The highlights from the Manchester Google conference
On the 30th October Google came to visit the wonderful city of Manchester to update us on all things Google. The event was a great afternoon with some insightful tips about where things are heading. What we really liked about the conference was the different examples of work that had been done by others.
It was a packed agenda which covered:
- Winning the moments that matter
- Generating response with video
- Making analytics work for you
- Developing high performance: The pursuit of innovation in the English Premier League
- Getting to grips with digital insights
- New realities of retail
- How Google+ can amplify your marketing
- The mobile (R)evolution – the pace of change
Instead of covering the intricate details of what each speaker covered we are going to run through some of the key insights and useful pieces of information which came from the event.
YouTube
Google suggested that people now spend an average of 2 hours per week watching YouTube videos.
There was also a mention of TrueView adverts on YouTube which are displayed prior to videos being watched. These videos are a way for you only to pay for the advert when someone watches the full length of the video, so you won’t pay for anyone who simply skips over the advert.
Google recommended one quick way to test this method is to use any digital assets that you currently have, such as a normal TV advert, and upload this as an advert on TrueView so the results can be monitored. With the costs being only when people view the full length of the video then this means that it is a much more targeted advertising method than traditional TV adverts.
It is also possible to drop pixels as part of TrueView adverts, meaning that retargeting advertising can take place after someone has viewed the advert in full.
Google+
It wouldn’t be a Google conference without the huge focus around their social network.
One interesting statistic which was mentioned is that when +1’s are listed next to the sponsored listings on Google, there is around a 5%-10% increase in click through rate on the adverts.
Some interesting statistics about the usage of Google+ as a social network were that there are a total of 400 million users with 100 million of these being active every month.
Google also mentioned that there was an insights platform “coming soon” to Google+, which we imagine will be similar to Facebook Insights. They are just perfecting the tool at the moment then they will release it “soon” so watch this space.
Hangouts
One feature of Google+ that was pushed was the Hangouts facility where you can either have private hangouts between your friends or public hangouts which are broadcasted onto YouTube. This is what the President Obama did while answering peoples questions, if you are interested in viewing the full video then this is posted on YouTube.
Case Studies
There were a lot of case studies mentioned throughout the event, some of which are listed below.
Dollar Shave Club
The Dollar Shave Club produced a video as part of their marketing campaign which ended up going viral and has been viewed 7,372,300 times on YouTube (at the time of writing) and the video was only published 7 months ago in March.
Some interesting bits of information mentioned were how the video only cost $4500 to create and generated 5000 annual subscriptions within the first day of the advert going live.
If you haven’t seen the video previously, I recommend taking a look as it is great.
Goertz Virtual Shoe Fitting
Words can’t describe how cool this is – just watch the video below.
Burberry’s Regent Street Store
A good example of how the physical world can be integrated with digital products. Their store brings to life the products being offered using video and music. Again, the video is a better way of explaining this:
Red Bull’s Dual Screen
Red Bull are a good example of a company who have utlised dual screening. The TV was showing an overview of what was being seen for someone snowboarding down the slopes, whilst the mobile device was showing the snowboarders view of the situation. If you want to find out more about dual screening, check out our blog post on Interactive TV.
Charity Auction
Throughout the day Scriberia were documenting all of the information that the speakers were talking about in a nice visual way, which was then put up as a prize for a quiz during the event. Below is a photograph taken by Paul Morris :
Image Source: http://www.searchmuse.com/storage/google%20at%20manchester.png
The person who won this was Sinead Hernen from Swinton Insurance who has kindly put this into a charity auction.
