2021

The holidays are quickly approaching and 40% of U.S. consumers have already started their holiday shopping. Supporting local businesses is top of mind this year. In fact, 60% of U.S. consumers who are planning to shop for the holidays say they will shop more at local small businesses.

If your stores are open for in-store shopping or dining, you know it’s important to make sure your customers can easily find you online. We’ve unwrapped new local solutions plus a local holiday guide to help you stand out on Google and connect shoppers to your stores.

Engage with customers using your Business Profile

Starting this week, you can easily claim and verify your Business Profile directly on Google Search or the Google Maps app. Search for your business by name and you’ll see an option to claim and verify the associated Business Profile. Once your business is verified, you can edit your business’ information, including the address, store hours, photos and more.

Here on the Google Registry team, we’re always keeping an eye out for helpful websites and apps on the top-level domains we’ve launched (.app, .new, and .dev, to name a few). This time of year, we’re especially interested in ways to prepare for the holidays. So before the holiday season kicks off, we’re sharing our favorite websites and apps to help you plan your travel, create DIY gifts, stay grounded, and everything else in between.

1. Give.new: Give back this holiday season by supporting a nonprofit that aligns with a cause you care about.
2. Flight.new: With 26 member airlines, you’ll have no trouble getting to your holiday or business destinations through Star Alliance.
3. Knit.new: Take a DIY approach to gift giving this season! Knit your own scarves, sweaters and mittens with Kniterate.
4. Mercari.new: Out with the old, in with the new. Use Mercari to sell the things you don’t need, and find the things you do.
5. Form.new: Planning to snail mail out holiday cards? Send a quick form to family and friends to update your address book with everyone’s latest info.
6. Mindshine.app: Stay present and mindful this holiday season with the help of Mindshine, an all-in-one app for personal development and wellbeing.
7. Loóna.app: Get proper rest with the help of Loóna, an immersive sleepscape and storytelling app that will lull you into a deep sleep.
8. Fluz.app: Getting started on holiday shopping? Earn cash back with Fluz while you shop for gifts.
9. Strong.app: Find creative workouts and exercises to squeeze into even the busiest of seasons with the help of the Strong app.
10. Tayl.app: Give your eyes a rest by turning articles, blogs, reports, and more into a podcast, and listening to them while you’re on the go.

Whether you need gift ideas or just a reminder to take a breather in the busy days ahead, we hope these sites can help you stay focused and present through the end of the year and into 2022. For a behind-the-scenes look at two of the apps we’ve highlighted, check out the videos below. Wishing you a healthy holiday season!

Dissatisfied with her job in retail, U.S. Marine Corps veteran Amie Hanbury enrolled in the Google Career Certificate program on Coursera to learn job-ready skills that could help her start a new career in IT support. The flexible online training allowed Amie to learn while maintaining her full-time job. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, her retail store closed to customers, leaving her with less to do while at work, but more time to study. As she worked through the curriculum, she learned new skills, her confidence grew and soon she was applying for jobs in IT. Today, Amie is a Google Career Certificate graduate and works as a lead field technician; she says she couldn’t be happier with her new career.

Amie’s story is just one example of how Google is helping make progress in expanding opportunity for the military community, and one that inspires me personally. As the proud daughter of a 20-year Army veteran, I’m honored to announce Google.org will provide $20 million in grant funding and in-kind product donations to support economic empowerment for veterans and the military community. This includes a $10 million cash grant to Hiring Our Heroes to launch the Career Forward program. The initiative will provide 8,000 veterans, transitioning service members, and military spouses with the skills and career support they need to get great jobs through free access to the Google Career Certificates.

The certificates are portable, industry-recognized credentials that prepare people for in-demand, entry-level jobs and allow certificate graduates to work in high-growth career fields across state and international boundaries — no degree or relevant experience required. The certificates are also flexible, so learners can study on their own time, and they have a track record of advancing economic mobility — 82% of graduates report a positive career impact within six months of completion, such as a raise, promotion or new job.

The cash grant will also enable Hiring Our Heroes to provide job search support, like interview prep and career workshops, to help learners succeed. They’ll assist in placing certificate graduates in 12-week paid job training fellowships at one of more than 400 employers in the Hiring Our Heroes network. After training, graduates can connect with employers like Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, Freedom Learning Group, Verizon, Molecula and of course, Google. These companies are just a few of the more than 150 members of ouremployer consortium committed to hiring and reskilling veterans and military spouses.

Google.org will also donate $10 million in Ad Grants to veteran serving organizations — including Hiring Our Heroes, Code Platoon, Black Veterans Project and Minority Veterans of America — to help them connect with veterans and their families who are searching for their services on Google. To help ensure as many people as possible have access to resources for the military community, we’re also working with partners that serve our military community at the local and national levels. For example, the Department of Labor’s Transition Employment Assistance for Military Spouses (TEAMS) resource guide now includes information about the Google Career Certificates and links to our updated Military Spouse Career Roadmap, developed in partnership with Hiring Our Heroes, which provides helpful tools for military spouses as they forge ahead on new career paths.

To support transitioning service members as they make their moves to civilian life, our own Google Veterans Network (VetNet) — a community of veteran, military spouse and civilian ally Google employees — will volunteer with Hiring Our Heroes over the next year to host free workshops for thousands of service members. During these workshops, VetNet Googlers plan to provide career advice, resume support and job search training.

Today’s news builds on our longstanding commitment to increase economic opportunity in the military community. We’ve created Search capabilities to make it easier for veterans, transitioning service members and military spouses to find relevant job opportunities on Google. We also became an official partner of the Department of Defense Military Spouse Employment Partnership, and announced five days of paid leave for military spouses every time their service member receives orders.

Our hope is that increased access to portable career credentials and employment opportunities can ease some of the challenges our military community faces in reaching economic mobility. Visit our online hub to learn more about our free tools and resources for the military community.

It’s no secret that the digital advertising ecosystem is evolving. And at the center of all that change is user privacy. The way that publishers, advertisers and technology providers handle and activate user data is being reconsidered and reimagined to more effectively protect people’s personal information online.

Web developers and technology providers are leading open-source initiatives like the Privacy Sandbox to address this challenge. But other areas of investment, like first-party data, are largely being driven by publishers and brands who are uniquely positioned to establish and deepen direct relationships with the people who love their content, products or services.

As we’ve shared in the past, we believe first-party data is poised to play an important role in the future of digital advertising. That’s why we’re launching new features that will make it easier for our publishing partners to maintain direct relationships important to their businesses and scale the use of their first-party data in ways that meet people’s expectations for data protection.

Activating first-party data in the programmatic auction

Today, we are launching new functionality that enables publishers to share Publisher Provided Identifiers (PPIDs) — pseudonymized first-party identifiers that are created and controlled by publishers — with Google’s programmatic demand. By helping publishers expand the use of their first-party identifiers to more transaction types, like the Open Auction, our partners will be able to show ads that are more relevant to their audiences, which will increase the value of their programmatic inventory.

In our initial experiments, we observed that Beta partners experienced an increase of 15% or more in programmatic auction revenue when passing PPIDs in inventory without other identifiers.¹

“By partnering with Google to test PPID for programmatic demand, we’ve seen significant revenue improvements in browsers where third-party cookies are not available. With the wealth of powerful first-party data Hearst Magazines generates in facilitating commerce activity from our sites, we’re excited by this progress and look forward to seeing what solutions Ad Manager builds to help publishers navigate today’s privacy environment.”

Scott Both
Vice President of Programmatic Monetization & Operations, Hearst Magazines

“At Pelmorex, finding privacy-first solutions is an important part of our long-term monetization strategy. That’s why we recently partnered with Ad Manager to test PPID for programmatic. The ability to bring our own data to the auction offers the potential to increase the value of our programmatic inventory now and in the future when third-party cookies are fully phased out.”

Darren Bulakowski
Head of Monetization & Programmatic, Pelmorex Corp, The Weather Network

Before sharing PPIDs with Google demand, Ad Manager turns them into per-publisher partitioned IDs, so users cannot be identified across other publishers’ sites and apps. Then Google Ads and Display & Video 360 aggregate the anonymized data from participating publishers to help build audience segments. Using these segments, advertisers can programmatically deliver relevant ads on publishers’ sites and apps based on first-party data. In addition to helping publishers earn more revenue in the auction, the data also unlocks core functionality for advertisers, like cross-device reach, frequency management, and creative optimization in programmatic inventory without third-party cookies or other identifiers present.

It’s important to note that advertisers using segments built with PPIDs will not have visibility into underlying user data or the IDs themselves, and because PPIDs are unique to each publisher, there is no way to match identifiers or create profiles across sites.

Audience segments created using PPIDs will only be made available in programmatic auctions when there are no other identifiers present. This means that PPIDs will have no impact on publishers’ programmatic inventory where third-party cookies or other identifiers are still provided. Additionally, PPIDs passed to Ad Manager cannot contain personal information or device IDs and Google has no visibility or access to the underlying data.

Supporting publishers’ direct relationships

We understand that publishers often work directly with many third-party buying partners — Authorized Buyers and Open Bidders — across the ecosystem to maximize the value of their inventory. That’s why we’ve long supported these trusted, direct relationships between publishers and buyers, and built solutions to help our partners monetize in the best way for their businesses.

In March, we shared that we are building a new feature to enable publishers to securely share encrypted signals with Authorized Buyers and Open Bidders via Ad Manager. We’ve since made progress based on feedback from our partners, and in the coming months, we’ll onboard additional Beta partners and increase the functionality to include app and video inventory. We’re also continuing to make workflow improvements in the Ad Manager dashboard, including troubleshooting tools and controls to make it easier for publishers and their partners to use the feature. Our goal is to make encrypted signals available to all publishers and their Authorized Buyer and Open Bidder partners in 2022.

Similar to how PPIDs are used to pass first-party data to Google’s programmatic demand, encrypted signals from publishers will allow publishers to share their data directly with other trusted buyers. Publishers who opt to use this feature will have full control over what data is passed and which bidders receive the signals. Ad Manager will only route the signals on behalf of the publisher and will not be able to read the signals.

Investing in first-party data is a privacy-forward way that publishers can increase the value of their programmatic inventory now and in the future. Given the feedback we’ve heard from partners, we have prioritized this product area and will continue to develop features that empower publishers with the data and identity tools they need to prepare and grow their businesses.

^{1. Google Ad Manager Internal Data, August 2021}