Introducing Google Play: All your entertainment, anywhere you go

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)



Entertainment is supposed to be fun. But in reality, getting everything to work can be the exact opposite—moving files between your computers, endless syncing across your devices, and wires…lots of wires. Today we’re eliminating all that hassle with Google Play, a digital entertainment destination where you can find, enjoy and share your favorite music, movies, books and apps on the web and on your Android phone or tablet. Google Play is entirely cloud-based so all your music, movies, books and apps are stored online, always available to you, and you never have to worry about losing them or moving them again.







With Google Play you can:

• Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks


• Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games


• Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks


• Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles

Starting today, Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore will become part of Google Play. On your Android phone or tablet, we’ll be upgrading the Android Market app to the Google Play Store app over the coming days. Your videos, books and music apps (in countries where they are available) will also be upgraded to Google Play Movies, Google Play Books and Google Play Music apps. The music, movies, books and apps you’ve purchased will continue to be available to you through Google Play—simply log in with your Google account like always.



To celebrate, we’ll be offering a different album, book, video rental and Android app at a special price each day for the next week in our “7 Days to Play” sale. In the U.S., today’s titles include the collection of top 40 hits Now That's What I Call Music 41, the popular game Where's My Water, the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and the movie Puncture for just 25 cents each. In addition, you'll find great collections of hip-hop, rock and country albums for $3.99 all week, detective novels from $2.99, some of our editorial team's favorite movies from 99 cents, and our favorite apps from 49 cents.



In the U.S., music, movies, books and Android apps are available in Google Play. In Canada and the U.K., we’ll offer movies, books and Android apps; in Australia, books and apps; and in Japan, movies and apps. Everywhere else, Google Play will be the new home for Android apps. Our long-term goal is to roll out as many different types of content as possible to people around the world, and we’ll keep adding new content to keep it fresh.



To learn more, head over to play.google.com/about or keep up with the latest on our Google+ page. If you’re headed to Austin later this week for South by Southwest, come to the Google Village to see Google Play in action. We can’t wait for you to try Google Play and experience a simpler way to manage your entertainment.



Posted by Jamie Rosenberg, Director of Digital Content

Introducing Google Play: All your entertainment, anywhere you go

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)



Entertainment is supposed to be fun. But in reality, getting everything to work can be the exact opposite—moving files between your computers, endless syncing across your devices, and wires…lots of wires. Today we’re eliminating all that hassle with Google Play, a digital entertainment destination where you can find, enjoy and share your favorite music, movies, books and apps on the web and on your Android phone or tablet. Google Play is entirely cloud-based so all your music, movies, books and apps are stored online, always available to you, and you never have to worry about losing them or moving them again.







With Google Play you can:

• Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks


• Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games


• Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks


• Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles

Starting today, Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore will become part of Google Play. On your Android phone or tablet, we’ll be upgrading the Android Market app to the Google Play Store app over the coming days. Your videos, books and music apps (in countries where they are available) will also be upgraded to Google Play Movies, Google Play Books and Google Play Music apps. The music, movies, books and apps you’ve purchased will continue to be available to you through Google Play—simply log in with your Google account like always.



To celebrate, we’ll be offering a different album, book, video rental and Android app at a special price each day for the next week in our “7 Days to Play” sale. In the U.S., today’s titles include the collection of top 40 hits Now That's What I Call Music 41, the popular game Where's My Water, the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and the movie Puncture for just 25 cents each. In addition, you'll find great collections of hip-hop, rock and country albums for $3.99 all week, detective novels from $2.99, some of our editorial team's favorite movies from 99 cents, and our favorite apps from 49 cents.



In the U.S., music, movies, books and Android apps are available in Google Play. In Canada and the U.K., we’ll offer movies, books and Android apps; in Australia, books and apps; and in Japan, movies and apps. Everywhere else, Google Play will be the new home for Android apps. Our long-term goal is to roll out as many different types of content as possible to people around the world, and we’ll keep adding new content to keep it fresh.



To learn more, head over to play.google.com/about or keep up with the latest on our Google+ page. If you’re headed to Austin later this week for South by Southwest, come to the Google Village to see Google Play in action. We can’t wait for you to try Google Play and experience a simpler way to manage your entertainment.



Posted by Jamie Rosenberg, Director of Digital Content

Supercharge ad performance with DFP Optimization

When advertisers are evaluating whether to advertise on a publisher’s site, they want to ensure their ad will perform well. Advertisers decide whether to keep buying on your site or a competitors’ based on if their campaigns are reaching the most valuable audience and meeting their campaign goals.




As a publisher, ensuring your advertiser's campaigns are receiving the impressions, clicks, and conversions they expect can be a daunting task. Ad operation teams spend hours at the controls of their ad server adjusting delivery settings, flight dates, and targeting, in effort to help their advertiser’s campaigns perform well. But solving this equation manually for hundreds or thousands of campaigns at once is virtually impossible to do.




The answer may lie in technology....and we think we can help.




Today, we’re excited to introduce DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Optimization, an advanced optimization system that supercharges ad performance to help publishers increases the value of their premium inventory, and boost yield for non-premium inventory.




DFP Optimization leverages Google’s infrastructure and processing capabilities to automatically deliver the best ad, to the best user, at the best time. The system uses advanced modeling and pattern recognition, and harnesses the power of AdWords machine learning and AdSense contextual matching, to deliver ads to users who are more likely to respond to them. DFP Optimization helps advertisers improve campaign performance, while helping publishers maximize clicks, conversions, and revenue.




Heise Online, one of Germany’s leading IT publishers, saw clicks on their optimized campaigns increase by 52% using DFP Optimization. This increase helped their sales teams improve the site stats they share with prospective clients, and were able to charge new premiums for its highly valuable inventory. Thomas Goldmann, Sales Director at Heise Online said “DFP Optimization has had a positive influence on our sales relationships with advertisers. Optimization allows better use of our premium inventory and increases the quality we can make available to our customers.”




DFP Optimization is fully integrated with the DFP ad serving platform, and can be easily implemented across all of a publisher’s inventory. After activating DFP Optimization, the system will continually learn, process, and adapt; this happens all without any manual intervention from your ad operations team. The system provides validation for publishers and their clients through a built-in control group that demonstrates the percentage lift for each optimized campaign. With this powerful reporting tool, you and your clients will know the solution is working.




To learn how you can begin increase the value of your inventory with DFP Optimization, please contact us.




Posted by Alex Vogenthaler, Product Manager

Offers.com utilizes technology and strong partnerships to increase sales by 36%

Over the past few years, Google Affiliate Network has helped advertisers and publishers grow their businesses with the right mix of technology, service, and data insights. We’re pleased to share these stories with you on the blog every few weeks. 



Offers.com is an Austin-based publisher that aggregates and promotes deals from all over the web. In 2011, as they considered their annual goals, Offers.com Vice President Howard Schaffer worked with Google Affiliate Network to grow top line revenue and better align with advertisers’ brand goals.



Using Google Affiliate Network link subscriptions, product search, and product feed subscriptions, Howard and the Offers.com team culled the right information to provide their audience with the most compelling deals. Their proven results earned the Offers.com team the trust and confidence of a growing group of advertisers, assisting a number of them with their search strategy.



By coupling Google Affiliate Network technology with building strong partnerships, advertiser sales through Offers.com increased 36% YoY in 2011.



Learn more by reading the full case study.



Posted by Will Heidrich, Account Manager

New tools and policies for Publisher Networks in the Ad Exchange

As the size and quality of publisher networks have grown, so has their need to operate more efficiently and profitably. With this in mind, we’ve rolled out a series of updates for publisher networks in DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

First, we’ve revised our policies to allow publisher networks to use the Ad Exchange even if they own & operate few (or none) of the sites they represent. As always, every partner site has to meet the same high-standards of quality as every AdX publisher.

Second, we’ve built a set Network Partner Management tools that make it easy to add new partners, manage hundreds of domains, and monitor their performance.


For current clients, using these features requires no changes to your existing tags. In addition, reporting, payment and site management remains in your hands.

If you’d like to learn more about these new capabilities, please sign up for one of the webinars below, contact your Ad Exchange account representative, or tell us how to contact you and we’ll have someone reach out.

US Webinar
Tuesday, March 13 at 11am PST (1pm CST / 2pm EST)
Register HERE

EMEA Webinar
Tuesday, March 13 at 2pm GMT (3pm CET)
Register HERE

Posted by Drew Bradstock, Product Manager

App Engine 1.6.3 Released

Our second release of this year will have you leaping into action to start using the new features immediately. What could be more exciting than a feature to support A/B testing on your app? Or DKIM signing when you send email from your Google Apps domain? This release has plenty of exciting changes to keep you busy on your extra day this year.

1.6.3 Platform Changes:

• A new Experimental feature called Traffic Splitting lets you send a percentage of your traffic to different versions of your app. Traffic can be split based either on IP or on cookie.


• When an email is sent either from a user of a Google Apps domain from a request originating on that domain, or from an app administrator with an account on a Google Apps domain, a DKIM signature will be automatically applied to the email.

1.6.3 Admin Console Changes

• Billed applications can now specify the amount of storage used for logs and the duration of time these logs are stored (default is 90 days) as well as view the currently stored amount in the Admin Console. The first gigabyte of logs storage is free and additional storage will be charged at $0.24/G/month. These settings are now available, but additional storage will not be charged for at least 4 weeks, at that point any logs beyond the configured amount will be deleted.


• You can now manually shut down an instance in the Instances view of the Admin Console.


• The Logs Viewer for each request now provides a link to the instance that served that request (as long as the instance is still active).

These are just some of the highlights in 1.6.3. As usual, our release notes for Python® and Java® contain the full list of all the new features and bug fixes, so be sure to check out all the exciting things we’ve been working hard to release this past month.




Posted by the App Engine Team 

Dynamic Views: Update #3 - Gadgets!

Hi Bloggers.



Have you been contemplating a new design for your blog? Are you ready to spruce up your pages with a fresh, modern, and new look? Then you may want to check out Dynamic Views - which now include gadget support.



Dynamic Views are a set of templates that make it easy and fun to explore a blog. As you might expect, we’ve made the gadgets interactive too. Instead of appearing in a panel that consumes valuable real estate on your blog, gadgets now appear in a dock that slides in and out as you move your cursor over them.

Gadgets supported in Dynamic Views currently include: Blog Archive, Followers, Labels, Profile, Subscribe (a new gadget - automatically present if either Follow By Email or Subscription installed), and Link List. These gadgets make it easier for your readers to navigate your blog (archive, labels), and to follow it (followers and RSS).



If you are currently using a traditional template and change to Dynamic Views, supported gadgets will automatically appear on your blog. Gadgets can be added, removed, or customized from the Layouts tab the same as with any other template.



If you’re one of the millions of people who have adopted Dynamic Views since we launched them in September 2011, we encourage you to head on over to our Google+ page and tell us what you like about them!



Happy blogging.



Bruce Polderman, Product Manager