In our final installment of the Power Users series, we’ll cover advanced reporting and measurement capabilities of our platform. As you may know, Google TV Ads delivers precise reporting including impression counts, tuning data and cost metrics; this report type is called the ‘Played Spots Report.’ Beyond these data points, advertisers can also choose to include audience reporting metrics as well.
Our system merges aggregated demographic and psychographic information with viewership data from millions of anonymized set-top boxes to report on the audience composition for your ad airings. Audience metrics include Nielsen VPVH, household income, and category interest information amongst others. Easy to run reports detail the composition, or index for each metric whether or not you chose to target those specific metrics in your campaign. This allows you to see an overall picture of exactly who your ads reached or potentially can reach. Insider’s Tip: Selecting the audience measurement option while creating your ‘Played Spots Report’ will allow you to measure how many W25-54 are REALLY watching your ad, or how Project Runway indexes for consumers with certain interests such as photography, hiking, and over 30 others.
Another useful report type is the ‘Summary Report’ which allows you to analyze how well specific networks and programs deliver against an audience and your clearance goals. For instance, you can run a ‘Summary Report’ to find out which programs are delivering the highest VPVH for W25-54, or combine all played spots on ESPN to see how the overall HHI compares against all spots aired on Speed.
The last report and final tip we have for you, is the ‘Reach and Frequency Report.’ Insider’s Tip: Imagine how powerful it would be to understand not only the reach, but also the frequency of your TV campaigns over a given time frame. As seasoned TV buyers know, understanding how often you are reaching a given audience is as important in determining ad effectiveness as measuring reach. Are viewers motivated to visit your website or purchase from you after seeing your ad just once? Or perhaps the sales cycle is longer and repeat views are needed to move the needle. The ‘Reach and Frequency Report’ makes measuring this extremely easy, and can be viewed weekly or monthly to give you a sense of your creative penetration over the specified date range.
This brings us to the end of our Power Users series, we hope you have found these tips and tricks useful. As our product continues to develop and new product features arise, we’ll be sure to keep you posted and in the know.
Posted by Katie Mason, Account Manager for Google TV Ads
Our final installment of the TV Viewership Insights Series looks into viewers' television consumption behavior and how viewers are loyal to certain networks and specific programming on those networks.
Each graph takes a single network over the course of two weeks and examines the amount of overlap between the audiences at every half-hour period in those weeks. Overlap means that a viewer watching this network in this half hour was also watching the same network the previous half hour. If an audience member stays tuned to the same network for long periods of time, you will see this as a purple band.
Check out this video to see what we found:
Comparison of different networks gives us insight into how different types of viewers consume TV content in different ways. In the first set of charts, Bloomberg's large purple blocks were very broad, suggesting that viewers are staying tuned for very long periods, monitoring the market throughout the day. The neighboring chart shows the audience overlap for a large children’s network, and there are bright purple bands throughout the week, only turning black late at night. Children seem to be a lot like bankers, except they don’t take the weekend off.
Even loyalty comes in different flavors. In the second set of charts, the left-hand chart shows the audience overlap for a major adult entertainment network. The diagonal purple lines indicate that viewers do watch at consistent times from day to day. But notice how thin the lines are horizontally and vertically compared with the posters showing children’s or financial programming. Viewers are tuning in to this adult network regularly, but they don’t seem to be watching very long.
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The right-hand chart is an example of super-niche programming: Armenia TV, which calls itself “the largest, private and independent television operation in the Republic of Armenia.” This chart is a sea of red, showing that a lot of the same people are watching Armenia TV all week long. The network doesn’t reach a huge audience, but many of viewers seem to watch little else.
It is thus important to understand what audience you are trying to reach, what networks they are watching and their viewing habits. This research can help media planners focus their marketing spend on the networks and dayparts that are most effective at reaching their target customer and reduce waste in their marketing spend.
Posted by Deeksha Hebbar, Associate Marketing Manager for Google TV Ads
Today's installment of the TV Viewership Insights Series looks under the hood of the Google TV Ads' measurement system. Every day, Google analyzes anonymized data from millions of set-top boxes tuned to several thousand different ad airings in order to describe precise second-by-second tuning behavior for each commercial break.
In this example, we looked at audience tune in and tune out behavior before, during and after a commercial break. Check out this video to see what we found:
Immediately at the start of commercial, a small percentage of the audience tunes away. The audience starts to grow again about halfway through the break, presumably as some of these viewers return in anticipation of the programming resuming.Once the programming resumes, the audience builds back up to roughly its original size, over the course of about two minutes.
We also looked at the exact number of tunes in and out at each second. All the numbers are relatively small, meaning that at any given second only a fraction of 1% of set-top boxes are tuning (i.e., switching channels) at all. Before the break there is some tuning going on, but the tunes in and out are generally about matched. This is probably ordinary channel surfing “noise” that is unrelated to the specific programming on this network. Set-top box data can help better understand the reasons why the audience is changing the channel.
In addition to other signals, second-by-second data can be helpful in understanding viewer response; advertisers can see whether viewers are responding positively to their ads or tuning away. Thus, advertisers can make better decisions on what ads to run in order to reach their target audience.
Posted by Deeksha Hebbar, Associate Marketing Manager for Google TV Ads
In our latest installment of the TV Viewership Insights Series, we look at how every network delivers its audience slightly differently. Even networks with similar audiences can elicit different kinds of viewing behavior from their followers. We looked at two networks in particular, Oxygen and SOAP, both of which serve an audience composed mainly of women.
Check out this video to learn what we found:
We saw that Oxygen generates more unique impressions as we increase the number of total impressions in a campaign, while SOAP offers more frequency of exposure for any given level of total impressions. Presumably, Oxygen is reaching a large number of women who tune in for a specific show or movie. SOAP, on the other hand, benefits from women tuning into their soap operas day after day at the same time. Advertisers might choose one of these over the other depending on their marketing objectives.
In this TV Viewership Insight, set-top box data enabled us to confirm a plausible hunch regarding Oxygen and SOAP's abilities to deliver on different campaign goals. Applying this type of research more broadly across other networks whose audience delivery is less well understood will help marketers build better media plans and understand their ad viewing audience better.
Posted by Deeksha Hebbar, Associate Marketing Manager for Google TV Ads
Our TV Viewership Insights Series delves into thelearnings Google TV Ads is starting to develop from anonymous data from millions of set-top boxes across the United States. We started the series yesterday with a look at how the tuning metrics we measure are signals from viewers about what they want to see and when they want to see it. Today we're focusing on how DVR affects how audiences watch television.
There has been an explosion of content on television over the past few years. While in the past viewers were limited to a handful of networks, today's viewers have access to hundreds of channels. From the data, we've learned that this increase in TV content has not really changed the way people watch live TV. Live television viewership is mostly concentrated on the top networks, and viewers seem to be watching TV at the same times, day after day. However, when DVR recording comes into play, these viewing patterns start to change.
Check out this video to learn what we found:
The networks that are less popular when viewed live can have as many recordings as more popular networks, and other times of day can be as frequently recorded as prime time. The most popular (live) networks still tend to attract the most recordings across the week, but individual hours on smaller networks can sometimes match those at the top, as viewers use their DVR to seek out interesting content beyond the usual top choices. Although a lot of people do record the top networks, those networks don’t seem to grow their audience significantly through time-shifted viewers.
At Google, we’re very interested in the “long tail” of TV. Our findings suggest that DVR may be making that long tail a little fatter. And while most TV viewing is still live, DVR usage patterns may be an important indicator of future viewing behavior. One way or the other – either through the proliferation of DVR boxes or through the migration of TV content to on-demand services online – viewers are getting more control over their TV schedules. This data suggest that viewers really use this control when they get it and don’t just watch the same programs as before.
Posted by Deeksha Hebbar, Associate Marketing Manager for Google TV Ads
Today, we'd like to kick off a series of blog posts that dive into the insights Google TV Ads is developing from set-top box data, to deliver better value to our advertisers and more relevant ads to viewers. Our TV Viewership Insights Series begins with a look at the various tuning metrics we measure, as signals from the audience about what they want to see and when. And while there are many factors that affect audience behavior, we can separate the effects of these factors to focus on how the audience is reacting to the ads themselves.
Visit our poston the Official Google Blog for a more detailed analysis and a new video showcasing our findings. We'll continue to post installments to this series over the next few days, along with more videos featuring our viewership insights.
Posted by Dan Zigmond, Technical Lead for Google TV Ads
Are you curious to know exactly how effective your TV ad campaigns are, but have not been tracking your TV campaigns with unique phone numbers or URLs? Worry no more. In addition to the TV Campaigns reports discussed in this post, Google Analytics offers two great ways to track your TV campaign effectiveness.
1. Direct Traffic Report When your customers type your URL directly into their browser, this traffic is classified as direct traffic. All of the TV viewers who type your website URL into their browsers will fall into this category. Therefore, it is important to monitor how your direct traffic is influenced during the time of your active TV campaign.
To access the Direct Traffic report, log in to Google Analytics and choose Traffic Sources -> Direct Traffic. Make sure you select the date range that corresponds to your active TV campaign. The example below features data from a real campaign, and you can see that there is a clear lift in traffic when the TV campaign was running (shown with green labels).
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2. Non-paid search traffic Your customers may search for your company or product on their favorite search engine instead of visiting your website directly. To get a more complete picture of the effect of your Google TV campaign, it's important to monitor your non-paid search traffic as well. Non-paid search traffic is traffic that originates from the natural search results of search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. These visitors are accounted for in the Search Engines report.
To access your non-paid search traffic, login to Google Analytics and choose Traffic Sources -> Search Engines. Then click the "non-paid" link to filter out any paid traffic from the engines. In the example below, you can see a noticeable increase in non-paid search traffic on days with active TV Ads (shown with green labels).
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We hope this post provides you with some simple and powerful tools to measure the effectiveness of your Google TV Ads campaign.
Posted by David Wurtz, Associate Product Manager for Google TV Ads
In October, we launched the Reach and Frequency report, a detailed breakdown of a given TV ad campaign's reach, delivered at a given frequency of exposure. As a reminder, Reach is defined as the number of unique televisions exposed to the campaign. Frequency is the number of times a given television was exposed to an ad.
Today, we'd like to announce reach and frequency estimates available within our forecasting tool. Now, you can get an idea of whether your campaign is likely to achieve your reach and frequency goals before your ad airs, allowing you to adjust your campaign to achieve your optimal reach and frequency before you spend a dime.
It's easy to review your reach and frequency estimates:
1. Create a new campaign or edit an existing campaign 2. Click on "Calculate weekly estimates" on the "Set pricing" page 3. Look for the section called "Weekly Reach and Frequency Estimates" 4. View the average frequency and unique reach numbers 5. Make adjustments based on your target reach and frequency
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Your weekly estimates include:
Total impressions - The total number of impressions we expect you to win based on your current budget, bid, and set of targets.
Unique impressions - The number of unique televisions exposed to the campaign, one or more times. Unique impressions are based on historical overlap we see between different programming. For example, if you were watching Family Guy at 8:00PM, how likely were you to be watching The Simpsons at 9:00PM? This can also be called "unique reach."
Average weekly frequency - Total impressions divided by unique impressions. This tells you how many times a television will display your ad, on average, within the set of all televisions that display your ad at least once.
So what's your target reach and frequency? Determining the right level of reach and frequency depends on several factors, including the type of product or service you're selling, the competition, the quality of the ad you use, as well as the type of audience that would most likely buy your product or service. Once you have a target reach and frequency in mind, you should use these estimates to guide your campaign in the right direction.
Posted by Andrew Poon, Product Manager for Google TV Ads
TV viewers are increasingly watching what they want when they want it. About 25% of television households in the United States have digital video recorders or DVRs installed. Today, the Google TV Ads team is excited to announce the launch of time-shifted viewership data, which provides you with insight into how and when viewers see your ads during DVR playback of recorded content. As with all metrics in your Google TV Ads reports, time-shifted impressions reflect the viewership of your specific TV commercial, not just general program viewership. And, what's more, this information is available to Google Adwords TV advertisers for free.
DVR viewership is very fragmented, and thus requires a very large sample to make accurate projections. This is where Google's processing power can benefit you. We process anonymized DVR viewership data from millions of set-top boxes, in order to provide you with accurate, detailed time-shifted impression counts.
Check out this video to learn more about how to access this new data in your reports:
At Google, we love digging into data. So we've been excited to investigate how time-shifted viewing differs from live viewing. Our initial findings suggest that niche programming tends to get a disproportionate percentage of its viewing through DVR. That is to say, without DVR, smaller networks would have a more limited audience. For advertisers, insight into the time-shifted viewership of your ads will help you better understand the full value of the networks and programs you've targeted in your campaign.
We hope access to time-shifted viewership data offers you new insights into how the audience is interacting with your TV commercial.
Posted by Yaroslav Volovich, Software Engineer for Google TV Ads
A few months back, we launched a new addition to Report Center: Reach and Frequency reports for Google TV Ads. These provide you with insight into how often viewers see your ad, so you can determine whether your campaign is delivering on your goals. Today, we'd like to share a tip about something useful you can do with the data, once you create one of these reports.
You may be curious to know the average frequency for your campaign, or in other words, the average number of times a given television was exposed to your advertisement. Calculating this is simple.
1. Generate a Reach and Frequency Report from Report Center.
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2. Notice how many unique TVs were exposed to your campaign (Reach) and how often (Frequency). For example, in the report below, 50 TVs showed the ad once, another 20 TVs showed the ad twice, and 10 TVs showed the ad 3 times.
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3. To calculate the average frequency for your campaign, divide the total number of exposures, by the number of unique TVs exposed.
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In this example the average number of times a given television showed the commercial was 1.5. Use this formula with your own data to understand how often viewers saw your ad. Then you can adjust your campaign based on these results. For example:
If you wanted to decrease your frequency and increase your reach, you could do so by adding more unique networks for the same dayparts you are using now.
If you wanted to increase your frequency and decrease your reach, you should bid on fewer overall networks.
You can always increase your budget to try to improve both your reach and your frequency, but keep in mind it's harder to achieve higher frequencies than higher reach.
Today, we'd like to announce the launch of Reach and Frequency Reports now available in the Report Center of your AdWords account, along with the Played Spots, Summary, and Spots Scheduled to Air reports. Reach and Frequency reports provide you with insight into how often viewers see your ad, so you can determine whether your campaign is delivering on your goals.
Reach is defined as the number of unique televisions exposed to the campaign. Frequency is the number of times a given television was exposed to an ad.
We process data from millions of anonymized set-top boxes to provide you with a detailed breakdown of the unique reach delivered at each frequency of exposure. Ultimately, you'll be able to better manage your TV campaigns to deliver the desired frequency of exposure to your audience.
Here's how to create a report:
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1. Log in to your AdWords account and click on the "Reports" tab.
2. Choose the TV Ads tab in the Report Center and click on "Reach and Frequency Report"
3. Define the time frame you'd like to review as weekly (7-day) or monthly (30-day). You also can choose custom time periods or pre-set periods. If you choose custom time periods, we'll provide data for as many weekly or monthly periods that fit into your custom defined period as possible.
4. Select which campaign you'd like to review data for. You can select all of your campaigns or a subset.
Here's an example of how a report might look:
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You can see the reach at each frequency for the two campaigns above, which are set to a monthly window (standard for most TV campaigns).
We hope the Reach and Frequency report will provide you with useful data to better manage campaigns to meet your objectives.
Posted by Andrew Poon, Product Manager for Google TV Ads
So you've just created a campaign with Google TV Ads, and now you want to know when your ads are scheduled to air before they run. Is this possible? Of course! Now, you can access this information by midnight before the day of airing through the new report called Spots Scheduled to Air.
To access this report, click on the "TV Ad Reports" tab in Report Center and select "Spots Scheduled to Air."
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All available columns will be selected as defaults, while a few columns such as Impression, Cost, and Tuning Metrics will not be available before the ad runs.
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The report will show the spots that are scheduled to air, and each spot will be labeled as "Pending" in the "Verification Status" column until successfully aired, at which time they can be viewed in the Played Spots report.
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For direct response advertisers, this report can be helpful when planning call center staffing. In addition, knowing where spots are scheduled to run can help inform any changes you might want to make to your campaign targets for the next day.
Do you want your television ads to reach college age men? Or maybe you want your spots to focus on baby boomers? If so, you'll be happy to know that Google TV Ads offers tools to help you target networks and programs that reach your intended audience, as well as reports to give you insight into how well your ads are reaching that target. Here's how it works:
First, from the Target Campaign screen during campaign set up, you'll want to click on the "Get suggestions by target audience" tab. There, you can select the demographics of your ideal audience, review the networks and dayparts that best reach that audience, and add some or all of the recommendations to your campaign. Learn more about how Google recommends networks and dayparts.
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After your ad airs, you can also run a report to get directional feedback on whether your targeting selections are efficiently reaching your desired demographics. Using the Nielsen data provided by Google TV Ads, you can also make discoveries about those watching your ads. By comparing the demographic compositions of the audiences for the networks, dayparts and programs that perform best in your campaign, you can find commonalities and then edit your campaign targets accordingly. Return to the "Get suggestions by target audience" tab to find and target other networks and dayparts that are rich in that demographic.
It’s important to keep in mind that this data is based on a large survey, and Google TV Ads only reaches a subset of viewers in that survey. Therefore, you’ll want to use this data to get general information about who is viewing the programs you’ve aired on, rather than use it as an exact measure of the demographics of the viewers who have seen your ad.We encourage you to learn more about the Nielsen demographic data as well as other metrics in your Google TV Ads reports.
