Think Holiday 2010 Webinar Consumer Shopping Intentions

>> Thanks for joining us today for part two of our Think Holiday Series. So just a few
announcements to kickoff today's event. First of all, this morning we launched our brand
new external holiday site. The URL is www.google.com/thinkholiday. We're really excited about it and it has--it's
going to be updated with daily insights throughout the holiday season, so please check it out.
We will be saving time at the end of today's presentation for your questions, probably
about 15 to 20 minutes worth, so please use the Q&A box throughout today with--to chat
your questions to us. And lastly, we'll be sharing the presentation from today on the
external holiday site by the end of this week. So, actually this morning, I went to Google
Insights for Search and I checked out what the fastest rising search terms were for the
past week. And the number one rising search term over the past seven days was actually
Snooki, I mean, that girl is everywhere, but the number three hot rising search term over
the past seven days was actually Black Friday, so what does that tell us? It tells us that
shoppers are definitely starting to gear up for the holiday season. So today we're going
to just start our latest research and findings and figure out where consumers' heads are
at now that the holiday season is here. We're also going to have a special guest from our
mobile team here to make recommendations on how you can develop a mobile strategy for
this holiday. So with that, I'd like to introduce Sarah Kleinberg. She's a group product marketing
manager for the retail and [INDISTINCT] protocol here at Google and if you were in our last
webinar, you'll remember that I told you that Sarah actually loved Black Friday, so she
told me she actually bought two bags and a pair of boots last Black Friday. Who knows
what she's going to buy this holiday season. So with that, let me turn it over to Sarah
and we'll get going. >> KLEINBERG: Thanks, Heidi. As Heidi said,
in the past couple of weeks, we just got in some new consumer research that Google conducted.
And we've also been looking at the latest search trends. We've seen three themes emerging
and it's pretty similar to past years. First, people are shopping earlier and earlier every
year. Second, shoppers are more connected and e-commerce continues to grow and third,
we'll share some of the hot products that people are searching for this year, that might
indicate the kind of gifts they want to buy. So let's jump in and talk about what this
means for your holiday marketing strategy. The early shopper gets the gifts. Last year,
Google started serving shoppers every two weeks to track progress of holiday shopping.
And we've done the same this year. And the big takeaway is that research and holiday
shopping started even earlier this year than last year. By October 5th, 7 out of 10 people
had already begun their holiday researching and last year around this time, we saw 6 out
of 10, so that's been an increase. And actually at this time, not even this high up, we were--we
were surprised to see it. And we double checked and double checked the data and it held up.
So what this tells us is that we can already be thinking about our holiday strategy much
sooner than you think. Traditionally, we think about the holiday that's starting after Halloween,
right? They take off the Halloween candy off the shelves and they put up the Christmas
candy, but actually, holiday marketing execution is not about [INDISTINCT] only, it's now;
7 in 10 have already started their shopping. As far as the purchasing, we see this consistent
from last year. About half of the people have already made one holiday purchase by this
time. So while you see the majority and yourself than before, decision making and a few purchases
have already started happening and research shopping has definitely started. We see the
majority of shopping; of course, it still lasts for later in the season. And the key
takeaway is that it's already time to get your holiday messaging into the marketplace.
We asked people why they started shopping already and it boiled down to two reasons.
First, they just like it. Fun. They want to be sure they get the items they want; they
want to beat the rush. They just want more time to research, decide, and choose. And
second, they think if they get started early, they'll get better deals. So while the recession
and the economy is certainly a reality for us, it really has been--come through as a
big influencer for holiday shopping habits. Holiday is a release. Let's bring the joy
back to holiday. People told us that they started shopping earlier and we saw this reflected
in Google search trends. You see the URL in the slide here, it's google.com/insights/search
and this is the tool called insights for search where you can see how much people are searching
on Google for their presents. So let's take Black Friday as the example. Black Friday
has become a phenomenon. People are starting to search for Black Friday earlier and earlier
and you see in 2009, Black Friday was November 27, so we see searches for Black Friday picked
up steam in the first week of August. And again that reflects the consumers [INDISTINCT]
in our research but they've already started shopping. If you look at 2010, you see in
July, there was a site for Christmas in July. And that reflects that some retailers in summer
were advertising Black Friday specials. "Toys R Us," "Kmart," "Target," "Sears," they all
offered some kind of Summer Christmas Saver or Christmas in July program to encourage
people to get started with their holiday shopping. That leaves us with three takeaways. First,
shoppers will respond to the messages that you put in the marketplace. There's no other
reason why they keep searching for Black Friday in July. Second, shoppers turn to Search to
research the promotions that they're seeing or what they want to buy. So third, you got
to ramp your search presence and make sure you reinforce your promotions with Search
since that's where consumers are going to be looking for it. In the July webinar, I
talked about Christmas shopping kind of being like Pavlov's [INDISTINCT]. We've conditioned
shoppers for sales, promotions, deals, Black Friday and we got consumers three years in
a row. What promotions and offers are you looking for this holiday? And the results
haven't changed much if you can see the three years plotted out here. Consumers had focused
on sales and discounts and free shipping. And this is reinforced by what we see people
searching for. This is for printable coupons--are currently up 20% over last year. And searches
for BOGO which we know a short for Buy One Get One Free are currently up 10% over last
year. Now, you and I know BOGO, I was a little surprised that consumers knew BOGO and that
they were searching for it, but they are. Takeaways, do you think consumers' discounts
or some sort of value have become expected? You need to message this in some way to attract
consumer attention this holiday season. Summaries, consumers are well into their holiday shopping
and shopping, it's a fun task and we're not bogged down by the recession. They're doing
their research, they're figuring out what they want to buy and they're having fun doing
it. They're going to be looking for discounts and free shipping and that's all become the
Pavlov [INDISTINCT] part of holiday shopping. The connected consumer. We all know that online
shopping continues to increase. It's not a surprise that we see here eCommerce sales
growth has far outpaced in-store sales growth over the past four quarters. Thinking ahead
to this holiday season, there is, you know, various sales projections that I've read in
the press. But it seems extremely likely that eCommerce growth will continue to outpace
in-store sales growth this holiday season. In our September research that we just fielded,
we learned that almost 9 out of 10 consumers will do some research online in their holiday
shopping. There's no such thing as a "online shopper" anymore. It's a fluid process. People
research online, they go to the store, they check their phone in the store, they go back
home, they look online. So, how marketers are busy developing an online marketing strategy
versus the in-store offline marketing strategy? Well, what we've learned is that in consumer's
minds, all channels are created equal and they're just not thinking that way. It's the
same shopper that they buy some online, they buy some in the store. We see here from our
research that about 40% of shoppers will research online and then buy online. And an even bigger
group, about half of all shoppers will research online and then buy in the store or they'll
go back and forth, they may see the different models here. The takeaway is that there's
no "online shopper." Nine out of 10 consumers will research or shop online this holiday
season. You got to get your message to them, where they're doing this research and that's
online. When does all this online shopping take place? In 2009, the biggest eCommerce
day was Tuesday, December 15th. A Tuesday. At first, we were really surprised to see
it Tuesday and then in fact, why Tuesday? We looked at eCommerce transactions within
the month of December for the past five years, based on the day of the week and we took an
index and then you see the results charted here. Historically, the heaviest eCommerce
days in December have been Tuesdays and Wednesdays. As we get closer to Christmas day, you see
that pattern fading away a little bit, and since Christmas falls on a different day of
the week every year. The time we see is towards, you know, last week of the year, is a couple
of days before Christmas and a couple of days after, so the day of the week does not correlate
the week before Christmas, but in general, Tuesdays and midweek shopping days are the
big days. So we've learned a little something about consumer shopping habits. So given that
midweek days are strong for eCommerce, let's take a look at the 2010 calendar and what
the top projected eCommerce days are. The top five projected eCommerce days are shaded
in dark blue here, and you see that the trend holds up. They're pretty much midweek days,
Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And each of them are above $1 billion of eCommerce. The biggest
day of the holiday shopping season this year is predicted to be Green Tuesday, December
14th, which in [INDISTINCT] last year and again, that kind of two weeks before Christmas,
leading into Christmas is going to be the biggest week. We have other key eCommerce
days highlighted in blue here. Starting with the beginning of the season Black Friday,
it's not going to be a very strong in-store holiday, but it's also key for online. Between
Black Friday and the rest of Thanksgiving weekend, it's expected we'll see $1.3 billion
in eCommerce and that's bigger than the projection for Green Tuesday. The official "eCommerce
kickoff" is Cyber Monday, which will be a big day, $775 million. Also note the end of
the season, Free Shipping Day. That's one of the top 5 biggest days. And that's the
last day that you can get free ground shipping in time for Christmas delivery. And that's
why over a thousand retailers are going to offer free shipping this day. So, there are
also some impressive eCommerce days after that. You notice that we've got a billion
dollars in eCommerce the weekend before Christmas, online. And also notice December 21st and
December 22nd are both going to be bigger eCommerce days than Cyber Monday. The takeaway
is to heavy up your marketing presence on the biggest eCommerce days of the year to
take advantage of everybody being online. You want to heavy up on Thanksgiving Weekend
and consumers are doing more and more online shopping during this time. And also keep promotions
running strong, right up until Christmas. Also don't under devalue post-holiday sales,
2/3 of people plan to keep on shopping after Christmas to take advantage of the post-holiday
deals. So picking up--pick up post-holiday is kind of another Black Friday or another
big hoopla shopping holiday. Make sure you're out there and that your presence is online
and that you're advertising any promotions that you're running. Where is all this eCommerce
activity taking place? Online. So we looked as of last week, and we see that department
stores represent most of the online conversions, almost 70%. A distant second of all eCommerce
transactions is at apparel retail sites with 22%. What this tells us is that mass retailers
and [INDISTINCT] and this often includes Amazon, they've really ramped up their presence in
online marketing in the past couple of years and it's really paid off for them. They're
now the leaders in capturing online shopping. Smaller retailers have to be aware of this
and make sure that you're providing a differentiator as to why consumers should be shopping on
your site this holiday season, given all the promotions and advertising from the big retailers.
The other big shift we're starting to see is consumers using mobile phones as a personal
shopping device. Well, in commerce, you know, fine overselling is still small, in our research
1 out of 5 smartphone owners tells us that they expect to buy something online this holiday
season. So the expectation and the consumer interest is there. But the real shift that's
definitely happening is in using smartphones for research approach purchase. Exactly why
you're standing in the store or figuring out what store you want to go to. People call
up, they're comparing prices, locating a retailer, looking for promotions, in fact, we've read
that barcode scanning is up 700% in 2010. In addition to online research, people will
be researching gifts on their phones this year. Given this shift, smartphone owners
are looking forward to using shopping apps to help them with their shopping. Eighty percent
told us they're interested. And this creates an opportunity for retailers who have that,
to really deepen their relationship with their customers. But it's--there's also an opportunity
for other retailers that don't have that, you can advertise through apps. Alex Barza,
our mobile guru will speak about this more later and explain how you can approach it.
Takeaways here. There's no such thing as a "online shopper." Online research is just
ingrained in consumer behavior. Also keep in mind the biggest eCommerce days that are
expected this year, they're midweek but know what those dates are and keep your holiday
promotions running strong to capture the online attention. So what are we seeing in the search
trends? What are the new hot products this year? As Heidi mentioned in the beginning,
Black Friday is the rising search term today. But we also took a look in some of the popular
gift categories to try and see what people are searching on more in app now than before.
That's where we think about a rising product research is. And just give us clues and trends
is what people might be looking for, leading into holiday gift shopping. And we also, in
our webinar in July, we took a look at this and so it was interesting to compare where
things stand now compared to what we saw in July. In the consumer electronics category,
what struck out to me was the Apple fleet of products, very strong. And what we're seeing
here that we did not see in July was the growth in TV products; Apple TV, Slingbox, TiVo,
Blu-ray. So a renewed interest in television has come in the past couple of months. In
the computer category, you see very specific products and, again, we saw these specific
product searches in July. Although in July, we saw the usual brands; HP, Dell, Sony, Toshiba
and Mac. Now we're seeing some newer brands emerging; Archus, Asus, Android. Newer brands
are taking their place and consumers are looking for them. In phones, just like we saw in July,
we're seeing the latest models being searched for. And the thing that's [INDISTINCT] to
me is that the names of these products are really getting good; Fascinate, Chocolate,
Incredible. And it seems these companies are doing a really great job in standing out in
the marketplace, which is, I think, a good reminder for all marketers of how to make
their products standout over holiday. And then across these categories, something that
jumps out to you that I didn't see in July are accessories. We see [INDISTINCT] categories,
a couple of batteries, which I didn't see in July and cases and sleeves. And maybe--maybe
those will make good gifts for the holidays to compliment the new products that people
are buying. In apparel, we, of course saw a shift from summer to fall, winter clothing.
In July, we saw flip-flops, Crocs and swimsuits and now we're seeing winter boots and snow
boots. All of these are going to have another big season, we see them rising again and,
again, just as we saw in July, overall, compared to the consumer electronics and tech categories,
we see fewer brand names here in apparel. Most of them are general apparel, although,
a few specific products and brands stand out like Uggs, Lucky, North Face and Gucci. In
toys and games, Nerf is hot and a few staple gifts like Barbies, dollhouses and Legos.
Videogames and consoles jump out. Dead Rising which I looked it up, it's a videogame that--actually
it looks kind of violent to me. But Xbox and Playstations and videogames look hot for holiday.
And, of course, the Snuggie is back this year. It's a hot rising term. And I [INDISTINCT]
a little bit to see that Google, our system classifies Snuggie as a toy as opposed to
apparel. But Snuggies jumped out. And then there's jewelry and accessories. In July,
we saw a lot of rings. We found mood rings, mother's rings, engagement rings. And this
season we're seeing watches and crossbody bags. And, again, in this category, we do
see just a couple of new brands shining through. So these insights for search tools tell us
the facts that drive these searches and you can also ask these questions. To figure out
which of your products are being more sought after than others, which can advise you in
what keyword to find or what to pull out in your shopping or what to feature on your site.
So in apparel, we saw that people are looking for the latest trends, 10% more often now
than this time last year. You can also compare terms. So we compared ankle boots to boots.
And I see that this year, ankle boots have risen 70% in the last 90 days whereas boots
have risen by about 40%. So if you're selling ankle boots and boots, you might want to call
out the ankle boots in your copy. And today, jeggings, another big year for jeggings. Search
for the jeggings have risen more than 50% this year. So if you have them, make sure
to place them front and center. Inside for Search again, driving up as to who is going
to receive the most gifts. We saw three times more searches for gifts for men than gifts
for women this year. Two times more searches already for gifts for kids than gifts for
parents and more searching for gifts for friends than gifts for family. So, again, google.com/insights/search,
it's a free tool and it can be helpful for you to stay on the polls of what consumers
are looking for and what's hot for holiday and, again, translating that into your marketing
strategy. Our three major recommendations then for holiday 2010, first, start your holiday
messaging now and keep your messaging strong until the end of the year. Seven out of ten
consumers have already started holiday shopping and 64% will take advantage of after Christmas
sales. Make sure your messages are loud and clear. Second, listen and be nimble. Use google.com/thinkholiday,
our new site where we already have a few preset rising search term categories for you. Or
go to insights for search yourself and put in your terms. Also pay attention to what
your customers are telling you on your Twitter pages and your Facebook pages and listen to
these clues to help you guide your holiday messaging and be nimble through the end of
the year. And, third, if you want to reach out to this connected shopper, shoppers are
online and they're searching and increasingly, they're on their phones. And we know that
consumers are real excited about their smartphones. They're on them all day, they're at the mall,
they're on their phones in the store and mobile advertising is shiny, and it's new and it
gets noticed. You're familiar what kind of targets customers by search and hopefully
you're familiar with targeting through display. So mobile is new. So now I'm going to turn
it over to Alex Barza who's one of our mobile app gurus and he's going to provide us recommendations
for how to reach shoppers on their phones this holiday.
>> BARZA: Hi everybody. This is Alex Barza, I'm really excited to be here because as Sarah
mentioned, consumers are going to be using mobile for their holiday research and shopping
more than any other year in the past. And it's--we look at the next slide, we'll see
that mobile has actually grown over 500% the last two years here at Google. I think it's
important to frame our conversation as smartphones have proliferated, networks have gotten a
lot faster, devices are getting a lot better. It's resulted in dramatic increases in mobile
searches. In some countries such as South Africa and Indonesia, we actually see that
we're generating more mobile searches than we are desktops. So as a company, we've decide
to make mobile first an imperative front, which is why we're focusing a lot of time
and energy on it. Also through the acquisition of AdMob, we've actually just, recently greatly
expanded our display capabilities. We announced last week that AdMob has served over 300 billion
mobile display impressions. So to put it into context for you guys, imagine if everybody
on the planet had a phone; each person on the planet would have seen about 50 AdMob
impressions to date. So, 300 billion is really big. Also, last week in our Q3 earnings report,
we actually announced that mobile is now on a $1 billion revenue run rate for the company.
So I think it's safe to say that mobile is no longer an emerging platform. It's one that's
here today and one that we all need to appropriately plan for in order to get ready for the holiday.
So with that, I'm going to focus our conversation on some really practical things that you can
do this quarter. I work with a lot of retailers, tech companies, and companies in a lot of
other verticals, and I've tried to summarize a lot of the questions that I'm getting out
in the field from a lot of different customers in the slides that I'll be sharing with you
today. So if we look at the next slide, we'll actually see that it's really important to
prepare for the holiday spikes. So this is a slide illustrating shopping search queries
on mobile devices over the last three years. As you'll see on the left-hand side of the
slide, in January or July of 2007 when the first iPhone was launched, we didn't have
a lot of searches because there weren't a lot of high-end mobile devices. And what we
see from our own data is that on average, users that have high-end or smartphone devices
in the palms of their hand, on average, tend to search 50 times more often than users of
traditional feature phones. So a lot of my conversation with you today is really going
to be focused on those high-end devices. When I say high-end, I'm specifically referring
to iPhone, Android, Palm, some of the BlackBerry devices as well as a couple of the Windows
devices. Now as you're looking at this graph, and you will see as we progress over time
up until the middle of this year, searches had--that mobile searches on shopping have
a hockey stick like growth. And the growth is continuing to accelerate as more and more
devices hit the market. What I wanted to highlight for you here is what's happening during the
holiday season over the last two years. We see dramatic spikes during the holidays. The
red portions on this illustrates shopping searches over the last two years for a two-month
period where you can see clearly defined spikes within those periods. And I'll get into a
little bit more detail in that later. One of the questions I also commonly receive is,
is mobile cannibalizing desktop? And the clear answer to that is no; that it's not. Mobile
is actually complimentary. We notice that users are actually on their mobile phones
more often in the mornings, at lunchtime, as they're commuting back from work to their
homes on the weekends. So mobile is actually increasing the search pi and giving you additional
opportunities to connect with those consumers while they're in stores. Another question
that I often receive is are mobile searches different than desktop? And I'd have to say
that depends on device. On traditional feature phones or WAP phones, searches do tend to
be a little bit shorter in length. And also, on the WAP phones, people tend to do fewer
searches than they do on desktops. On desktop, maybe they'll do an average of four searches
where, on WAP phones, they'll do an average of two. Now, when we talk about the high-end
devices that I mentioned earlier, we actually see that searches and browsing behavior is
very similar to that of desktop. When we look across all categories, we see that mobile
web traffic actually mirrors that of desktop so consumers that are interested in the same
things that they are on desktop and mobile. They're actually not changing their browsing
behavior. And with the addition of voice search, now one in four searches on Android devices
are actually spoken into the phone utilizing the phone's microphone capability, making
it much easier for users to speak relevant searches and get those search results back.
So, as we think about the holiday period and what kind of searches consumers are using
to search for the products and services and gifts that they're looking to purchase during
the holiday, think of it the same way you would of desktop. Take the same approach.
Now as we look at the next slide, the first thing that I want to talk to everybody on
the call about is, is your site ready for the holidays? One of the recent studies that
came out by Acuity Group found that only 12% of the top 500 internet retailers had sites
that were optimized for mobile. I can't stress the importance of having a mobile optimized
site. The last thing you want to do is have consumers come to your site during the holidays
and have a suboptimal experience. So make sure that you get your smartphones out, perform
some searches, look at the experience, see how your site navigates and also make sure
that you've dressed up your site for the holidays. As I've illustrated earlier, we see huge spikes
in traffic during the holiday period and you want to make sure that your mobile sites are
ready for that. Some tips that I would have is keep it simple, optimize the navigation,
use your own internal analytical data to inform you on how to develop your mobile optimized
site. For example, understand what consumers are looking for, what type of devices they're
coming form and--from and let that inform you as to how you should develop content for
the site. And then lastly, measure and optimize. It's very important to utilize that data that
you have at your fingertips in order to continue to cater to the site experience. Now, as we
move on to the second recommendation, oftentimes, I talk to retailers and I say it's critically
important to break out your mobile search campaign. The reason why that's important
is we found that mobile-specific campaigns really outperform hybrid desktop campaigns.
And when I say hybrid, I'm referring to campaigns that have mobile as an opt-in in addition
to the desktop targeting. With mobile, we see that when our advertisers break out their
campaigns, they usually see a 46% greater clickthrough rate, 119% greater conversion
rate as we look at conversion data that we have with a large number of our clients here
at Google, and an 11% lower cost-per-acquisition. So the results are astounding and the recommendation
is break out. There are also a lot of additional benefits to breaking out mobile campaigns.
For one, you get much better control over bidding to ensure that your ads have that
top placement. Within mobile search, unlike desktop, there are only two ads at the top
of the search result page and three at the bottom. Desktop, on the other hand, can have
up to 11 ads that are visible to the viewer at--on any given search results page. With
mobile, it's very critical to be in the top two position. By breaking out campaigns, you
can accurately manage those bids and manage the position to make sure that you have top
placement where a lot of the activity happens today. Another addition to breaking out campaigns
is giving you the ability to have specific mobile ad tops. These users are on mobile
devices, they're in-store, they're looking for comparison shopping information, pricing,
availability, make sure that you speak in that language to those consumers. Make sure
that you have ad copy that talks to the--to mobile; things like "Shop Now on Your Mobile
Phone" or even "Download an Application Today" or really take advantage of some of the unique
attributes that we're able to do with the mobile device, which I'll show you in a couple
of slides. And lastly, by breaking out your mobile campaigns, you'll have much better
access to reporting. Reporting won't be bundled in with your hybrid campaigns, it will be
specifically for mobile which will allow you to--which will allow you to optimize and test
much better and get better results. Now, let's go back to talk a little bit about holidays.
So as we look at this slide, the third recommendation that I have for everybody is build holiday
campaigns. It's pretty simple. It's a no-brainer. As Sarah mentioned to us on the previous slides,
we see huge spikes in traffic not only on desktop but as well as on mobile. What you're
looking at here is actually a chart over the last four years of Black Friday search queries
on mobile devices. You can see that in 2006, we barely had a blip. In 2007, with the launch
of the first iPhone, we saw traffic increasing, and as we get on to 2008, 2009, traffic is
just ballooning. And it's also starting the research behavior much earlier. You can see
from this graph in 2009, people started their Black Friday research on mobile devices in
the beginning of October. So again, to Sarah's earlier point, start early. Make sure you
have a strategy in place. And I'm really excited to see how big the spike is in 2010, you know,
now that we have faster networks with 4G on Sprint, Verizon potentially launching 4G later
this fall. And as we've also seen on Sarah's earlier data that mobile devices are going
to be a really hot holiday gift item and we see a lot of phone sales happening in the
fourth quarter; I think we're going to see mobile searches growing exponentially this
year. Now, as we move on, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about how we can leverage
the unique attributes of mobile in order to gain access to your consumers. So one way
we can do that is through location targeting. We've actually noticed that one in three mobile
searches have local intent and we're now trying to utilize the unique attributes of mobile
such as the GPS positioning capabilities in order to better target ads to the consumer.
So we can find a user's location via a number of different ways: first, through GPS; another
through cell tower triangulation; another one is through WiFi; and another one is through
query parsing in addition to some others that I won't go into detail today. The ad that
you're looking at here on this page is what we call a hyperlocal ad which we've introduced
not too long ago. And it basically uses the user's location in order to return a relevant
result. So, as we're looking at here, this is actually an ad for a Sprint store. Sprint
has a lot of retail locations throughout the country. If I am in the purchase cycle for
a brand-new Sprint EVO phone and I'm looking for my nearby store, this ad actually tells
me how close the store is located to me. It actually has a little places icon which you
see the little blue dot telling me how far away. And then I also have an expandable map
where I can just click and expand the map and it will show me where the store is located.
The unique thing about mobile and what excites me about this particular ad unit is that right
now, this Sprint ad is pretty much taking up the entire page. So you--it's almost as
though having 100% share of voice on this mobile device until the user decides to minimize
that ad and continue to go further. So it's a really interesting way to look at how we
can engage with consumers utilizing location. But let me show you another example of how
we can do this as well. So, this is yet again an example on how we drive in-store visits
using location. These are two additional ad units. They're called location extensions.
The one on the right-hand side is actually what we like to call a store locator ad. So
again, when the user is within Google mobile maps and they're searching for the Sprint
store, they are able to receive two different types of ad units. Think of the map as a--as
a base layer, and what we're doing is adding on additional layers of relevant information
at the consumer's interest. So this consumer searched for the Sprint, we give them option
to overlay another layer of information that shows them all the Sprint stores located nearby.
In this case, it's actually showing the Sprint stores in New York. So this is another great
way to make sure that your brand is visible and top-of-mind with consumers when they're
within Maps, and this also works when consumers are searching for your products and services.
I could perform a search for a Sprint HTC EVO or even a more generic search for just
an HTC EVO within my map and it actually shows me the nearest retailer where I can pick that
up, in this case being Sprint. Now, let's go on to some different ad units that we have
now. So these are some more ways in which we're utilizing the phone's unique capabilities
to connect with consumers in Search. The first one that you see here on the left-hand side
is called Click to Call. And this is a really great way--if you got a call center and you're
taking orders this holiday season, make sure that you enable your phone number within your
search ad. We actually launched Click to Call earlier this year, and I'm seeing phenomenal
success. A number of advertisers that were in our initial data trials have seen quick
surveys of anywhere between 5% to 30%. And we have a number of published case studies
on the Web, one in particular from Esurance, which is an auto insurance broker that actually
saw Click to Call generated a 30% lower cost per acquisition than any other channel that
they used. So Click to Call has proven to be one of the most effective ways to drive
calls, to take orders, and to make appointments for a lot of large retailers and tech companies.
The other one that you're probably more familiar with on desktop, which is the middle ad here,
is called Site Links. Site Links has been available on desktop for over a year now,
and it's been--it's had phenomenal success, helping users navigate to specific pages that
advertisers deem important on their pages. What we've done is we've extended that functionality
on mobile. So imagine if I'm searching for a particular brand or maybe I'm looking for
Black Friday deals and an advertiser's brand comes up, now you can have a site link that
links that user directly to that landing page that helps them find the information that
they're looking for. This again is available through AdWords and it's extremely easy to
utilize. And lastly on this page is something that we have that's called Offers. We know
that users are looking for offers and coupons much more so than in the past. Mobile is going
to help unlock that and bring those coupons to light when users are going to be in stores.
One research group actually has conducted a research and they showed that there's going
to be over $1 billion worth of goods purchased this year utilizing mobile coupons. So mobile
coupons are getting to be pretty big. Again, this is similar to the [INDISTINCT] that you
saw earlier. This gives an advertiser the ability to put a promotional offer within
a search result. So the user can just click on the offer and the search result expands
and presents the user with the offer. For example, it might be--a test that a retailer
ran recently was, "Receive $15 off of $75 purchase or more in store. Present this offer
with this code at the time of purchase in store." Another retailer that actually combined
it with Click to Call was utilizing it to drive calls to their call centers for signup
to their service. So they had something like, "Receive five months free for a year-long
subscription. Call the 1-800 number." So it doesn't necessarily have to be--to drive in-store.
It can be a number of different formats that can be utilized within the offer. And at this
time, you're only charged a CPC when a user actually clicks on the headline and goes to
their site--to your site. You're actually not charged when a user emails or SMS that
offer to themselves, to be redeemed at a later time. But what's also interesting about this
is there's a viral and social component to it. So people can actually email this to friends
if they see these offers within search results. So you can actually get much more return on
this investment than you would just from the impression that you're receiving from the
search result. Now, as we move on to the next topic, the sixth recommendation I have is
make sure the you have a tablet strategy. So tablets are proving to be pretty hot. There
had been over 3 million iPads sold to date, and this group is a really engaged audience.
Conversion from the data that I've seen and from the conversations that I've had with
retailers on tablets actually equals those of desktops. And for some data that I've seen,
even though–-if we were to classify tablets, or specifically iPad in this case, as a mobile
device, even though tablets are only getting about 1/4 to 1/3 of the traffic that mobile
devices are generating for retailers, they're actually driving more conversions than all
of their mobile devices combined. So tablets are extremely important. We at Google have
made it extremely easy for you to connect with users when they're surfing the mobile
Web on tablets as well as utilizing application, or when they're searching. Make sure that
your site experience is good and don't necessarily turn them to your mobile-optimized site. Tablets
are much more like desktops, so it's important to have the optimal experience. But make sure
that you're not sending users to a really flash-heavy page, and also make sure that
you break out your campaign and you have specific campaigns that are targeting iPads, taking
users to the appropriate landing pages that are optimized for the iPad and other tablets
that they're going to be launching in the latter part of this year. Now, moving right
along to the last portion of my recommendation, I wanted to spend a little bit of time and
talk to you about mobile display. So as I mentioned earlier, we acquired AdMob earlier
this year, which AdMob has served over 300 billion impressions to date. AdMob is really
a leader within mobile display. They have the world's largest mobile display ad network.
They have really rich--really rich solutions for advertisers. They can do text and banners.
They can do application, download tracking. They have multiple targeting app options,
and they have a lot of partnerships in place. Now, working with us on mobile display, you
can target over 12,000 mobile websites this holiday season and over 19,000 in both Android
and iPhone application. So the reach is just staggering. But let me show you what I'm talking
about. So if we would--let's go to the next slide. Let--let's--the main takeaway here
is reach shoppers when they're on the mobile Web and apps. So on the left-hand side; we
actually see a non-mobile-optimized site that a user is browsing on, on a mobile device.
So as a result of a lot of sites not being mobile-optimized, that's not stopping consumers.
Consumers still want the information that they want when they want it, so they're going
to these sites and they're looking for the information that they want. And we're actually
seeing a high activity on non-mobile-optimized sites on mobile devices. On the right-hand
side, you see an example of how Best Buy utilized this during the last holiday season in order
to target various applications in our network. So think of--think of this in a--in a number
of different ways. So a couple of display strategies that are common are--one is brand-building.
So mobile clicks-per-rate to date are often ten times greater than online, and that's
partly a result due to there's only one mobile ad per page, and it's also the newness of
these devices; people are really excited. That will tend to--that will decrease over
time as it did for the desktop Web back in the mid '90s. But my--you know, what I want
to stress to everybody on the call today is take advantage of it today while you can.
There's no reason why you shouldn't. Another way to utilize display is performance. So
you can drive mCommerce. You can drive lead generation. You can drive Click to Call through
mobile display. Everything that I've talked to you early on this presentation is also
applicable within mobile display. And AdMob have some really cool creative ad unit such
as Click to Play video, if you have video access that you're utilizing, commercials
that you've produce. There are a number of different things that you can do here. And
lastly, what I don't have an illustration for is application in phones. So, a number
of you have developed applications, just getting out there in Android or the iPhone marketplace
or various other application stores, but they're not getting the traction that they deserve.
You made this initial upfront investment, maybe you promoted it a little bit upfront,
but oftentimes what I hear from a lot of retailers is that after the initial pop, it gets really
hard to standout amongst the field of over 200,000 applications. So working with us,
we can use birth-type methodologies, in order to make sure that those apps are at the top
of the results within the various--within the various stores, to make sure that they're
noticed this holiday season and you maximize your return on investment. And that's also
available via CPC or CPM models. Now, last week, if you won't mind turning the slide,
I just want to summarize. So I've talked to you about a lot of different tactics here
today. But let me just go over it--all of them once again really quickly for you. So
ready your site for the holiday. Make sure you have a really good experience. Make sure
you're connecting with consumers, and make sure you understand what's happening on your
mobile site. Number two, break out those campaigns. It will give you better target ability. It
will make sure that you have top placement and it will give you better control as well
as a better consumer experience. Number three, as Sarah has told us, everything that's happening
on desktop is now translating and migrating over to mobile. All the same principles that
you would utilize on desktop to create Black Friday holiday campaigns or Cyber Monday or
deal-seeking behavior, coupon and offers, all of these is happening on mobile at a much
greater pace than it ever did in years past. So make sure you have appropriate coverage
as well as budget during the holiday period. Make sure you budget for those dramatic spikes
that occur for that two to three-week period. The other one is, make sure you're driving
in-store. Use the Offers. Use the Click to Call. Use Maps. Let people find your locations
and drive them into the store where they'll--where they'll make those holiday purchases. Number
five is, have a tablet strategy. Don't ignore tablets. Tablets are going to be--there's
going to be a proliferation of tablets that are launching in the marketplace. A number
of Android tablets--I've read that iPad tablets are going be made available through some other
carriers potentially. It's going to be a really hot holiday gift. A lot of people are going
to be browsing the Web and purchasing via tablets. Make sure you have appropriate coverage.
And lastly, utilize the mobile Web with application. So if you're trying to build your brand, if
you're looking to drive performance or if you got an application that you're trying
to get out there, make sure that you're utilizing the vast world of applications in order to
connect with these consumers. And that is basically my quick tips on how to get geared
up for the holiday.