Nearly 60% of smartphone users expect their favorite apps to look visually appealing¹. We’ve always believed that in-app ads can enhance an app’s overall experience by being well designed. So today we’re announcing a completely new look for our interstitial in-app ad formats - also known as full-screen ads - that run on apps in the AdMob network and DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Inspired by Material Design, the new app install interstitial comes with a beautiful cover photo, a round install button, and matching color schemes. Technology called “color extraction” makes the ads more consistent with the brand's look and feel -- we extract a dominant color either from the cover photo or app icon and apply it to the footer and install button. We found that having a greater variety of designs and colors can improve conversion rate.

Other features include the app’s rating, and a screenshot gallery which appears when a user taps ‘More images’, so users can learn more about the app without leaving the ad.

The previous design for our app install ads on the left, and our new version on the right.
Different examples of color matching.
Our app install formats have driven more than a billion downloads across Android and iOS. You can use these new designs automatically when you run a mobile app install campaign on the AdMob network in AdWords. That’s right, no extra work required!

Next, our new text-based ads are easier to read, and contain a larger headline and a round call-to-action button that clicks through to a website.

On the left, the previous text ad interstitial design, and the new version on the right.
As with other ad format innovations, our ads UI team test multiple designs - ten in this case over the course of a year - to find final versions that increase clicks and conversions for advertisers, and a positive experience for users. Both app install and text ad formats appear within the app and can be closed easily, so users can return to what they were doing with a single tap.

As we announced at Google I/O this year, the volume of interstitial impressions has more than doubled across AdMob since last July, so now’s a great time to get your business in front of more app users.

If you’re a developer looking to learn more about earning with in-app interstitial ads in your app, visit AdMob now. These new designs will also be available to developers monetizing their apps with DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Posted by Pasha Nahass
Product Manager

^{1. Mobile App Marketing Insights: How Consumers Really Find and Use Your Apps, Google & Ipsos Media CT, May 2015}

As a brand trying to reach consumers in today’s increasingly fragmented media landscape, it is critical that you understand the impact of your ads on brand metrics such as awareness and consideration.

Viewability is the starting point, an initial understanding of whether the ad had a chance to be seen. We have talked before about why measuring the viewability of advertising matters.

In December 2014, we shared insights on the state of display ad viewability across the web. As a continuation of that effort, in May we released new insights from our video ad platforms, including YouTube, to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.

We wanted to take this research a step further, by analyzing the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

To do so, we took our Brand Lift solution, which gives you insights into what impact your ads have on the consumer journey - from awareness, to ad recall, to brand interest - and tied the data to viewability metrics from our Active View technology for a set of YouTube TrueView ads. By connecting these two solutions, we were able to draw out some insights about the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

Sight, sound and motion combined drive higher lift

When it comes to brand metrics, ad recall is a foundation for measuring the impact of your ad. As a brand advertiser, knowing if your ad breaks through with users is a key first step to understanding the overall impact of an ad on a suite of brand metrics. In this analysis, we were able to analyze how being able to hear and see your ad affected a user’s ability to recall your ad.

Our data shows that users exposed to even one aspect of your video ad (audio or video only), exhibit significant lift in ad recall. However, the full immersive experience of sight, sound and motion delivers more ad recall than either audio or video alone. In fact, the impact on ad recall was 23% higher when users were exposed to ads with audio and video together versus ads with just audio alone.

The longer in view, the better you do (on brand metrics)

Time in view also plays a large role when it comes to moving the needle on brand awareness and consideration. We recently introduced the ability for Active View users to measure average viewable time - the average time, in seconds, a given ad appeared on screen - in Doubleclick Bid Manager. By connecting these measurements, we can see the relationship between viewable time and brand metrics.

We found that there is a consistent relationship between how long an ad is viewable and increases in brand awareness and consideration. The longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in these two important brand metrics:

What the results mean for your brand

These results prompt you to think about your brand advertising in a few important ways:

• Are users viewing your creative for longer periods of time? Brand metrics continue to get higher the longer a user views your ad.
• Are you buying the right media to have an impact on brand metrics? YouTube’s opt-in TrueView ads are uniquely suited to deliver long-form video content at scale for brand advertisers.
• Finally, are you thinking beyond viewability to capture effectiveness metrics? You want your ads to move consumers at the moments that matter, and measuring the impact on brand metrics will make for more effective ad spend.

This is just the beginning of understanding what impacts brand metrics for video ads. As brands look to measure the effectiveness of their digital video advertising, a continued understanding of what factors drive brand metrics will be crucial to more effective brand spend.

Read further research on the impact of online video.

To read all of our research on viewability, check out thinkwithgoogle.com/viewability.

To see how viewability is measured, visit our interactive Active View demo.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google

Over the past few years we’ve been committed to investing in a suite of new metrics that would be as actionable for brand marketers as the click has become for performance advertising. In that spirit, today we are announcing a new GRP solution, comScore vCE in DoubleClick, and updates to our Active View viewability solution.

Our goal is to enable brand marketers to answer some essential questions about the success of their campaigns:

Announcing an update to Active View - Ensuring your ads are seen

If a human being never has a chance to see your ad, then nothing else matters - the campaign will not succeed. That’s why we’ve been steadily introducing Active View technology across our product suite: the ability to buy based on viewability in AdWords, and reporting on viewability in our DoubleClick advertiser and publisher platforms. In a recent study that we published we found that 46% of all video ads on the web did not even have a chance to be seen. This contextualized the importance of video viewability and the launch of Active View for Video a few months ago.

We are firm believers in the IAB / MRC standard as the minimum viable definition for a viewable impression. We also recognize that there is a need for secondary metrics that complement the single standard and support individual advertisers’ objectives. In light of this, we are announcing that starting today, Active View users will be able to measure average viewable time - the average time, in seconds, a given ad appeared on screen - in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Since introducing Active View, we’ve seen tremendous momentum with over 80% of clients having adopted our viewability technology. These advertiser and publisher clients have told us time and again that they would like to use Active View to measure viewability across all their media buys. So we are working with these clients to expand Active View beyond Google’s media and platforms.

Announcing comScore vCE in DoubleClick: Ensuring you reach the right audience faster

Last year we announced our partnership with comScore to bring to market a completely tagless and digitally actionable metric that would make real-time GRP measurement a reality for advertisers and publishers. Today we are announcing the culmination of that partnership: comScore vCE in DoubleClick.

comScore vCE in DoubleClick is the first independent, completely tagless, audience delivery measurement service to be directly integrated into an ad server and will give advertisers and publishers a trusted comScore audience measurement solution for both video and display that is effortless to set up and actionable.

This new GRP measurement solution is now widely available for all of our DoubleClick customers across DoubleClick Digital Marketing and DoubleClick for Publishers. This means advertisers can now see if they’re reaching their target audience as it happens. And publishers will be able to make adjustments during the course of a campaign to meet their advertisers’ needs -- no more after the fact reporting and make-goods.

With this tagless and single-click workflow, advertiser and publisher clients will have 100% coverage. Publishers will have the ability to forecast their audience availability to ensure they meet advertiser commitments. For advertisers, in addition to scheduled reports we are introducing new audience cards that surface reports with simple and easy to read visuals.

Measurement Matters

We will continue to look for opportunities to raise the bar on measurement through a combination of product innovation and partnership with industry leaders.

We’re excited about the progress we’ve made in enabling advertisers to ensure that their ads reached the right audience and were actually seen. But our biggest investments in measurement still lie ahead as we work to help advertisers understand what their audiences thought and ultimately did as a result of seeing their ads.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google