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

Lessons from Legends

Creativity is a fundamental part of any business' success, and it's often helpful to go right to the source for tips. Earlier this year, we partnered with The One Club to develop a series that would bring the energy and ideas of creative icons to today's industry. Our goal was to explore the creative consistencies, anomalies, joys, and pains over the past century.



Last week, we hosted icons Mark Tutssel of Leo Burnett and Bob Scarpelli of DDB at Google Chicago. The theme was "Focus," featuring a candid conversation between the two creatives, ranging from influential work, Chicago's mojo, and the future of advertising. Both men discussed the work that makes them proud, creativity's power to solve problems, and the importance of emphasizing the humanity in everything that we do. Creatives from several Chicago agencies, including Leo Burnett, DDB, BBDO Energy, Euro RSCG, and SapientNitro, joined the conversation, and learned about the stories behind campaigns such as Budweiser's Wassup and Troy Library's Book Burning Party.



Our first Lessons from Legends event was held in June, with Lee Clow of TBWA\Chiat\Day kicking off the program. Just as Lee couldn't help but emphasize the importance of Los Angeles in his creative story, Chicago played an active role inspiring both Mark and Bob. We'll soon move the program to another city, and are eager to learn how the next locale inspires another group of creative talent.

Posted by Carley Ribet, Agency Coordinator

Upcoming extended AdWords API/Scripts, Ad Exchange, and DFP API Downtime

Update: Ad Exchange will be affected by the downtime as well. Please see below for details.



As previously mentioned, we have an upcoming AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP service outage. This will occur on Saturday, September 22 -- AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP systems will be unavailable from approximately 10:00 am to 8:00 pm Pacific Time (17:00 Saturday to 03:00 Sunday GMT) due to system maintenance.



AdWords

During this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual (with the settings you established as of 10am PST), but you won’t be able to make SOAP API calls or download reports. Requests to the AdWords API will fail with an HTTP 50x error during the maintenance window. Please also keep in mind that any automated rules scheduled during this time will not run and AdWords scripts will not execute during this period. We encourage you to verify your campaign settings prior to the outage.



Ad Exchange

During this time, your ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to downtime period, but you will not be able to make API calls to Ad Exchange Buyer SOAP API. On Ad Exchange Buyer REST API, only the Direct Deals related API calls will be affected. For the Ad Exchange Real-Time Bidding Protocol, you will not be able to make changes to pre-targeting settings, everything else should continue to run as usual.



DFP

As mentioned above, ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to the downtime period. If you use the audience feature in your network, any API call to the AudienceSegmentService service will fail with a SegmentError.UNEXPECTED_ERROR error. Also, if you target any audience segments in your line items, any calls to LineItemService, ForecastService, or LineItemCreativeAssociationService that involve those line items will fail.



We apologize for any inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as our engineers work to keep AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP running smoothly.



 - Kevin Winter, Ads Developer Relations Team

Better bids, better ads, more downloads: New app promotion tools for advertisers

With more than one million apps currently in the Google Play and iTunes Stores, we know that those of you advertising apps are looking for ways to drive valuable installs at scale while helping your apps stand out from the crowd. We recently launched several app promotion features designed to help those of you who have created an app promotion campaign in AdWords, or are considering creating an app promotion campaign, maximize your return on investment.



CPA Bidding with Conversion Optimizer

You are constantly looking for ways to easily optimize your campaigns and attract the right customers at the right cost. Google’s Conversion Optimizer helps increase conversions across our search and display networks while decreasing cost per acquisition. Conversion Optimizer analyzes historical conversion data and adjusts bids on an ongoing basis to help you maximize your ROI. We're now extending the power of this automated bidding feature to app advertisers to help you drive efficient app installs at scale.

With Conversion Optimizer, instead of a traditional CPC bid, you can set a target cost per acquisition (CPA), based on your average cost per download. Conversion Optimizer will use historical conversion data and other signals to place CPC bids automatically, in order to hit the target CPA with as much volume as possible. While results vary per campaign, strong early results from our beta campaigns show a 20%+ decrease in cost per install with the addition of Conversion Optimizer. It’s important to note that Target CPA bidding does not guarantee a particular cost per install. The tool is now available to all advertisers that have created app promotion campaigns, and we’re excited to help you move beyond manual bid management to free, automated optimization.



Ad Formats

For advertisers looking to promote your apps to app users, capturing the attention of potential users and driving them to download your app is key. Many advertisers use our text ads to drive people to an Android or iOS app, and we've now optimized text ads for Android or iOS apps to include more information about what users are getting, what they have to pay for it, and how others feel about the app.

The ad rotates to display all the information when a user clicks on the ad.
The user has to click on Download to go to the app download page.

With AdWords, app advertisements are automatically updated with the latest information like reviews and ratings. You simply create a text ad that points to your app download page, and AdWords supplies the graphics and formatting. We’ve found that when app advertisers provide users with this kind of important information about their apps, many have seen their cost per conversion decrease by about 25%.



If you’d like to learn more about Google’s app promotion features and see a live demonstration of how to implement and optimize these tools in your AdWords account, tune into our webinar on September 12th at 10am PST. Register today by visiting this link: http://goo.gl/B49ma.



Posted by Chrix Finne, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

Announcing the September 6 DS release!

The latest DoubleClick Search (DS) release includes the following new features:

• Budget pacing report: Allows you to set a budget (different from a campaign’s daily budget) across multiple campaigns and see if you’re on track to spend it. Tracking spend against a budget goal is a common need for many users. These reports save time for agencies that need to look at such data on a regular basis. You can:




• Enter KPI expectations and see if your campaigns are on track to deliver on them.


• Visualize week-over-week, day-over-day, or month-over-month trends and changes easily.


• See how each campaign is contributing toward budget and KPI.

Learn more about Budget pacing reports on the Help Center, and look for an in-depth blog post in the coming days.

• Inventory management is now fully launched: We recently blogged about the beta release of DS inventory management, which allows you to use your Google Merchant Center feeds to efficiently and automatically update your search campaigns. This feature is now available to all DS users. Check out the Help Center to learn more about managing your inventory in DS.

• See the number of changes to campaigns and other objects: These new columns display the number of changes to campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords for the specified date range in the upper righthand corner. They introduce change history information into the main campaign management functionality. You can:




• Discover the number of changes for any object by using the new Impact analysis default view (above the performance summary graph, click the first dropdown to the right of View). This view displays all changes columns, along with some stats such as clicks, actions, and revenue. You can use this view to help track these metrics and quickly determine the campaign changes that caused the metric changes.


• Click a number under one of the changes columns, and DS will take you to a Change history page with details on each change.


• Use impact analysis and date comparison together to correlate performance variations with changes made to objects.


• Chart these columns on the performance summary graph. For example, select Ad changes from the Select a metric dropdown, and see a visual representation of the total number of ad changes within the current date range.

• See when an object was created in DS: Find the new and not-so-new by adding the Creation time column to see when an object (such as a keyword) was created in DS. To access this column, along with the individual changes columns, click the Columns button above the performance summary graph. Under Available columns, navigate to Change history > Change stats.

We also added quarterly and yearly options for date range. When selecting a date range in the DS UI, there are new options for This quarter, Last quarter, This year, and Last year.

Read the Help Center release notes for more information on these features, and on issues fixed in this release.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

DoubleClick Ad Exchange Buyer REST API Version 1.1 Released

Version 1.1 of the Buyer REST API has been released bringing the following changes:

• A list method has been added for the Creatives resource. 


• The adgroupId has been removed from the Creatives resource. 


• A region property has been added to the bidderLocation[] object. 

Creatives.List Method added 

The list method retrieves a list of all of the authenticated user's active creatives. Optional parameters allow you to set the maximum number of Creatives resources to return each time you call the method. You can also filter the contents of the list by the status of creatives, for example to restrict the contents of the list to those ads that have been approved. Valid status values are approved, disapproved, and not_checked.



Removed adgroupId property 

Beginning with Version 1.1 of the Buyer REST API, the adgroupId will no longer be returned from method calls. In addition, passing the adgroupId value to a Creatives method will raise an error. However, a creative submitted through the API can be used to respond to a pretargeting match for any ad group. The removal of this value means that the key to uniquely identify a creative now consists of accountId + buyerCreativeId.



Added region property to bidderLocation[] 

The bidderLocation[] list in the Account resource now includes a third value. The region property describes the region for the bidder location. You can contact your customer representative to determine whether or not your account is in the new quota system.



The value of region describes the geographical region from which the Ad Exchange should send requests. This value is used by the new quota system. Allowed values:

• ASIA 


• EUROPE 


• US_EAST 


• US_WEST 

 -- Irene Smith, Ad Exchange Team

Discussions in Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets users now have the ability to collaborate more efficiently with discussions in Google Spreadsheets. This updates brings features like the ability to +mention users to add them to the discussion.



Release track:

Rapid release



Editions included:

Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education



For more information:

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/09/google-spreadsheets-now-with-discussions.html



whatsnew.googleapps.com


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