Checking the Pulse of Ads and Brands

As an advertiser, you've probably wondered from time to time what people thought about your marketing efforts. How are they responding to your ads? Do they like them? What do they think about your brand? With many advertisers running display campaigns across the Google Content Network, we’re starting to test some interactive ways for brand advertisers to get feedback on their marketing efforts. In the coming months, we’ll be experimenting with some new approaches that help measure the impact of AdWords campaigns beyond traditional click-through and conversion metrics.

The first is a way to gather feedback on display ads. We start by taking a display ad and removing all traces of the advertiser's brand. We then show this de-branded ad on the Content Network, and present a few basic questions: 1) Have you seen this ad?, 2) Did you like it?, and 3) What was the product or brand being advertised? This simple and approachable ad encourages users to provide feedback, and it also gives advertisers more information on whether people liked the ad and whether they remember the ad and were able to link it to the brand.

This is what users see:

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We're also testing a second approach to brand monitoring using gadget ads served on the Content Network, where we give users the chance to share their thoughts about a set of brand or product names. Over time, advertisers will be able to understand how their brand perceptions and associations are shifting, and they can tailor their marketing messages accordingly.

Here's an example:

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In the coming months, we'll be testing these ideas with a limited set of advertisers in the U.S. and the U.K. with the goal of making it available to more advertisers. With these experiments, we hope to provide you with more actionable insight on how users respond to your ads and brands.

Posted by Austin Rachlin, Inside AdWords crew