More than half of all
But it's still a milestone that Google has just reached in the U.S., Japan, and eight other unnamed countries. And today, the search giant today is using it as a hook to release a slew of new types of mobile ads and tools to measure their impact all the way to sales in stores.
For the past year or so, Google's growth has been hurt by the lower prices mobile ads bring in. Although that situation may be easing, as Google insisted after its recent first-quarter earnings, it's clear that more mobile-native formats such as Facebook's app install ads are stealing a march on search ads when it comes to mobile devices. That's raising worries among investors that perhaps Google's dominance in online ads is coming to an end.
During a livestream starting at 9:30 a.m. Pacific Tuesday morning from its annual ad conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Google is sending a pretty clear message to advertisers that use its AdWords online advertising system: No way are Facebook,
According to Google's own research, in fact, some 40% of smartphone users look for apps in app stores. That's less obvious than it sounds because frankly these stores haven't been all that good for discovering apps, which is why app install ads are a $6 billion-plus business worldwide. What's more, Google says, about one in four app users--and even more than that if they're looking for local, tech, and travel apps--discovers a new app by doing a Google search.
Not least, half who actually downloaded an app thanks to an ad on their smartphone did so because of a search ad. That's a little better than those who credited their download to a social ad (49%), a banner ad in another app (47%), a banner ad on a website (45%), or a video ad (43%).
For all that, Google knows Facebook, Twitter, and other rivals have given advertisers more potent ways to reach people while they're on the go. So the company is trying to close that gap with a raft of new types of ads built for what Google calls the "micro moments" when people are primed to download an app, book a room, or buy something. "The purchase funnel is completely dead for the always-on consumer," says Jerry Dischler, vice president of product management for AdWords. "The challenge for marketers is to be present at those moments."
The new ads, a sample of which appears above, are made for mobile, designed to allow the user to swipe easily to view pictures and other visual information. The hotel ads, for instance, show directions, photos of the hotel, and maps, along with buttons to book a room immediately. There's also an auto ad with links to dealers and a mortgage ad that is a new addition to Google Compare ads of the kind the company has had for auto insurance and credit cards.
It's an expansion of a trend toward ads aimed at specific products--something of a departure for Google, whose search ads and even its display ads have largely been general-purpose formats for prompting actions on every kind of product and service. In that sense, the ads are a little like apps, offering targeted functions. But Dischler says they also can use the power of Web search to offer consumers a wide range of buying choices.
Google also has recently started running search ads inside its Google Play app store as part of a pilot program. Dischler says Google will quickly scale up that program, with announcements expected at its annual Google I/O conference for developers in late May.
Google's also aiming to make it easier for advertisers to show the ads to just the audience they want to reach. Today, it's introducing a new dashboard that helps advertisers assess how their bid strategies are working and simulate what happens with various changes to their campaigns. It's also announcing new features for its "dynamic" search ads, which run based on the content of a marketer's website rather than simply keywords, such as suggested ad price bids for various categories on a website.
The company is also debuting several new products intended to help marketers measure the results of their ad spending. For one, it's making it easier for advertisers to measure the impact of ads beyond simply the last one consumers clicked on before taking an action or buying something, and to use their own data to help determine that. It also introduced ways to measure the additional impact of Google ads on traffic or other desired results. Later this year, Google also plans to offer marketers the ability to measure results across devices and integrate that into their automated bidding.
Not least, Google in the next few months will expand its store visits measurement tool, which ties clicks on an ad to store visits based on GPS to provide an estimate of purchases, to 10 new countries beyond the U.S., Canada, and Australia. "We're finding that the impact in a physical store is often greater than in the online store," Dischler says.
