Google Gadgets and Google Gadget Ads
At the last Google Geek Night I interviewed Jeremy Wood from Google about Google Gadgets and Gadget Ads. He provides some helpful hints and tips for marketers and developers on how to get the most out of Gadgets.
Jacqui: What are Google Gadgets and how do they differ from Google Gadget Ads?
Jeremy: We have two products which can be confusing. One is Gadgets and the other is Gadget Ads. Starting with the base program and model is Gadgets themselves. Typically Gadgets are most familiar to people who use iGoogle. When you go to the iGoogle homepage, all those gadgets, also known as widgets, which can be anything from weather to horoscopes to crossword puzzles to much more complex. They are really like little applications or mini websites.
Jacqui: Why do you think marketers should care about Google Gadgets or Gadget Ads?
Jeremy: So, for the Gadgets themselves is huge exposure. It is basically a way on a free platform for marketers to get additional exposure either driving traffic through to their website or branding or just getting interaction or value with their clients. Or even just to have a bit of fun without it costing anything except for some development time.
The Gadget Ads themselves could take advantage of our broader content network. You can place those ads in much more specific highly targeted pages so you know that the viewers who are seeing those gadgets are indeed your target audience. It is the ability to take a mini version of your website or a component of it to get in front of your end customer.
Jacqui: You’ve just spoken about how Gadget Ads can be placed onto the content network and that is a paid placement. What are some other ways for marketers to get more exposure for their Gadgets?
Jeremy: We encourage people developing gadget ads to place an “add to iGoogle” little button on their gadget ad itself. Although it is serving on the content network and they are paying for that, they can also let users take it off the content network and put it onto their iGoogle page leveraging that platform to get that additional viewership. People are also free to take that to put it onto their Facebook page, MySpace or even their own webpage or blog. It repurposes itself over and over so there is no end to where you can put it as it is just a simple snippet of code.
Jacqui: That sounds good that you can get so many uses from such a small application. Many of Netconcepts clients really care about conversion and driving traffic to their website. Do you think that Gadget Ads are a type of banner ad which is possibly not so great for driving traffic or do you think it is useful for that purpose?
Jeremy: Actually I think one of the powers of Gadget Ads is that because it is essentially a website in a website, you are free to develop it in anyway that you want. Based on your objectives such as driving traffic, then you are free to build a gadget ad to drive traffic right through to your website. We had a few people in the beta testing phase that did exactly that. They had one or two layers of interactivity before it drove people straight to the site. They had phenomenal click through rates and at the end of the day it was driving that drive click through rate versus just pure branding where they are just engaging users. It is wide open to what you want to do with it.
Jacqui: What we have seen so far with Gadget Ads that they are mostly flash banner ads. Do you see advertisers creating more mash-ups or reservation forms or other types of applications as such?
Jeremy: The great thing is that you are limited by programming or restrictions because it is open source. So it is native for people to take advantage of flash, it is familiar to people. We are trying to get people to be more creative and think outside the box. They are slowly starting to do that such as integrating different languages and things like that. We are going to see cooler and cooler stuff from the developers putting these things together.
Jacqui: What are some tips or hints how marketers could increase click rates from their Gadget Ads?
Jeremy: One of the learnings we are getting from the early testers and even people adopting it right now is execution. We are not seeing people fail because of distribution or anything else rather than the creative execution. We want to encourage people to spend the time in the development phase, take their objectives and build out exactly what they really want to do and they will see great results at the end of it. It is like any traditional website. Keep it fresh, keep it unique, make the navigation easy and make the path obvious.
Jacqui: How do advertisers track the performance of those ads? From the guidelines you are not allowed to place any cookies within those ads. How do you do that?
Jeremy: It is one of the unique things that stands out for gadget ads apart from anything else at this stage which is our interaction tracking. We offer up to 30 levels or different types of interaction tracking which feeds right back into your AdWords account. You’re free to bake that into the code yourself whether it is play, fastforward, rewind, mouse on, mouse off, clicking in a certain corner instead of another corner. Right now we have thirty but we’re hoping to expand that over the coming months to a much deeper level. Basically you have that great reporting that is fed right back into your account so you can track very, very well.
Jacqui: In the guidelines they also specify that animation must be kept to a limit of 15 seconds is that for the total ad itself regardless of how many animation screens there are within the gadget ad or can you have a maximum of 15 seconds for each screen?
Jeremy: In theory it is per animation. What we are seeing right now is that people typically are not confusing the user by having too many things going on at the same time. If you take yourself from one part to the next part and there is a flash animation to continue that 15 seconds. It is all about the user experience and you don’t want to overwhelm them with gizmos because you can.
Jacqui: It is about the user experience, so if the user does not flash enabled on their browser what do they see instead?
Jeremy: That’s a great point. Basically they will see a back fill image and we encourage the gadget developers to have that sort of alt source in place so that people can at least see a static frame. We are seeing the rates of flash enabled browsers are phenomenally high so there is extremely a small proportion of users that may not have the full user experience that you are hoping to get out of Gadget Ads.
Jacqui: Do you see at some point launching its own cookie type system to track the user experience at all?
Jeremy: I can’t really comment on that at this stage. This is the very early stages of this. We’re taking on feedback, we’re developing and we’re moving forward with a whole bunch of initiatives in the next little while so it is best to stay tuned at this stage.
Jacqui: For the foreseeable future, what is the future of Gadget Ads over the next 6 to 12 months?
Jeremy: What I would like to see are the developers themselves coming back to us. We want to work with the user community and see what people can do with them. And if there are any restraints working with those people to build that out and make it a function in future version of Gadget Ads. I would like to see people getting out of the mindset that it is just a flash ad and take it to next level and really take advantage of the open source platform to do something that is out of this world. Really from a creative element that is what I am hoping to see over the next 6-12 months. They can do anything they want with it.
Jeremy Wood sent me an email a few days later after the interview. He wanted to add the following to ensure OnlineMarketer.co.nz readers have the right information:
“The question was around what the user might see if they didn’t have flash installed. So the answer is basically the same as what they would see on any site that required flash and the user didn’t have it installed in their browser, and that is the little icon in the middle of movie area asking you to install the Flash plugin. The same issue would be encountered for an AJAX-based gadget where the user has javascript switched off. Gadget Ads are essentially a web page within an iframe. In terms of best practice, it is recommended that you have some sort of placeholder text in case Flash or JS is not rendering.”