DMA 2011: Alan Moss, Google, "View of Global Online Sales"

Good morning. It's great to be with you all. I've been looking forward to taking some time and sharing with you what we're doing at Google to turbocharge real-time marketing and helping marketers to drive great results for your companies. Here's what I mean by that. Imagine it's the spring of 2010 and Lady Gaga has just released her new premiere of her video Telephone, complete with a cameo from Beyoncé. Now, if you're a dad like me, you're probably thinking, 'What is she wearing?' But if you're a little bit more imaginative than that, your mind is starting to race with the possibilities, and you know that any video with this kind of viewership offers great marketing opportunities. Now let's say you're an American soldier stationed over in Afghanistan, and you're looking to blow off a little bit of steam between missions. You might round up a group of your mates and decide to film a remix of this video. Now I'm pretty sure these soldiers didn't think that their video would get 6.5 million views on YouTube. Pretty amazing. Now if you're a fashion-forward teenager, you might be thinking, 'How can I copy that great look that Beyoncé is rocking in the video?' And you're trying to find that out by going online and searching for 'yellow eyeshadow.' Just look at how search skyrocketed right after the release of this video. Your expectation and that of thousands of other teenage girls just like you was that you'd find just what you were looking for online. And that's the opportunity of real-time marketing. Now if you're a marketer or a cosmetics company, you better be thinking, 'How can I jump on this opportunity?' You know that thousands of people are going to be watching this video, and there's a huge opportunity to market your yellow eyeshadow. So you better be building out your campaigns and adding keywords to make sure that people can find you. In fact, it took cosmetics companies a little bit longer than they would have liked to jump on this opportunity, and it was a huge missed opportunity. This example really illustrates the relevant and real-time marketing that the world is moving towards. In this new world, the savviest marketers know that speed needs perfection. Today you'll get a glimpse of the important transformation that's taking place in consumer behavior and what we're doing at Google to help you capture those opportunities. Now, you know your customers. They're searching online more frequently than ever, and they're not just searching for those typical online categories—they're searching for virtually everything. We all turn to online search as the first point of reference to answer virtually any of our questions. And we're able to do this because we're constantly connected. And nothing is helping that connectivity more so than mobile. It's driving a significant portion of the online reliance today. Does anyone even make a call on these devices anymore? It seems like today, when you're looking for your next mobile device, you're thinking more about its online capabilities or maybe the apps that come with it rather than the call quality. Remember when we used to worry about that? By the end of the year, over 50% of all Americans will have a smartphone, and more than half of all new internet connections globally will occur on a mobile device. But most surprisingly, one-third of all smartphone owners report preferring to search the web or do their email on their smartphone rather than the larger screen of their desktop. Smartphones are like the new Swiss Army knife—a device that's so useful we just can't live without it. Mobile search has increased by more than 500% in the last year, and that's in part because mobile makes it so easy for us to bring that digital connectivity with us wherever we are. Desktop search really peaks during the working hours in the mornings and afternoons, but during our lunch breaks, in the evenings, and on the weekends, mobile searches really peak when we're out living our lives. This constant connectivity means that businesses can engage with customers 24 hours a day. When they're looking for you is an opportunity that didn't exist until very recently. For better or worse, we're constantly using our mobile devices. I know some of you are using yours now. We do it when we're eating, when we're walking around town, and 8% of people even report using their mobile devices while bathing. Go figure. And when we're searching, whether we're using our desktop or our smartphones, we're looking for more specific answers. In any given day, 16% of Google's queries are ones that we've never seen before. The search query length is growing much longer, and we're looking for more complex things online. And when it comes to mobile, one-third of our searchers have local intent. We're not just looking for answers—we're looking for places too. And that means that marketers have to be even more attuned to what their customers are looking for. They're not just searching for 'leaf blower'—we're looking for a 'handheld gas-powered multivariable noise control leaf blower' in our ZIP codes. Are you marketing a way to reach that potential customer? Today, the information that consumers find online is ever more important to our purchase decision. Four out of five consumers say that they go online first before making a purchase decision, and they're really going deep in online search—they're consulting many online sources before making a purchase decision even in what we used to think of as low consideration categories like personal care. At Google, we call this shift the Zero Moment of Truth, or ZMOT. Some of you may be familiar with the phrase 'First Moment of Truth' that Procter & Gamble coined many years ago to define that first interaction between a shopper and a product on a store shelf. P&G believed that shoppers make up their mind in that first moment—a few seconds when they first hit the aisles and they encounter their product. And then the Second Moment of Truth follows when they bring that product home, sample it, hopefully like it, and have a customer for life. Well, what we found is that these days, a customer's first contact with a brand is often happening online. While the First and Second Moments of Truth are still incredibly important, the rise of internet use and search engines means that many brands and their interactions with their customers happen online beforehand. And this is what we mean by the Zero Moment of Truth. Just like in the past, a stimulus like a TV ad or display online ad might cause a consumer to want to research a product more. And at that point, as marketers, you better be online. You better have a great online presence that is engaging and represents your brand well. So how is Google helping? What are we doing to turbocharge these connections? Well, we're helping in three important ways. The first way we're helping is by providing real-time insights and optimization tools that help marketers to operate more efficiently and drive great results for your campaigns. Most conversion tracking tools just look at that last click before a conversion, giving all the credit to that traffic. But we know that consumers today are interacting with many different forms of media—whether it's social, display, paid search, organic search, affiliate marketing. All of these touches are influencing our decisions, and those last-click tools aren't capturing all of that mix. So we've recently launched a tool called Multi-Channel Funnels that helps marketers get a single unified view of all of their digital touches with a customer. This place looks pretty gorgeous, right? It's a hotel in Thailand run by the Amari Hotel Group. Amari started to use Multi-Channel Funnels, and what they found was that 57% of their customers required multiple visits to their website before actually booking a stay. And when they started to dig into the data, they started to understand that they needed more drivers that caused those multiple visits, and they learned that display ads in particular were a great and very powerful assist for those leading to multiple visits. So Amari started to increase their display presence, and as a result were able to drive a double-digit increase in their bookings. Pretty good. Another way that we're helping marketers is through our automated tools. You don't have to spend a ton of time getting great results from your online campaigns when you use these tools. Larry mentioned the stock market volatility over the last few days. Many of you also probably can't forget the enormous volatility we had back in the summer in early August. The stock market plummeted about 8%, and during that same time gold prices rose by more than 133%. And as you might imagine, queries for gold online increased by more than 400%. News sites, blogs—all kinds of information was spiking with information for consumers about what might be a safe haven for you to invest your money in. And if you were a gold company, you wanted your ads right next to those articles. And that's exactly what Google is able to do for Goldline International Inc., one of Inc. Magazine's fastest growing private companies. They used our automated tools to take advantage of that information gold rush. They used a tool that increases their conversions by automatically managing targeting and bidding for campaigns across the Google Display Network. This tool, called Display Campaign Optimizer, really learns what content and bids work best for the advertisers on the Display Network as it constantly changes. And as it learns and identifies more relevant inventory, it allows a company like Goldline to really scale their business within their target cost per acquisition. Now the second way that Google helps marketers is by developing more fun and engaging platforms. YouTube is one of the best playgrounds out there to create a truly engaging experience. There are 3 billion views on YouTube every day globally, and more than 200 million YouTube mobile views. But what's even more impressive is that this viewership is growing by more than 50% year on year. YouTube is really leveling the playing field for small brands and allowing brands to build themselves online and grow sales through YouTube. This is a picture of Dr. Bob Wagstaff. He's the inventor of a bad breath device called Orabrush. Now no matter what Dr. Bob tried—whether it was infomercials or any other marketing—he couldn't seem to find his target audience. Well, on the advice of a college student, Dr. Bob decided to spend $500 in 2009—yes, that was $500—and shoot a YouTube commercial. That video now has 15.5 million views. And Orabrush was able to gain 150,000 subscribers to their sponsored brand channel. They're the third most trafficked brand channel on the internet, right after Apple. Pretty amazing. But that's not all. On YouTube, Orabrush has been able to sell more than a million of these devices, and they've recently announced they now have distribution in more than 3,500 Walmart stores, without ever having to go to Bentonville and negotiate distribution with Walmart. Not too shabby for a bad breath device, a doctor, and an actor dressed up as a dirty tongue. So how does Orabrush do this? What's their secret? Well, they keep their content fresh and engaging. They're not one of those one-hit wonders. They're posting new episodes hosted by the tongue guy weekly and even spoofing rising trends in popular culture, like this video that spoofed an iPad 2 commercial with nearly 2 million views and 1,000 viewer comments. Orabrush actually eclipsed Apple's original iPad 2 views on YouTube. Pretty fantastic engagement. The third way Google is helping marketers is by constantly evolving our platforms to make sure that we're giving marketers the chance to connect with their customers everywhere they spend time. Not only is it now easier to find what you're looking for, but you can deliver the most relevant message. New technology makes it easy to assemble a display ad in real time based on signals that are tailored to your customer. This display ad here targeted Vermont residents ahead of a big snowstorm, selling snow shovels, snow blowers, and the like. Our Teracent technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of different creative elements and assemble that display ad as the ad is rendered, so that you can quickly change images, products, and more. Target residents in the Southeast before a big rainstorm and promote your sump pump catch basins and the like. Or you can even target folks where the weather's pretty nice and encourage them to take on that big project this weekend with a special deal. I spoke earlier about the rise of mobile. Well, when you're searching on your phone, you don't want to finally find a site that you're looking for, hope that you have a scrap of paper, hope you have a pen or pencil that actually works, and write down the phone number to connect with that business later. What you really want to do is you want to use Google's new Click-to-Call format, which has been a huge driver for direct response marketers everywhere to connect with their customers in real time, real place. This product really works. For customers that have implemented it, it's led to more than a 6 to 8% click-through rate and driven great business. One marketer who resells home security services, Defender Direct, now gets 75 to 80% of their advertising clicks using Click-to-Call. Once they started targeting high-end mobile devices, the returns for mobile really took off, and the results were double what they saw on the desktop. Today, Google mobile ads constitute more than a quarter of their overall online spend—something they couldn't have imagined a short while ago. And what's more real time or real place than social? Sharing's always been a huge part of how people make decisions. We know that 71% of people say that reviews from their friends and family actually lead to purchase decisions, influence the decisions they make. We recently introduced the +1 button to help build this sort of trust online. When I was recently booking a trip to Madrid, I remembered a friend had a great visit there, but I couldn't quite remember who it was or where they stayed. Well, with the +1 button, I can go online, search for Madrid hotels, and actually see results within my network, and soon be able to see results in display ads of who have recommended places. So people like my friend can recommend their favorite hotels, great restaurants, or even bad breath devices that they recommend, and then their contacts can see those recommendations at the moment that they need them. They don't have to sift through and find it in a huge mass of data. This is how Google is really working to make the web a more social place—bringing recommendations in your social graph to you in real time when it's most meaningful to you. The +1 button now gets more than 5 billion views a day, and marketers like Dell, Nordstrom, Pepsi, and many others are now earning +1s across their websites. But that's not all. There's more to come for marketers with what we call the Google+ project. I hope that many of you are already familiar with the Google+ personal profiles. We're excited to announce that business profiles will be available this fall, so brands like Nexus S, which you see here, can join the Google+ platform and start building relationships, sharing content, and developing an audience in new and interesting ways. With Google+ for business, we're creating a new way for businesses to get closer to their customers with real conversations with the right people at the right time. Let's look at a couple quick examples. In Google+ we have a tool called Circles that lets you segment your customers so you can send the right message to the right people. Nexus S, for example, could customize their circles to segment customers, promoting different plans and services to moms versus teens based on their usage of the device, and connect with these groups differently how they most prefer. And one of the most exciting new ways for businesses to connect with their customers is through face-to-face interactions through something that we call Hangouts. A brand can start a Hangout and invite people to a face-to-face video conference. Up to 10 people can join at any one time. And as a marketer, you can record that conversation and later broadcast it to the world. Think about the amazing opportunities this provides for real-time engagement. Already in our field trial, we've seen Michael Dell conferencing with some of his customers. We've also seen someone unexpectedly—a doctor doing a Hangout with a surgery room many miles away, offering his unique expertise to that surgery. We didn't really see that one coming. But if you can imagine using a Hangout for surgery, it's not too hard to imagine how you might resolve a customer complaint in real time face to face, or how you might hold a focus group with some of your most avid fans. Google+ has enormous potential to bring companies ever closer together with their customers in real time and in real ways. So in a world that's moving much faster than ever, how can you truly be real time? What you need to remember is that online is now really central to how all of us are living our lives—how we interact and look for information and pursue our interests. You need to make sure that you're taking advantage of that shift and staying nimble by first iterating and constantly using real-time insight. You can do this efficiently using Google's automated tools. Secondly, use the new platforms and technologies that are out there to create compelling, fun, and targeted solutions. Your content can be so engaging that it shares itself. And lastly, getting in front of your customers no matter where they are, at the right time with the right message. Thank you very much.