DoubleClick Publisher Blog

Answering to our users - delivering on commitments

2012-05-16T10:53:00.001-04:00

Last year at IAB’s Innovation Days, I made a number of predictions, all focused on answering one central question: how can we put the user at the center of all that we do? One year later, I think it’s time for a progress report - to hold ourselves accountable and see how far we’ve come. I presented an update on some of my predictions earlier today at Digital Media Summit, hosted by Luma Partners:

Prediction: People will have a direct say in 25% of the ads they see:
Update: We’ve seen choice friendly formats take off across the industry. In our own network, engaged views of TrueView skippable ads grew 4x last year. Going beyond ads, we rolled out paywall alternative Google Consumer Surveys, which has already shown more than 300 million surveys, with an average publisher RPM of $12. Given all the innovation, I actually think we aimed too low and that consumers will have a say in well over half of the ads they see.

Prediction: Engagement rates across all display ads will increase 50%
Update: This increase in engagement will be driven by two factors: relevance and creativity. While technological innovations continue to improve relevance, we believe rich media will be the key to unlocking the creative potential of digital advertising. According to Nielsen AdRelevance, rich media impressions almost doubled in 2011. We’re committed to helping creative agencies scale and optimize rich media ads with templatized ad units in the latest version of DoubleClick Studio.

Prediction: 35% of campaigns will use metrics beyond clicks and conversions
Update: As we move to a model that seeks to drive engagement versus just clicks, we need new measures of success. We’re working with the industry-wide “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3MS) initiative to establish new standards for brand advertisers to measure reach and engagement. And just last month, we launched the Brand Activate Initiative with several pilots for new metrics — Active View, which shows brands whether their ad has been seen; and Active GRP, the digital counterpart to the gross rating point. We’ve already received interest from dozens of major brands.

As an industry, we’ve made plenty of progress over the last year. With all the innovations to do right by our user, I actually have two new predictions I’d like to add to the list.

New Prediction: 25% of brands will favor digital ads over all other media
This is a pretty bold prediction, considering today this number is probably close to none. So why are we so bullish? First, audiences continue to move online: in 2011, households with broadband internet but with no cable TV, increased 23% (Nielsen Cross-Platform Report Q3’11). Second, so is content: the newly launched YouTube Original Channels alone will introduce 25 new hours of original programming a day. Third, technology is offering new levels of control and measurement: technologies like real-time bidding will allow for improved targeting while initiatives like 3MS and Brand Activate will demonstrate effectiveness. With reach, control, quality content and measurement, I think the real question will become, why wouldn’t a brand name digital their favorite medium?

New Prediction: 100% of campaigns will be integrated everywhere
All signs indicate that campaigns that reach across screens - TV, desktops, smartphones and tablets -- are more effective. For example, in a study conducted by Google and Nielsen Multi-Media Labs in September 2011, users who saw a multi-screen Volvo campaign had a 24% higher brand recall than those that viewed their ads on TV alone. We’re increasingly seeing increased interest in buying across screens on our own platforms, like DoubleClick for Publishers Mobile, where we’ve seen the number of impressions delivered double every quarter.

The online advertising ecosystem is complex, and in order for digital advertising to be a medium that provides a great experience for consumers, marketers and publishers alike, we all need to work together. For our part, we’ve invested in hundreds of partnerships to better support publishers, and advertisers, ultimately serve our users. Happier consumers will drive better performing ads, more money for publishers and increased ad spend (including marketing budget) for agencies. I look forward to seeing the continued innovation that this “user revolution” inspires and working with all of you to move towards the bright future I hope we all envision for this industry.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

Mark your calendars for DoubleClick Insights on June 5th

2012-05-15T17:40:00.000-04:00

From our vantage point, we see unprecedented opportunity as the digital media world continues to grow and diversify. What does this mean for the future of buying and selling ads online?

Tune in and watch Google's Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising, sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital ecosystem's swift evolution, and how advertisers and publishers can work better together to chart a path to capitalize on every opportunity, while simultaneously addressing the challenges we face.

The live stream will start on June 5th, 2012, at 9:00am PST, and you’ll be able to watch from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

Please register for this virtual event by visiting the DoubleClick Insights Live Stream page.

DoubleClick Insights
Tuesday, June 5th 2012
9:00am - 1:00pm PST
Set event reminder today

Following us on Twitter? Use the #dclkinsights as you're watching the event.

Posted by Stephen Kliff and Scott Brown, DoubleClick Marketing

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

2012-05-02T17:12:00.001-04:00

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). The list below contains some highlights. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Improved Custom Targeting Input: We've designed DFP so there are fewer steps, clicks, and screens throughout the trafficking process to help you reduce the time it takes to traffick your campaigns. To help you streamline your workflows even further, you can now select custom targeting criteria when trafficking a campaign with a single key-stroke to help you quickly select and search for the right targeting criteria.

Additional Reporting Combinations: To help you generate precisely the data you're looking for, we've introduced additional reporting combinations to give you a more granular look at your data. A sample of the new combinations available include:

Ad Unit x Line item x Creative/size x Country x Custom Targeting
Ad Unit x Line item x Creative/size x Country
Ad Unit x Line item x Creative/size x Metro
Placement x Line Item x Creative
Ad unit x Line Item x Creative/size x Hour

Available in DFP Mobile:

MRAID Support: Our latest mobile SDK for DFP and AdMob was launched to fully support the IAB's Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions (MRAID). For publishers who use DFP to deliver ads to mobile applications, the new Google AdMob SDK gives your advertisers the flexibility to provide creatives that work seamlessly across any application, regardless of the device, platform, or ad technology involved. Learn more.

Available in DFP Video:

Stream Based Frequency Caps: To help give you more delivery options when working with you video advertisers, we've introduced stream-based frequency caps to help control how often an ad appears in the same stream. Learn more.

VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0, and VMAP 1.0 Support: At Google, we've been longtime supporters of video advertising standards. We're happy to announce our support for the latest set of guidelines announced at the IAB's Digital Video Marketplace Event. This means that we'll be implementing VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0 and VMAP 1.0 across our video advertising products. Together, these three guidelines strengthen the video advertising infrastructure already adopted by most participants in the video ecosystem. The Video Suite also adds support for skippable ads, podding, in-ads privacy notices and ad sequencing, while offering greater clarity around compliance and mobile scenarios. Learn more.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

PubTalk: PCH’s Denise Leggio on winning big with DoubleClick Ad Exchange

2012-04-24T12:47:00.000-04:00

You probably think of Publisher’s Clearing House (PCH) as a mail-order sweepstakes company that surprised winners with big, over-sized checks. However, PCH has evolved its traditional magazine and merchandise direct marketing business to include several “play and win” properties such as pchlotto.com, pchgames.com and pchsearchandwin.com.

Delivering over 300 million ad impressions per month across these sites, PCH tested multiple strategies for monetizing remnant inventory before turning to DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) in early 2010. Today, AdX’s share of revenue has grown 5X and it now monetizes up to 70% of all remnant inventory. We caught up with Denise Leggio, Director of Ad Operations at PCH, to learn more about what worked for them with AdX.

Won over by strong controls
“With a brand like ours, ad quality is just as important as the RPM. But Ad Exchange is easy to use and allows us a broad range of controls, like blocking competitive or undesirable ads from bidding. It lets us maximize revenue without giving up control of the ads or compromising our brand,” says Denise.

Higher yields with Dynamic Allocation
“One of the biggest benefits of Ad Exchange is Dynamic Allocation with DFP. Ad Exchange will only serve if it can beat the highest-paying ad at that exact time, ensuring optimal revenue.” For PCH, Dynamic Allocation has also informed pricing decisions on direct inventory.

Multiple tools and levers for deeper insights and higher revenue

From reporting features at the individual ad unit level, to the Minimum CPM Recommendation tool to set the minimum auction price, AdX has provided Denise’s team many tools to optimize revenue. “The optimization options have been extremely valuable for our online business. The tools, reports and data provided give us insight into our inventory and buyer habits,” she says. “With those insights, we’re able to make changes extremely quickly.”

Operational efficiencies allow deeper focus on direct sales

The time savings from being on AdX has allowed Denise and her team to better support PCH’s direct sales team, testing and building creative packages involving rich media, takeover ads and site skins. “The operations team can now be a strategic partner on that end, instead of just being on the back end doing yield optimization and trafficking.”

“You have to work with a solution that you trust, and I think that’s why we like Ad Exchange,” Denise says. “For PCH, Ad Exchange is the solution of choice because of its robust technology, insights, control, and ability to offer the highest yield and inventory fill in a highly competitive market.”

Read the full case study here.

This blog post was part of “PubTalk”, a series of conversations with publishers.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Manager

MRAID support in DFP: Simplifying in-app rich media on mobile

2012-04-19T14:53:00.000-04:00

As part of today’s release of the Google AdMob SDK, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and AdMob now fully support the IAB’s Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions (MRAID) standard for advertising in mobile applications.

MRAID is an initiative from the IAB to define a common API for mobile rich media advertisements, in order to help the mobile marketplace reach new levels of consistency, efficiency and effectiveness. Adopting a common standard for rich media in applications will make building rich media ads simpler and enable advertisers to reach a wider audience with a single creative.

For publishers who use DFP to deliver ads to mobile applications, the new Google AdMob SDK gives your advertisers the flexibility to provide creatives that work seamlessly across any application, regardless of the device, platform, or ad technology involved. Using an MRAID-compliant SDK also enables publishers to:

Work with a greater range of vendors to produce rich media campaigns
Reduce integration and maintenance costs by removing vendor-specific SDKs
Develop differentiated ad formats against a stable, vendor-neutral platform
Attract large scale advertisers building high value, high reach campaigns
Use HTML5 creatives across mobile web and mobile apps

We look forward to actively participating in the future development of MRAID. We believe it will have a significant impact on the mobile advertising industry by lowering costs, increasing scale and providing the foundation for a mature mobile display ecosystem.

Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

A Universal Language for Video Ads

2012-04-10T16:52:00.000-04:00

Like many New Yorkers, I can’t imagine life in this city without the subway - it’s essential to how the city operates, creates millions in economic value, and even features great mariachi bands. But the subway wasn’t always this efficient. In the early 1900s, there were multiple subway systems, with different size train cars, running on different track configurations - even one propelled by air! Today, after the unification of these subway systems, everything works seamlessly together.

So what does the subway system have to do with video advertising? Well, the two dominant video advertising guidelines -- VAST and VPAID -- are like the unified transportation system for video advertising. VAST and VPAID define a common language that unifies the diversity of the video advertising industry: Flash and HTML video players, ad networks and exchanges, mobile devices and connected TVs, 30 second spots and interactive overlays.

At Google, we’ve been longtime supporters of video advertising standards. We’re happy to announce our support for the latest set of guidelines announced at the IAB’s Digital Video Marketplace Event today. This means that we’ll be implementing VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0 and VMAP 1.0 across our video advertising products. Together, these three guidelines strengthen the video advertising infrastructure already adopted by most participants in the video ecosystem. The Video Suite also adds support for skippable ads, podding, in-ads privacy notices and ad sequencing, while offering greater clarity around compliance and mobile scenarios.

What benefits can you expect from VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0 and VMAP 1.0?

If you’re a publisher, interoperability will improve and you’ll be able to accept a wider set of video ad formats with less technical work. The new error codes will also help with troubleshooting of third party served ads.
If you’re an advertiser, the Video Suite allows you to create more engaging brand stories that reach a wider audience across all devices. You’ll be able to take greater advantage of skippable ads, which offer new pricing models focused on performance.
If you’re a vendor, the technical details of these specs really matter, and we’ve provided much more clarity around the compliance requirements for video players and ad servers.

So much has changed in the online video space in just ten years, that we thought we’d take a trip down memory line with this infographic:

Click through for the full infographic

As an industry, we’ve started to take VAST and VPAID for granted, much like New Yorkers and their subway system. That’s a good thing, because it means they’ve become an essential part of powering our economy.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Product Manager, Video Monetization

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

2012-04-03T10:35:00.000-04:00

Spring is here and so are a couple of new features in DFP! For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Integrated Change History: To help you keep a closer eye on your ad operations, we’ve integrated our change history feature into the orders page in addition to its home in the Admin tab. The change history can help you quickly identify and review all changes made to your orders and line items, including: what has changed (e.g., line item), what change occurred (e.g., from "Paused" to "Ready"), who made the change, and the date and time the change was made.

Creative Preview Links: “What will my creative look like on your site?” You've told us that this is one of the most common requests that you hear from advertisers. With our creative preview tool, you’ve been able to create an internal test page for QA purposes, and send screenshots to advertisers to see how their ad would appear, but advertisers could not interact with their creative on your site unitl it went live. We’ve changed that with the release of external creative preview links. You can now send your advertisers a link to a test page that displays their creative on your site so they can easily preview and interact with their creative on your site before it’s live.

Bulk Creative Upload: We’ve designed DFP so there are less steps, clicks, and screens throughout the trafficking process to help you save time when trafficking your campaigns. In efforts to help you streamline your workflows even further, we’ve introduced the ability to bulk upload multiple creatives. With this tool, you can easily drag and drop multiple image, Flash, or text creatives from your desktop directly into your line item with a single gesture rather than uploading multiple individual creatives, helping you save time and minimizing clicks.

Available in DFP:

DFP Optimization: Publishers can now supercharge ad performance with DFP Optimization - an advanced optimization system that supercharges ad performance to help publishers increase the value of their premium inventory, and boost yield for non-premium inventory. DFP Optimization leverages Google’s infrastructure and processing capabilities to automatically deliver the best ad, to the best user, at the best time. Read more.

First-party audience segmentation: Publishers are increasingly taking control of their audience data as one of the key assets of their digital businesses. To help you manage and control this data, we’ve introduced the ability to define and manage audience segments directly in DFP to help you increase the value of their inventory while gaining insights on how different audience segments engage with your content. Read more.

Available in DFP Mobile:

Click-To-[Action] Creative: As mobile advertising becomes a greater emphasis for your advertisers, it’s important to recognize that their campaign objectives may differ from their web-based campaigns. On mobile, advertisers may define success as driving downloads of a mobile application, calling a telephone number, or opening a map versus visiting a website. To provide your advertisers with uniquely mobile experiences, we’ve released a new mobile creative type that enables you to specify an action (ie. download) as the destination. This new creative type will help you differentiate your mobile offering and provide your advertisers with the latest mobile formats and functionality.

Available in DFP Video:

VPAID Linear SWF Creatives: Creative agencies are building more VPAID compliant video ads than ever before. DFP Video now supports the VPAID standard as defined by the IAB, allowing you to accept more video ad campaigns without needing extra technical development. VPAID introduces a common language between ad servers and video players for handling interactive video ads for Flash and HTML5 environments.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

First-Party audience segments in the upgraded DFP service

2012-03-26T13:03:00.001-04:00

Buying and selling ads based on audience has transformed the display industry in recent years. Buyers use new technologies to run highly relevant campaigns to users across ad networks and exchanges. This benefits publishers greatly, because it allows them to deliver more useful ads to their users ultimately helping increase RPMs on their indirectly sold inventory.

Publishers are increasingly taking control of their audience data as one of the key assets of their digital businesses. But publishers tell us they still want better tools to improve the integration, transparency, and control over their own audience data for both direct and indirect ad sales.

Today we’re announcing the first in a series of features in the upgraded DFP service that help publishers manage and control audience data through one platform, integrated directly with their primary ad serving technology.

This first release is focused on first-party segments - as a publisher, you will have the ability to define your own user audience based on criteria that you define (e.g., sports enthusiasts, travel readers). First party audience segmentation was available in the existing DFP service, and is now integrated seamlessly with the upgraded DFP service.

First-party segmentation involves no implementation or integration effort by you. Simply define the criteria you want for your audience segments, in DFP and DoubleClick technology does the work of populating them directly from the ad tag. Once you’ve defined your audience you can use it to increase the direct sales value of undersold inventory, and gain insights on how different audience segments are engaging with content across your site. We have designed it to be seamless, easy to use and to put you in control of your data.

First party segmentation is a great tool for our publishers, but it’s just the first step in the work of building out DFP’s audience capabilities. In the coming months you’ll see more information from us as we release a series of new features that are directly integrated with the upgraded DFP service.

Posted by Sean Harvey, Product Manager

Doubling Down on Publishers

2012-03-22T15:45:00.000-04:00

This morning, I had the pleasure of addressing the third-annual Admeld Partner Forum in New York. When we completed our acquisition of Admeld this past December, we said that we’d be looking at how to bring the best of their products and ours together to help us achieve our shared vision: helping our publisher partners make the web work for them, and get the most out of what online advertising has to offer.

Over the past couple of months our teams have been hard at work figuring out exactly how this might happen. Today, we’d like to put our cards on the table and share what we’ve done and where we’re headed.

Investing in the team: We realize that helping our partners succeed requires not just the right products, but the right people. So we’re investing in the team, bringing together our sales and services teams from across the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Admeld. This enables a continued focus on high-touch service for Admeld’s publisher partners, and also boosts Admeld’s presence across the globe.<

Tapping new pools of demand: Next quarter, we’ll start offering AdX Connect, a way for Admeld clients to start getting access to demand from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We’ll also be enhancing the advertiser, buyer, and bid transparency levels in the exchange, so that they are comparable with those currently provided to Admeld publishers.

Connecting the dots with DFP: We’re taking two big steps towards tying together Admeld and DoubleClick for Publishers: making it much easier for publishers to leverage SSP-style ad network optimization functionality directly within the DFP platform, and building an API so that Admeld’s mobile optimization capabilities will be more fluidly integrated with DFP mobile.

While we’re excited about these changes, they are just the initial steps. Our long term goal is to create a single, seamless platform for publishers that allows them to manage all their inventory -- across desktop, video and mobile -- with the control and flexibility their businesses require. Our publisher partners make the web the wonderful place that it is today, and by empowering their continued growth and success, we all come away winners.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

Supercharge ad performance with DFP Optimization

2012-03-06T12:33:00.000-05:00

When advertisers are evaluating whether to advertise on a publisher’s site, they want to ensure their ad will perform well. Advertisers decide whether to keep buying on your site or a competitors’ based on if their campaigns are reaching the most valuable audience and meeting their campaign goals.

As a publisher, ensuring your advertiser's campaigns are receiving the impressions, clicks, and conversions they expect can be a daunting task. Ad operation teams spend hours at the controls of their ad server adjusting delivery settings, flight dates, and targeting, in effort to help their advertiser’s campaigns perform well. But solving this equation manually for hundreds or thousands of campaigns at once is virtually impossible to do.

The answer may lie in technology....and we think we can help.

Today, we’re excited to introduce DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Optimization, an advanced optimization system that supercharges ad performance to help publishers increases the value of their premium inventory, and boost yield for non-premium inventory.

DFP Optimization leverages Google’s infrastructure and processing capabilities to automatically deliver the best ad, to the best user, at the best time. The system uses advanced modeling and pattern recognition, and harnesses the power of AdWords machine learning and AdSense contextual matching, to deliver ads to users who are more likely to respond to them. DFP Optimization helps advertisers improve campaign performance, while helping publishers maximize clicks, conversions, and revenue.

Heise Online, one of Germany’s leading IT publishers, saw clicks on their optimized campaigns increase by 52% using DFP Optimization. This increase helped their sales teams improve the site stats they share with prospective clients, and were able to charge new premiums for its highly valuable inventory. Thomas Goldmann, Sales Director at Heise Online said “DFP Optimization has had a positive influence on our sales relationships with advertisers. Optimization allows better use of our premium inventory and increases the quality we can make available to our customers.”

DFP Optimization is fully integrated with the DFP ad serving platform, and can be easily implemented across all of a publisher’s inventory. After activating DFP Optimization, the system will continually learn, process, and adapt; this happens all without any manual intervention from your ad operations team. The system provides validation for publishers and their clients through a built-in control group that demonstrates the percentage lift for each optimized campaign. With this powerful reporting tool, you and your clients will know the solution is working.

To learn how you can begin increase the value of your inventory with DFP Optimization, please contact us.

Posted by Alex Vogenthaler, Product Manager

New tools and policies for Publisher Networks in the Ad Exchange

2012-03-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

As the size and quality of publisher networks have grown, so has their need to operate more efficiently and profitably. With this in mind, we’ve rolled out a series of updates for publisher networks in DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

First, we’ve revised our policies to allow publisher networks to use the Ad Exchange even if they own & operate few (or none) of the sites they represent. As always, every partner site has to meet the same high-standards of quality as every AdX publisher.

Second, we’ve built a set Network Partner Management tools that make it easy to add new partners, manage hundreds of domains, and monitor their performance.

For current clients, using these features requires no changes to your existing tags. In addition, reporting, payment and site management remains in your hands.

If you’d like to learn more about these new capabilities, please sign up for one of the webinars below, contact your Ad Exchange account representative, or tell us how to contact you and we’ll have someone reach out.

US Webinar
Tuesday, March 13 at 11am PST (1pm CST / 2pm EST)
Register HERE

EMEA Webinar
Tuesday, March 13 at 2pm GMT (3pm CET)
Register HERE

Posted by Drew Bradstock, Product Manager

On stage at IAB: Daring to get the most out of online advertising for publishers, advertisers

2012-02-27T15:08:00.000-05:00

The evolution of technology is creating new opportunities in online advertising, in some cases helping improve publishers’ returns; in other cases, allowing them to manage their inventory more efficiently across multiple formats. And this past December, we announced our acquisition of Admeld, and made a commitment to work towards building the next generation of tools to help publishers make more informed decisions about their ad space and grow their businesses.

But there is still much to do, as the industry works together to grow display from the $25-30 billion industry it is today, to the $200 billion industry we believe it could be. Today, at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Google Vice President Karim Temsamani played a game of truth and dare with the audience and shared some thoughts on how we might get there, as well as how publishers and advertisers can get the most out of the evolving online marketplace.

Truth #1: It’s a Connected World...for Users. There are now more mobile devices than people in the US, and some predict that devices will exceed the global population by end of year.

Dare: It’s not enough that people are mobile, we, as an industry, also need to get the websites, ads, and operations mobilized too. We think, collectively, we can work to mobilize 80% of the largest 2000 websites by end of this year. This means ensuring that content is optimized for mobile, ditto for ads, and that ad transactions are seamlessly connected to the rest of the plumbing. Towards this end, we are launching GoMo for Publishers, where publishers can test their mobile site performance, get a personalized report with recommended actions, and find vendors to assist with implementations. Publishers who’ve optimized their sites are already seeing substantial increases in mobile ad revenue and mobile page visits.

Truth #2: Technology is fundamental. As an industry, we’ve made great strides in using technology to create operational efficiencies.

Dare: Let’s pair high-tech with high-touch. Karim announced that in April we’ll launch the Ad Exchange Direct Deals Marketplace--an interface that enables publishers and buyers to solicit direct deal offers, negotiate, and execute them without sending an email or picking up the phone. However, to complement this automation we’re bringing high-touch consulting expertise through our integration of the Admeld team. Admeld supports private exchanges to complement automation, giving clients a model as a more holistic, customized, and technically savvy vision for their display business.

Truth #3: This industry traditionally thinks of ‘audience’ as bits and bytes.

Dare: Let’s think of audience as people, looking to engage and interact. We can do more to give people what they want. For example, TrueView ads on YouTube let viewers choose which ads they watch. Advertisers only pay for engaged views, meaning their campaigns are more effective. And we’ve found that nine out of ten viewers prefer TrueView ads.

In putting these principles into practice, we believe we can further a growing and thriving online ecosystem, where publishers see improved returns, advertisers reach an engaged audience, and people get the ads and content they want, in the way they want it. Now that’s a dare worth taking on.

Posted by Maureen Bradford, Head of Publisher Marketing

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

2012-02-21T10:59:00.000-05:00

Alerts: Preventing delivery issues before they happen can be a time consuming and manual process. To make this process easier for publishers, and to help ensure you know when something happens that involves one of your orders or line items, such as if a line item is not meeting its delivery goal, we're excited to introduce account alerts to help bring this information to your attention so you can quickly resolve the issue. Read more.
Dimension reporting filters: To help you generate precisely the data you’re looking for, we’ve introduced the ability to filter your reports by advertiser, order, line item, and line item type directly within the reporting interface.
Platform reporting filters: If you deliver campaigns across multiple platforms (web/mobile), you can now easily segment your reports by platform type to quickly view how your cross-platform campaigns are performing by platform type.
Mobile creative preview: We know that publishers like to test their creatives to ensure everything is working properly prior to pushing a campaign to their live site. We’ve expanded the creative preview tool to support mobile creatives targeted to mobile devices using QR code previews. Simply scan the QR code with your mobile device to view the mobile create exactly as it will appear before it’s live.
Mobile application tags: We have expanded the formats of the ad tag generator so now you can generate tags for mobile applications in addition to your web and mobile sites.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

Introducing alerts in DFP

2012-02-13T11:58:00.000-05:00

Preventing delivery issues before they happen can be a time consuming and manual process.

To make this process easier for publishers, and to help ensure you know when something happens that involves one of your orders or line items, we're excited to introduce account alerts in DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

Alerts will notify you when any of your line items:

is starting soon and missing creatives
is not meeting its delivery goal
contains creatives that have been disabled because malware was detected

The alerts area in the top-right of your account will contain a summary of your recent alerts, and you can take action on each alert right from the notifications menu so you can quickly resolve the issue.

Alerts complement the order and line item tables which provide a complete overview of your ad operations, including order readiness, delivery status, and inventory revenue performance. You can easily sort line items by delivery status as well as show line items that are starting soon. The color coded delivery bars can help you easily identify line item pacing information, including line items that are at risk of over or under delivering.

With these tools in-hand, we hope we can help you catch and fix any delivery issues before they happen.

Posted by Alex Anikul and Jeff Drost, Software Engineers

isocket and Shiny Ads deliver new innovations using the DFP API

2012-02-06T14:09:00.000-05:00

With thousands of publishers using the DFP and DFP Small Business ad serving platforms, we know first-hand that no publisher is identical. Publishers may use in-house billing systems, have unique approval workflows, or use third-party tools to handle their ad operations.

To give publishers the flexibility to easily integrate their unique processes and systems with their ad server, DFP offers publishers an open API to easily create tools that complement their ad operations.

We’ve seen hundreds of developers build new ad serving innovations using the API, including applications to manage inventory, create orders, pull reports, and more. The API has created a new ecosystem of partner innovations, giving publishers access to new ad serving tools and applications. Two such applications come from isocket and Shiny Ads who have used the DFP API to build applications that help publishers manage and sell their ad space.

isocket uses the API to create tools that streamlines sales

Seeing the need to streamline the manual steps involved with buying and selling inventory, isocket engineered a direct and self-service ad sales tool to simplify sales workflows. By leveraging the DFP API, isocket was able to build an application to automate sales processes and save money. “We were interested in using the API because it allowed us to eliminate the hassle of manually coordinating campaigns, while still keeping the important parts like publisher control and approval. Integrating with the DFP API has allowed us to make things a lot simpler for publishers,” said Ben Trenda, VP of Sales at isocket.

Read more about how isocket integrated with the DFP API.

Shiny Ads builds application to help publishers save time

To help facilitate publishers’ direct ad campaign management, Shiny Ads began using
the DFP API to integrate its self-serve advertising platform with DFP in order to help publishers streamline their sales processes. This integration has helped save publishers time since they no longer need to manually book sales orders. “Our solution needs to support DFP - our customers demand it” said CEO and founder Roy Pereira. “The API made integrating with DFP easy for us, and most importantly, easy for our clients. Without the DFP API, Shiny Ads would not have the fully functional solution we have today.”

Read more about how Shiny Ads integrated with the DFP API.

Over the coming months, we’ll share more stories on how our partners are using the DFP API to deliver exciting ad serving innovations. For a complete list of partners who have built applications using the DFP API, please visit our partner directory.

Posted by John Park, Partner Programs Manager, and Adam Rogal, Developer Relations

The DoubleClick Ad Exchange delivers revenue uplift to EMEA Publishers

2012-02-01T07:47:00.000-05:00

Exchange-based buying has experienced huge growth over the past several years as advertisers focused on improving the targeting and effectiveness of their buys. Most large agencies have set-up dedicated “trading desks” to focus on this method of buying and in tandem, many publishers have aligned their strategies to profit from these trends.

Since the launch of the Ad Exchange, we’ve heard inspiring stories from our European publishers about the revenue uplift they’ve experienced when using the product. Today we’re pleased to share exciting research results which shows the impact of the Ad Exchange on European publishers’ revenue.

The results published in this whitepaper show that when publishers make ad space available in the Ad Exchange, and the Ad Exchange wins the auction, the revenue is 73% higher than if the Ad Exchange hadn't been used. This takes into account competing sales channels such as direct sales teams, other networks and backfills.

And what about inventory that would have gone unsold? The DoubleClick Ad Exchange demonstrated significant success in monetizing these ads. For inventory for which there was no other demand, it delivered a fill rate of greater than 90%.

Many of the tools we roll out are designed to help publishers maximize revenue across their multiple channels. Most recently we introduced minimum CPMs and pricing recommendations. These followed the introduction of private ad-slots and direct deals. We believe that these new tools will continue to help our Ad Exchange publishers make the most out of their inventory.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Product Management Director

Now playing: Flixster on Upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers platform

2012-01-31T12:11:00.000-05:00

‘PubTalk’ is a new program highlighting publishers’ perspectives on display products and industry trends. In our first installment, we spoke with Billy Shipp of Flixster on managing ad operations in the face of rapidly changing technology.

If you love movies, you’ve probably visited Flixster or RottenTomatoes on your desktop or mobile device. Every month, over 30 million people visit Flixster communities to post comments, read reviews and watch movie trailers. Managing ad operations across these sites for different devices and formats is complex. Billy Shipp, Director of Ad Operations at Flixster, is always on the lookout for solutions that increase his team’s operational efficiency. Accordingly, Flixster recently upgraded to the next generation of the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform.

For Flixster, many aspects of DFP increased productivity, including improved user interfaces that are familiar to users of other Google products, faster reporting and better forecasting. “A lot of this business is built around emerging platforms and emerging ad formats”, says Billy. Having to use multiple ad serving platforms to manage ads across devices created a lot of inefficiency. DFP helped Billy solve this problem by seamlessly integrating with DFP Video and DFP Mobile.

“Not having to go to a separate interface to manage inventory, to set up campaigns, to pull reports, to optimize campaigns - having all of that in a single workflow makes it so much easier for ad operations folks to be effective,” remarks Billy. “It gives them that global view of how a campaign is performing, without having to manually download reports and aggregate them.”

40% in time savings with DFP Video
The Flixster team reduced the time spent managing video campaigns by 40% after switching to DFP Video. “We can just take a video file, upload it to DFP and throw in any third-party tracking. You guys encode it in all the various formats and have it just work across different browsers and plugins and we don’t even have to think about the connectivity of the user - you guys will handle all that. With other video ad serving solutions I’ve used in the past, there’s usually a lot more effort that goes into setting up video ad campaigns,” says Billy. “When we’re reporting on campaigns that have video line items as part of the IO, you can see the whole IO - display and video - in one set of reporting.”

Operations scale easily with DFP Mobile
Although Flixster is currently in the process of migrating more of its mobile inventory to DFP, Billy isn’t too worried about the move. “Because we’re using a single trafficking interface for mobile in the overall DFP workflow, that enables us to train new folks on a single process and have them intuitively know what to do,” says Billy.

As advertising continues to expand to new formats and devices, ad ops teams need a solution that can evolve with their needs. For Billy Shipp, that solution is DFP. “The upgrade platform allows, from my experience, for a faster cycle of iteration and development, and really will be the platform for the future of ad delivery.”

Read more about Flixster’s experience with DoubleClick for Publishers here.

About Flixster:
Flixster is the leading online destination for movie enthusiasts with over 30M unique visitors per month and 2 billion movie ratings. In addition to Flixster.com and RottenTomatoes.com, Flixster also operates the leading movie applications on iPhone, Google TV, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Manager

What’s new in DoubleClick for Publishers

2011-12-20T17:42:00.000-05:00

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). We’ll be periodically posting lists of the highlights to this blog to help you stay up-to-date with all of the latest DFP developments. The list below contains some highlights. For a more complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and Small Business:

'As Many As Possible' Improvements: We've updated the 'As many as possible' creative display feature to prevent creatives from serving part way down a page if another line item has delivered in the first ad unit (i.e. if another line item serves to the top banner spot, we won't serve the 300x25 to the mid page since the roablock would be broken)
User Interface Improvements: We know your time is valuable, and we’re always working on new ways to make the DFP interface as quick and efficient for you as possible. To help with this goal, you can now quickly navigate between different tabs within DFP without requiring the page to reload.
Yield Reporting: The new Yield Report type makes it easier for publishers to understand their overall yield -- how your impressions and revenue breakout by deal type. This new report displays revenue and impression data for direct and indirect sales, helps you easily uncover unfilled impressions, and enables you to compare the performance of each ad type from within a single report.

Available in DFP:

DFP Mobile: Capture opportunities beyond the desktop with DFP’s full service mobile ad serving module to deliver dynamic, interactive ads across your mobile web pages and applications. Read more.
DFP Tag Troubleshooter (TagShooter): The new DFP TagShooter allows you to easily view the real-time decision making process DFP is using to determine which ad to serve. With this information, you'll be well equipped to quickly identify why an ad isn't delivering or why another ad is appearing in its place. Try it now.
Enhancement to Sponsorship Line Items: For Sponsorship line items, you can now set an impression goal in order to monitor progress of impressions you’ve contractually sold with the progress bar.
Multi-level Ad Unit Reports: There are now three different options for viewing data in ad unit reports. These new views are particularly useful for multi-level ad units, and will help you view data for all of your ad units at once rather than just parent or child ad units.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

+1 Button in DFP: Leveraging Social Recommendations in Your Display Ads

2011-12-05T10:36:00.000-05:00

Last March, Google introduced the +1 button on search results to make it easier for people to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching. And then in October, the +1 button and social annotations were made available to display ads from AdWords that win in the Ad Exchange auction.

Today, we’re excited to expand this capability to publishers who sell their ad space directly to advertisers using a new creative template available in DART for Publishers and the new DFP. Using the Image or Flash with Google +1 custom creative template, you can now add the Google +1 icon to your ads so that people can share your advertisers' offers with people across the web.

As results become more personal and relevant, we believe that users are not only more likely to click, but they're more likely to act as well. Personalized annotations bring you pre-qualified users, who are not only actively looking for your content, but are actively engaged after seeing recommendations from friends and contacts. In fact, 71% of shoppers say that recommendations from friends and family impact their purchasing decisions (Harris Interactive, June 2010). This powerful combination may result in more conversion and deeper engagement with your business overall.

The +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads.

For more information on how to incorporate the +1 button into your ad, please visit the DART or new DFP Help Centers.

Posted by David Flinner, Product Manager

Take a walk on the sell-side

2011-12-02T11:41:00.000-05:00

(Originally posted on the Official Google blog)

In June, we announced that we are acquiring Admeld, a New York-based company that helps large publishers (also known as the “sell-side” by people, like me, who live and breathe display advertising) maximize their revenues from online advertising. We’re pleased that the U.S. Department of Justice has today cleared this deal. We’ll close the acquisition in the coming days and then start the real work—building improved products and services that help our publisher partners to make more informed decisions across all their ad space, and to grow their revenues.

The opportunity for major online publishers is huge...and growing. People are spending more and more time consuming online content across numerous devices, advertisers are running more online and mobile campaigns to reach them; and ads continue to get more engaging and relevant. This represents an unprecedented moment for publishers. We believe that improved technology and services can help publishers seize it and make online advertising work much better.

For now, it’s business as usual—Admeld’s products will operate separately to Google’s existing solutions (such as DFP and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange). But over time, there are opportunities to bring the best of both businesses together in a variety of ways; and to develop entirely new solutions, too.

As we do this, Admeld and Google are guided by some core shared beliefs:

We want to give publishers more control over their ad space, and offer more flexible ways to manage and sell it. Publishers’ businesses should influence the technology they use; not the other way around
We believe that publishers can make better decisions to maximize their revenues when they have better insights at their fingertips
We envisage a much simpler system that enables publishers to manage and sell their ad space—across desktop, video, mobile, tablets and more

The content produced by Google’s and Admeld’s publisher partners is the lifeblood of the Internet. We can’t wait to start building the next generation of tools and services that will help them grow their businesses.

Update December 6, 2011: Our acquisition of Admeld has now closed.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

Making the operations match the strategy with DFP Mobile

2011-11-30T11:41:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, we announced DFP Mobile, our new mobile module for the DFP ad serving platform. DFP Mobile gives publishers access to an expanded set of mobile features including extended mobile rich media capabilities, advanced targeting options, better support for feature phones, and tighter integrations with Google AdSense, AdMob, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and mobile ad networks.

To learn more about DFP Mobile, join us at OPS Mobile, AdMonsters' mobile advertising conference, which will be held December 7, 2011 in New York. Register today to hear Marcel Gordon, DFP Mobile Product Manager, and Chris LaSala, Director of Mobile Partnerships, speak about how you can capture opportunities beyond the desktop with DFP Mobile.

You can also view Marcel’s recent Q&A with AdMonsters about DFP Mobile here.

Posted by Stephen Kliff, Product Marketing Manager

Capture the mobile opportunity with DFP Mobile

2011-11-29T14:11:00.000-05:00

Mobile devices offer many new and exciting opportunities for businesses. But mobile devices are not simply smaller versions of the desktop - these devices, and the mobile ecosystem as a whole, are unique. In order to succeed in this ecosystem, businesses must build specifically for mobile. Our recent 'GoMo' campaign has helped businesses develop websites that are optimized for mobile.

Similarly, there are mobile-specific challenges for publishers who want to serve ads on smartphones and tablets. There are thousands of different mobile devices running on multiple platforms on the market today, and a lack of technical standards as to how to serve ads across all these different phones and tablets. Publishers need technology that helps them navigate the complexities of the mobile ads marketplace, but that also connects to the rest of their ad operations, so that they can operate as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.

To help our publisher partners solve these challenges, we have rolled out an extended set of mobile features with the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Mobile, designed to complement the core mobile ad serving functionality released this summer.

DFP Mobile gives publishers access to an expanded set of mobile features. This includes extended mobile rich media capabilities, with built-in support for rich HTML5 ads such as video interstitials and templates for you to include your own more complex ad formats in a scalable way. DFP Mobile also offers advanced targeting options, better support for feature phones, and tighter integrations with Google AdSense, AdMob, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and mobile ad networks.

We've heard from our publisher partners that they want to be able to manage their mobile campaigns using the same tools that they use for the rest of their ad serving. For example, Billy Shipp, Director of Ad Operations at Flixster said “Not having to go to a separate interface to manage inventory, to set up campaigns, to pull reports, to optimize campaigns - having all of that in a single workflow makes it so much easier for ad operations folks to be effective because it gives them that global view of how a campaign is performing. The fact that we can use a single ad server and have all that information available in one place is a big win for us.” DFP Mobile is fully integrated with the DFP ad serving platform to help publishers streamline operations, create sales efficiencies, and leverage the power of DFP for their mobile business.

Publishers will also have more options when working with third parties. DFP Mobile can fetch mobile rich media ads directly from integrated rich media partners, decreasing latency and reducing discrepancies. Leading mobile rich media vendors such as Celtra have already integrated with DFP Mobile to help streamline operations for their partners. “The combination of DFP with Celtra’s innovative ad formats and analytics gives our premium publisher and ad network partners more rich media options to maximize mobile revenues and user engagement” said Grant Stratemeyer, VP of Business Development at Celtra.

Plus, later this week, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be rolling out the ability for publishers to opt-in mobile web inventory using the newly supported 320x50 banner size. With this functionality, publishers will have a range of options for monetizing their inventory, and can reach new pools of demand, potentially improving their returns.

This DFP Mobile release complements last month’s launch of DFP Video, to give publishers a truly unified experience for all screens, formats, and devices. With DFP, we’re committed to building best-in-class ad serving products for all channels within a single platform that works seamlessly across desktop, video and mobile.

To learn how you can begin selling across all screens with DFP Mobile, please contact us.

Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

Enhanced advertiser-level controls and insights in DoubleClick Ad Exchange

2011-11-22T17:57:00.006-05:00

Today, we’re happy to announce the roll-out of a new advertiser classification system that automatically scans and classifies each creative using sophisticated machine learning technologies to determine the associated advertiser or advertisers. This means that publishers can more easily and reliably block specific advertisers across all campaigns and buyers.

We focused on an algorithmic solution to this complex challenge, versus a more manual “self-declared” approach for buyers, which can often lead to inaccuracies such as misspellings or misclassifications. This quarter we are introducing this feature with coverage for the top 50 advertisers with a large expansion in advertiser coverage planned soon.

Further taking advantage of this new advertiser-level data, we’re now also able to give our publishers better insights into individual advertiser spending, CPMs and performance to help inform their overall sales efforts. Ad Exchange’s existing multi-dimensional reporting tool now includes an “advertiser” field dimension. This new field will allow publishers to slice and dice their data and see which advertisers are driving the most revenue by geography, domain, channel and a variety of other criteria.

Current Ad Exchange publishers can learn more about this new feature in the help center. If you’re not using Ad Exchange, you can contact your DoubleClick account representative to learn more about all of the ways we’re helping publishers profit from non-guaranteed sales on their terms.

Posted by Drew Bradstock, Product Manager

Grow your audience with Google+

2011-11-10T11:22:00.000-05:00

(Originally posted on the Inside AdSense blog)

At Google, we help grow your audience by connecting you with new users. We introduced the +1 button so your site would stand out on search and your users could easily share your content on Google+. But, sometimes you want to join the conversation and post content directly to where people are sharing.

Today we’re introducing Google+ for Business, a collection of tools and products that help you grow your audience. At the core of this is Google+ Pages, your site’s identity on Google+.

Google+ Pages: Have real conversations with the right people
To get your site on Google+, you first need to create a Google+ Page. On your page, you can engage in conversations with your visitors, direct readers back to your site for the latest updates, send tailored messages to specific groups of people, and see how many +1’s you have across the web. Google+ Pages will help you build relationships with your users, encouraging them to spend more time engaging with your content.

Google+ Pages are at the heart of Google+ for Business

Hangouts

Sometimes you might want to chat with your users face-to-face. For example, if you run a food blog, you may want to invite a chef to talk about her favorite recipe, or if you manage a fashion review site, beauty specialists might want to hold how-to sessions with makeup tips. Hangouts make this easy, by letting you have high-quality video chats with nine people with a single click. You can use Hangouts to hold live forums, break news or simply get to know people better, all in real time.

Hangouts let you meet your customers, face-to-face

Circles

Circles allow you to group followers of your Page into smaller audiences. You can then share specific messages with specific groups. For example, you could create a Circle containing your most loyal readers and offer them exclusive content.

The Google+ badge: Grow your audience on Google+
To help your users find your page and start sharing, there are two buttons you can add to your site by visiting our Google+ badge configuration tool:

The Google+ icon, a small icon that directly links to your Page.

The Google+ badge, which we’re introducing in the coming days. This badge lets people add your page to their circles without leaving your site, and allows them to get updates from your site via Google+.

Extend the power of +1, stand out in Google search
You can also link your site to your Google+ page so that all your +1s -- from your Page, your website, and search results -- will get tallied together and appear as a single total. Potential visitors will be more likely to see the recommendations your site has received, whether they’re looking at a search result, your website, or your Page, meaning your +1’s will reach not only the 40 million users of Google+, but all the people who come to Google every day. You can link your site to your Page either using the Google+ badge or with a piece of code. To set this up, visit our Google+ badge configuration tool.

Bringing Google+ to the rest of Google

Our ultimate vision for Google+ is to transform the overall Google experience -- weaving identity and sharing into all of our products. Beginning today, we’re rolling out a new experimental feature to a small group of eligible publishers,Google+ Direct Connect -- an easy way for your audience to find your Google+ Page on Google search. If you’ve linked your Page to your site and you qualify, when someone searches for your website’s name with the ‘+’ sign before it Direct Connect will send them directly to your Page. For example, try searching for ‘+YouTube’ on Google. Users will also be prompted to automatically add Pages they find through Direct Connect to their circles.

Direct Connect suggestions start populating as you type on Google.com

Just the beginning
We want to help you get your site on Google+ as soon as possible, so we’re opening the field trial for Google+ Pages to everyone today. Creating a Google+ Page only takes a few minutes. To get started, you’ll need a personal Google+ profile. If you don’t have a Google account, it’s very quick and easy to join. And if you’re looking for inspiration, check out some of the sites that are already starting to set up their Pages:

To learn more about how Google+ works for your site, check out the Google+ Your Business site. We’re just getting started, and have many more features planned for the coming weeks and months. To keep up to date on the latest news and tips, add the Google+ Your Business page to your circles. If you have ideas on how we can improve Google+ for your site, we’d love to hear them.

Posted by Dennis Troper, Product Management Director, Google+ Pages

Bringing AdMob Mobile Inventory to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange

2011-11-07T13:15:00.000-05:00

(Cross posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog)

In 2009, we launched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange as a way to simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, drive performance for our advertiser and publisher partners, and open up the display marketplace. In the two years since, exchange-based trading has taken off -- we’ve seen the volume of trades on our own exchange grow by more than 150% in the past year. At the same time, display, as a medium, has evolved.

Display started as just banner ads on websites, but has grown to include a range of formats as diverse as the web itself -- rich media ads that bring a page to life, in-stream ads that play before your favorite online video, and ads that run in the mobile version of your daily newspaper. To reflect this growing diversity, we have been expanding the types of formats in the Exchange. We support the most popular types of rich media ads, including units that run in-page with video, or expand when you click or mouse over them. It’s also possible to buy ads across the mobile web. Earlier this year, we announced that in-stream video formats were coming to the Exchange, and we’ve seen huge demand since launch: the number of buyers for in-stream video has tripled over the past quarter.

Today, we are announcing another step forward -- in the coming weeks, AdMob developers will be able to make their in-app inventory available on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Initially, a small number of pre-qualified buyers will be able to compete for this inventory. Over time, we'll be rolling it out more broadly. Ultimately, this will give app developers and publishers access to a wider pool of buyers like demand-side platforms and agency trading desks, improving their potential returns, and helping grow the overall mobile web economy. And marketers on our Exchange will be able to buy, in real time, ads that run inside people’s favorite mobile games, news apps and more. With this important addition, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be truly cross-format...and will become the first exchange to support this full range of ad formats.

VivaKi, one of our key partners on the Exchange, is gearing up to start buying in-app ads on the Exchange. “We are delighted to be working with Google as they open up the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to include AdMob in-app inventory, and to deliver this opportunity to our clients,” says Kurt Unkel, Senior Vice President, VivaKi Nerve Center. “We anticipate this experience will help us bring mobile to scale to our partners, and will provide insight into the operational elements and the creative assets that work best in this environment.”

A cross-format exchange is just one of the ways we’re looking to simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, but one we think will create tremendous value for advertisers and publishers. We will continue to work with our partners to help them get the most out of what the evolving display market has to offer -- today, tomorrow, and in the years ahead.

Posted by Chip Hall, Director, DoubleClick Ad Exchange