The CafePress Experience With Ads

When CafePress first started printing shirts in 1999, online retail was still a nascent industry and Google had yet to sell its first ad. Soon CafePress started selling products through search ads on Google, and their business took off. Today, CafePress hosts millions of shops online where customers can choose from more than 325 million products on nearly any topic, from wall art to phone cases.

Just as CafePress has broadened its offerings over time, we’ve also worked to improve and expand our search advertising products. What started as three lines of simple text has evolved into ads that are multimedia-rich, location-aware and socially-amplified.

Today CafePress uses Sitelinks to direct people to specific pages of their website, helping customers find what they’re looking for faster. On average, ads with three rows of links, or three-line Sitelinks, are more than 50 percent likely to get clicked on than ads without Sitelinks. More than 200,000 advertisers have joined CafePress in using Sitelinks in at least one campaign.

Monday at Advertising Week in New York City, I’ll be talking about how advertisers have been quick to adopt these new formats since we first began experimenting nearly two years ago. Businesses from the smallest retailer in Idaho to the largest Fortune 500 company in New York have seen how these innovations in search advertising can help grow successful businesses. In fact, roughly one-third of searches with ads show an enhanced ad format.

Here are a few ways these new ad formats are helping people find valuable information faster:

Visual. Not only can you find theater times for a new movie, you can watch the trailer directly in the ad. Media ads put the sight, sound and motion of video into search ads. With Product Ads, people can see an image, price and merchant name, providing a more visual shopping experience. Because this format is often so useful, people are twice as likely to click on a Product Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location, and today, hundreds of millions of products are available through Product Ads.

Local. More than 20 percent of desktop searches on Google are related to location. On mobile, this climbs to 40 percent. Location-aware search ads can help you find what you’re looking for more easily by putting thousands of local businesses on the map—literally. More than 270,000 of our advertisers use Location Extensions to attach a business address on at least one ad campaign, connecting more than 1.4 million locations in the U.S. via ads. And, with our mobile ad formats, not only can you call a restaurant directly from the ad, you can also find out how far away the restaurant is located and view a map with directions.

Social. With the +1 button people are able to find and recommend businesses with their friends. Since introducing the +1 button earlier this year, we now have more than 5 billion impressions on publisher sites a day. If you’re a business owner, the +1 button enables your customers to share your products and special offers easily with their network of friends, amplifying your existing marketing campaigns.

We’re continuing to experiment with search ads to help businesses like CafePress grow by connecting with the right customers.

We’re developing ads that provide richer information to you because we believe that search ads should be both beautiful and informative, and as useful to you as an answer.

Google Boost Bid Pricing

 

Google’s Boost advertising product was meant to be a dead simple way for a small business that had claimed their Places listing, to place a locally highlighted ad onto the front page of Google. It is simple to get started and in some situations, where the targeting is accurate and the price per click is reasonable, it can be a very effective advertising product. In a  very limited sample size it has worked to the clear benefit of the business about 50% of the times that I have tried it.

But the simplicity of the system hides a deeper complexity in pricing that is sure to confuse and anger most SMBs sooner or later: the bid pricing. These two screen shots tell the tale.

Up until June 15th, this campaign was generating click throughs at a reasonable cost. However somewhere along the line (neither the charts, nor the product interface make this explicit nor discoverable), the cost per click jumped from $4.68 a click to over $20, rapidly running through the budget and it resulted in the ad stop being displayed.

A call to a Boost support person (a 1+ to Google on providing phone support to all SMBs) indicated that “there was probably some external event had caused the bid for the ad to go up rapidly”. A review of the Boost help files made no mention of  the fact that the pricing was bid dependent. In fact there no explanation AT ALL of pricing and how it is determined. Simple all right, too simple by half.

This lack of transparency on pricing will be a death knell of the product in the SMB market. What small business person would be happy with 4x price hike that occurs unannounced? What small business person understands the possibility of a bidding war taking the ad offline? What small business person wouldn’t be surprised that an ad that had been working well for the previous 3 months suddenly went in the toilet? And what small business person, when he called Google was told ”there was probably some external event had caused the bid for the ad to go up rapidly”, would be a happy, educated camper?

Here is the screen shot of the preceding month for comparison. It is very similar to what the client saw in the account for the previous 3 months:

If Boost is to be successful long haul Google needs to be both more transparent and more reliable in their pricing. Otherwise, sooner or later, every SMB that uses the product will shrug in disgust.

Convert SWF files to HTML5 with Swiffy

Some Google projects really do start from one person hacking around. Last summer, an engineering intern named Pieter Senster joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash animations on devices that don’t support Adobe Flash player. Pieter made such great progress that Google hired him full time and formed a team to work on the project. Swiffy was born!

Today we’re making the first version of Swiffy available on Google Labs. You can upload a SWF file, and Swiffy will produce an HTML5 version which will run in modern browsers with a high level of SVG support such as Chrome and Safari. It’s still an early version, so it won’t convert all Flash content, but it already works well on ads and animations. We have some examples of converted SWF files if you want to see it in action.
 


 
Swiffy uses a compact JSON representation of the animation, which is rendered using SVG and a bit of HTML5 and CSS3. ActionScript 2.0 is also present in the JSON object, and is interpreted in JavaScript in the browser. This representation makes the Swiffy animations almost as compact as the original SWF files.

Swiffy is a great example of how far the web platform has come. Swiffy animations benefit from the recent advancements in JavaScript execution speed and hardware accelerated 2D graphics in the browser.