1 ROI and a 334% lift in ROI when they began attributing value to app downloads.

Google: What's iProspect POV on where mobile is going?

Kerri: Where is mobile not going? Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) have already become so ingrained in our everyday lives that the full impact is literally boundless. Mobile is the channel that connects all others. It doesn’t fit in the traditional conversion funnel -- it runs alongside it, involved at every stage. This presents a challenge to brands who still segment advertising channels with separate budgets and directives instead of focusing on how they impact each other. Mobile will highlight the need to evaluate all channels together to create a truly integrated approach - one that enhances the consumer’s interaction with the brand. Applying a value to the multitude of “responses” available in mobile is just the first step. Advertisers will also need to evaluate the impact of those responses relative to other brand initiatives (both online and offline) in order to determine the role each plays in contributing to their bottom line. The ubiquity of mobile will force advertisers to redefine their approach and how they measure success.


Posted by: Samantha Podos Nowak, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Mobile Websites vs Responsive Design: What’s the right solution for your business?

The following post originally appeared on the Google Mobile Ads Blog.

As more of your competitors Go Mo, building a mobile-friendly site becomes more of a priority for your business. Over the past two years alone, mobile search traffic has increased five-fold. Customers are searching for your business from their mobile phones, and you need to engage them with a mobile experience designed for completing on-the-go tasks from their small screens. Recently many businesses have been asking us about an emerging trend among web developers—responsive design—and if they should use it. While we believe that building a separate mobile website is an appropriate solution for certain businesses, it’s also important to understand how responsive design might fit into your plans to Go Mo.

What is responsive design? It is a website design technique that allows you to create a single website that will adapt to the device on which it’s being viewed, whether it’s a laptop, smartphone or tablet. A site built with responsive design will automatically resize for different devices, but it is up to you to prioritize the content that matters most to the mobile user. For example, a mobile user might need to quickly find your phone number or directions, whereas a tablet user might want a simpler way to make couch-surfing purchases. A site built using responsive design could prioritize click-to-call and click-to-map buttons, while the tablet site would focus on simplifying the shopping cart. For the technical details on how responsive design works for building mobile-friendly sites, read this blog post from the Google webmaster team.

So how do I know if I should build a separate mobile website or use responsive design?  

Here are some guidelines to help you decide what makes sense for your business:

If I decide responsive design is a better fit for my business, do I have to build my site from scratch?

Not necessarily. A sophisticated web developer might be able to adapt an existing site with responsive design, but there will still be costs in terms of time and budget. 

Will a site built with responsive design have more than one URL?

No. A site built with responsive design will have the same URL for desktop, mobile and tablets. When building a separate mobile optimized site, typically there is a different mobile url, but the users will be taken there automatically as long as your desktop site is enabled with the auto redirect code.

How much does it cost to use responsive design for mobile?

Prices vary across developers and agencies. We recommend reaching out to a developer and/or agency for help on getting started. 

Responsive design can definitely minimize long term maintenance of your site, but many businesses can effectively connect with their customers with a separate mobile-friendly site. If you have the technical resources and a clear business need, then responsive design is a more advanced way to make your site mobile-friendly. No matter how you go about it, you need to ensure you are designing for mobile first, and engaging your customers when they're using their mobile phones to search for your business. 

For additional resources on the value of mobile, testing your site and finding developers to help you build your mobile-friendly site, visit howtogomo.com. 

Posted by Jessica Sapick, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Data At Your Fingertips: Announcing The Google Analytics App For Android

We are pleased to announce the launch of Google Analytics App for Android phones!

With the Google Analytics App, you can access the same accounts and profiles you see when you open Analytics from a desktop browser, but you’ll see reports that are optimized for your phone. 

Swipe through these reports to see the essential data about your websites and apps anywhere, anytime:

• Real-Time: See the number of visitors you currently have and a list of the pages (for websites) or screens (for apps) that are currently popular.


• Dashboard: Monitor the KPIs and user metrics you care about the most. By default, you’ll see your Daily Unique Visitors and your Goal Conversion Rate, but you can customize the dashboard to change which reports, metrics, or segments you see.  


• Automatic and Customized Alerts: Google Analytics detects statistical anomalies in your data and can send you an alert when something unusual happens. See either automatic alerts, or customize your settings to send alerts based on your own benchmarks. 

Screenshot: The Realtime Report

Screenshot: The Dashboard

Visit Google Play to download and install the app to keep up with your data anytime, anywhere.

Peng Li, on behalf of the GA Mobile App team

Measuring a Mobile World: Introducing Mobile App Analytics

Mobile is changing the way that people communicate, work and play, and much of the growing adoption and innovation we're seeing in the industry is driven by mobile apps. There are already more than 600,000 mobile apps on Google Play alone, and we expect to see continued momentum throughout the industry. Mobile is also becoming front and center for marketers and businesses. As more of them understand the value of mobile apps, sophisticated measurement tools are becoming core to how marketers and app developers invest, analyze and market their apps. 

That’s why today we’re announcing a new set of reports in beta called Mobile App Analytics that help marketers and developers better measure their mobile apps. The reports are tailored for mobile app developers and marketers, speaking the language that matters to them. They are designed to measure the entire mobile customer journey - from discovery to download to engagement. This enables the creation of app experiences that are more useful and engaging through data-driven decisions at each stage of the app lifecycle:

1. Acquisition and user metrics such as downloads and new users


2. Engagement metrics such as retention, crashes and conversions


3. Outcome metrics such as app sales and in-app purchases

Layout of new Mobile App Analytics reports

Here’s an outline of the new Mobile App Analytics along with screen grabs of selected reports:

Acquisition and User Analysis Reports - discover your best sources of new users

New and active users - measure the number of new and active users who launch your app everyday and analyze your most valuable segments. 

Google Play traffic sources - understand which traffic sources are driving new users and in-app conversions through Google Play to fine-tune your marketing initiatives. 

App versions - keep track of the distribution of active users over the older and newer versions of your app so you know what to support.

Device overview - check out the top mobile devices and OS versions that your app runs on, and optimize the experience for each device.

Engagement Reports - see how users interact with your app

User behavior - assess how loyal your users are, how frequently they use the app, and the engagement level of each loyalty group.

Engagement flow - visually see the screens, actions and paths users take to move throughout your application in order to optimize usage.

App crashes - see trends in crashes and exceptions that will help you troubleshoot problems on certain devices and operating systems.

Outcome / Business Impact Reports - identify whether users are accomplishing your goals

Goal conversions - set up conversion events in your app, like spending 10 minutes in the app, or clicking on ads to gauge success.

In-App purchases - if you sell virtual or tangible goods in your app, you can measure the number of purchases and the revenue generated.

The new reports are part of a holistic experience tailored for mobile app measurement, including a new and lightweight SDK v2.0 that’s easier to implement and is opt-out ready, with a streamlined back-end infrastructure.

We’ve also revamped our sign-up process, so new users can choose whether they want to start measuring their website or their mobile app. This means you’ll be just 3 clicks away from setting up your app analytics account and downloading the SDK.

We will be opening the beta up to whitelisted users in waves, so if you’re interested in using Mobile App Analytics for your app, please complete this beta signup form and we’ll get you started soon. We anticipate the reports will be available to all Google Analytics users by the end of the summer.

Also, if you are at Google I/O be sure to attend the Google Analytics session “Measuring the End-to-End Value of Your App” (from 11:30AM - 12:30PM today, June 29) where our lead engineers will tell you more about Mobile App Analytics and some other exciting things we’re working on.

Posted By JiaJing Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team