For an ad to have impact, being seen isn’t just important, it’s fundamental. That’s why measuring the viewability of advertising matters so much. Today, we’re releasing new research to help the industry better understand video ad viewability rates around the world and across devices, and announcing updates to our Active View measurement technology that helps advertisers place their ads where they have a better chance to be seen.

The current state of video ad viewability

Last year, we announced that globally, average video ad viewability on YouTube grew to 93%, significantly higher than the 66% average video ad viewability across the rest of the web and apps. Today, this number is even higher: Globally, average YouTube video ad viewability is now 95%, while the average video ad viewability across the rest of the web and apps remains at 66%.¹ And what’s more, 95% of YouTube ads are audible.²

Read the full “State of Video Ad Viewability” report to see viewability rates across different inventory types and devices around the world.

New Active View optimization strategies in DoubleClick Bid Manager

To ensure all of your video ads are being seen and heard, not just those on YouTube, we’re launching two new Active View bid optimization strategies in DoubleClick Bid Manager for video ads on the rest of the web and apps, where video ad viewability is lower. This includes the ability to optimize towards a video ad that is viewable on screen for at least 10 seconds, or towards a video ad that completes in view and is audible.

Active View optimization uses machine learning to maximize the impressions that meet your viewability and audibility goals. Specifically, this means that Active View factors in signals like video player size, domain and position on page to determine the optimal bid for each impression, so you get the most from your marketing budget. These new bidding strategies allow you to improve view-through rate for situations when you need to know that your audience is paying attention — if, for example, you need more time to explain your offering, or if your branding or logo doesn’t show up until the end of the video.

These two new Active View bid optimization strategies are now available in Bid Manager for all advertisers globally, building on our existing Active View bid optimization strategies that help you deliver against viewable CPM goals.

Advanced Active View metrics for all of your video ads

Earlier this year we announced enhanced reporting for YouTube TrueView campaigns in DoubleClick. Now, we're expanding on that announcement and making new Active View metrics available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager for all of your video ads, not just YouTube.

These new viewability and audibility metrics allow you to uncover deep insights into creative performance and user attention, including:

Studies have shown that the longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in brand metrics like brand awareness and consideration. With new viewability and audibility metrics in DoubleClick, you can get closer to understanding which of your video ads are holding the attention of your viewers, and are thus most likely to make an impact, and which you need to improve in order to deliver more impact.

And, because DoubleClick Campaign Manager is MRC-accredited for viewable video ad impressions for desktop web, mobile web and mobile app, when you view these metrics in Campaign Manager you can feel confident that they’ve undergone a stringent, independent audit. We are also in the process of seeking MRC accreditation for video impressions and viewability statistics in both AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Today’s announcements are the next evolution of Active View and reflect our commitment to empowering you with the data and tools you need to ensure your ads are capturing attention. Visit the Help Center to see all available metrics in Campaign Manager and Bid Manager reports.

Posted by Babak Pahlavan Senior Director of Product Management, Analytics Solutions and Measurement, Google

^{Google and DoubleClick advertising platforms data, May 2017
Google Internal Data, Global, August 2016 (when volume is at least 10% for YouTube ads)}

If your business offers a large number of products or services, it can be difficult to manually create and manage keywords and ads for each and every one of them. Inventory keyword campaigns allow you to automatically convert your product catalog to highly relevant, up-to-date search ads. Today we’re providing additional flexibility and scale to feed-based automation with new upgraded inventory management. You can now automatically create thousands of campaigns, ad groups, keywords and other items based off any feed.

Endless possibilities with one easy setup

Getting started with upgraded inventory management is easy. First, connect the feed you want to use. Then, create an inventory plan. Finally, create templates for your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads, and other items. DoubleClick will automatically create thousands of each item at once, so you don’t have to. When creating new items, you can save time by editing your existing templates instead of starting from scratch.

Let’s say you’re a clothing retailer looking to promote your new line of Fall dress styles. Through a single setup, you can create an inventory plan that uses your dresses product feed to automatically generate a campaign for each and every dress style. Then for each dress style campaign, create thousands of relevant keywords, sitelinks, and more.

Show more relevant ads

Your ads will always be up to date as they’ll automatically reflect any changes to your feed. You can customize almost anything using your feed and apply functions and rules to that data. For example, show how many dresses are available by applying the COUNT function to the headline of your ad template. You can also apply a rule to automatically pause these ads when you sell out of that particular dress.

Holiday Hypermarket, a popular UK travel aggregator, uses upgraded inventory management to help improve its ad targeting and increase efficiency. The brand saw click through rates increase by 88%, ROI increase by 11% and saved upwards of 30 hours in campaign creation.

“Upgraded inventory management’s ability to generate entire campaigns based off of templates has saved us many hours in legwork. We can now focus our time on running and optimizing campaigns.”
- Ruaridh Stewart, Senior Account Manager, Periscopix

You can learn more about upgraded inventory management in the DoubleClick Search Help Center.

Posted by Henry Tappen Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Cross-posted from The Keyword

The vast majority of online content creators fund their work with advertising. That means they want the ads that run on their sites to be compelling, useful and engaging--ones that people actually want to see and interact with. But the reality is, it’s far too common that people encounter annoying, intrusive ads on the web--like the kind that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page. These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads--taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation.

We believe online ads should be better. That’s why we joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads. The group’s recently announced Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers, and today I’d like to share how we plan to support it.

New tools for publishers

The new Ad Experience Report helps publishers understand how the Better Ads Standards apply to their own websites. It provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences we’ve identified to make it easy to find and fix the issues. For a full list of ads to use instead, publishers can visit our new best practices guide.

“We’ve always put our users first and fully support the Coalition’s Better Ads efforts and standards. At the same time, we deal with so many different websites and ad experiences it’s hard to tell at a glance which ads experiences we need to replace. The report’s videos and screenshots are incredibly helpful and make the Coalition’s research actionable for our teams. We’re impressed with the level of detail and transparency Google is providing and are 200% behind this initiative.” - Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Media

As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor.

“Over the past year we’ve lost a substantial portion of revenue to ad blockers across all of our properties. Funding Choices allows us to have a conversation with visitors using ad blockers in a way we weren’t able to before. We’ve found that people are generally open to whitelisting once they understand that adblockers negatively impact our ability to create content for them—you just need a way to start that conversation.” - Sam Savage, CEO Comicbook.com

Funding Choices is available to publishers in North America, U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand and will be rolling out in other countries later this year. Publishers should visit our new best practices guide for tips on crafting the right message for their audience.

Chrome support for the Better Ads Standards

Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

Looking ahead

We believe these changes will ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to have a sustainable way to fund their work with online advertising.

We look forward to working with the Coalition as they develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards, and are committed to working closely with the entire industry—including groups like the IAB, IAB Europe, the WFA, the ANA and the 4A’s, advertisers, agencies and publishers—to roll out these changes in a way that makes sense for users and the broader ads ecosystem.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

At DoubleClick, we're always looking for new ways to help you drive growth and efficiency. This means giving you tools that let you scale and customize your marketing in a way that suits your business needs.

A pain-free bid strategy with Automated Bidding

Scale and customization are critical to effective media buying. But a dependence on manual processes is often painful, especially when you’re running thousands of campaigns. It’s time-consuming and prone to mistakes.

To ease this pain, we’ve rebuilt Automated Bidding from the ground up. Rather than trying to guess the best bidding strategy, you can use Automated Bidding to leverage deep insights informed by Google’s machine learning. You set your bidding strategy to meet campaign goals, such as conversions or viewable impressions, and DoubleClick does the work for you, analyzing dozens of signals to dynamically place bids on the most valuable impressions.

Automated Bidding is now available in all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts.

Flexing to meet your business goals with Custom Algorithm

While Automated Bidding lets you scale your marketing campaigns to meet a number of common goals, many marketers have campaign objectives specific for their business.

We’re introducing Custom Algorithm to address this need. This solution lets you customize the DoubleClick Bid Manager algorithm based on your proprietary data and models. You can assign a value to each impression based on your own unique data, and then Bid Manager automatically optimizes your strategy against those values, rather than clicks or conversions.

Fully customizable to meet any campaign goal, Custom Algorithm offers brands in any industry a way to better drive results using their proprietary data and insights. For instance, a financial services company could customize the algorithm to serve more of their ads to consumers with a high credit score, while a retail advertiser could use their historical purchase data to reach people likely to make high-value purchases.

Custom Algorithm also creates opportunities in more complex scenarios. Google’s internal media buying team used Custom Algorithm for the launch campaign of the Pixel phone. With the aim of optimizing for viewable placements on premium inventory, the team used previous campaign results to build a media buying model to score impressions based on these two factors. They used Custom Algorithm to increase the number of impressions on premium placements, while reducing cost per viewable impression.

They saw great results: Impressions on premium inventory more than tripled and viewable CPM fell 34% when comparing to previous campaigns that didn't use this approach.

Custom Algorithm will launch in limited beta in June 2017 and roll out in full availability towards the end of the year.

Adapting your bids to the user’s context with Bid Multipliers

Automated Bidding and Custom Algorithm are new tools to help marketers automatically set their bids to reach their broader marketing goals. But the most effective bid strategies are ones that align to the user’s context.

For instance, imagine you want to adjust your bids based on the device consumers are using. Right now this process requires you to manually set these bids in separate line items.

We’re aiming to improve your productivity with Bid Multipliers. This new solution lets you set different bids for six dimensions all within the same line item, including device, site, audience lists, demographic, location and time of day. You can also adjust your bids to better reach particular customer segments. For example, if your customers are converting at a higher rate on mobile than desktop, you could shift your strategy to bid higher on mobile campaigns.

We’ll roll out Bid Multipliers to all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts over the next few months.

We understand the leverage you can gain when we invest in tools that give you greater efficiency and help you scale. With these new solutions, we aim to increase your productivity and empower your team to achieve more impactful results.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar
Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick

Mobile has fundamentally changed how we live our lives. With our devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find, watch or buy anything at anytime. That’s why earlier this year we shared that we’re developing a new, cloud-based measurement solution for YouTube, designed for a mobile world. Today, we’re announcing the beta for this solution, Ads Data Hub, to help advertisers get more detailed insights from their campaigns across screens while also protecting user privacy.

We are also announcing that Ads Data Hub is a solution not just for YouTube, but a tool that offers access to more data and helps unlock actionable insights across Google ad platforms, including the Google Display Network and DoubleClick. And with Ads Data Hub now in beta, we’re expanding who can use it.

Built on infrastructure from Google Cloud, including BigQuery, Ads Data Hub gives advertisers or their preferred measurement partners access to detailed, impression-level data about their media campaigns across devices in a secure, privacy-safe environment. Data from other sources, such as a CRM system or marketing database, can be incorporated as well. With this full view, advertisers or their partners can analyze the data and draw out insights specific to their business.

For example, if an e-commerce retailer wants to understand what the path to conversion looks like, they can bring additional online data about their customers into BigQuery, and Ads Data Hub will enable them to combine that data with their ads data so they can see what a typical journey is from first encountering a user until conversion.

Consistent with our commitment to privacy, no user-level data can be removed from the secure Cloud environment. Impression-level data is only accessible for the purposes of analysis and generating insights. In the future, advertisers will be able to act on the insights they get from Ads Data Hub and buy media with greater precision.

As an early alpha partner, Omnicom Media Group helped to define the solution and has seen significant value from both the amount of data available through Ads Data Hub and the broad set of analyses and custom queries that are possible.

"With the complexity of today's consumer journeys, we are seeing that marketers are looking to solve harder business challenges than ever before. Through our partnership with Google and our use of Ads Data Hub, we will be able to answer a broader range of questions and expand our analytical services."
- Slavi Samardzija, Global CEO, Annalect, An Omnicom Media Group Company

With the shift to mobile, consumer behavior has changed for good. Marketers need tools to help them make sense of this new world, and Ads Data Hub is a key step forward.

Posted by Geoff Samek Senior Product Manager, Ads Data and Privacy

Welcome to the Google Marketing Next live stream! Tune in live at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET to learn about Google’s latest marketing innovations, the moment they’re announced.

Join the conversation at #GoogleMarketingNext.

Good morning, San Francisco! As the city starts to wake up, my team and I are gearing up to welcome over a thousand marketers from around the world to Google Marketing Next, our annual event where we unveil the latest innovations for ads, analytics and DoubleClick.

A big theme you’ll hear about today is machine learning. This technology is critical to helping marketers analyze countless signals in real time and reach consumers with more useful ads at the right moments. Machine learning is also key to measuring the consumer journeys that now span multiple devices and channels across both the digital and physical worlds.

It's a growing and important trend for marketers today, and will continue to shape how you build for success in the future.

Below is a sneak preview of a few of the announcements I’ll be making. There are many more that I can’t wait to share with you. Be sure to tune in at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET.

Hello Google Attribution, goodbye last-click

Today, we're announcing Google Attribution, a new product to answer the question that has challenged marketers for ages, “Is my marketing working?” For the first time, Google Attribution makes it possible for every marketer to measure the impact of their marketing across devices and across channels -- all in one place, and at no additional cost.

With today’s complex customer journey, your business might have a dozen interactions with a single person - across display, video, search, social, and on your site or app. And all these moments take place on multiple devices, making them even harder to measure.

Marketers have been trying to make attribution work for years, but existing solutions just don't cut it. Most attribution tools:

• Are hard to set up
• Lose track of the customer journey when people move between devices
• Aren’t integrated with ad tools, making it difficult to take action

As a result, many marketers are stuck using last-click attribution, which misses the impact of most marketing touchpoints. With Google Attribution, we’ll help you understand how all of your marketing efforts work together and deliver the insights you need to make them work better.

Here’s how it works:
Integrations with AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search make it easy to bring together data from all your marketing channels. The end result is a complete view of your performance.

Google Attribution also makes it easy to switch to data-driven attribution. Data-driven attribution uses machine learning to determine how much credit to assign to each step in the consumer journey -- from the first time they engage with your brand for early research down to the final click before purchase. It analyzes your account's unique conversion patterns, comparing the paths of customers who convert to those who don’t, so you get results that accurately represent your business.

Finally, you can take fast action to optimize your ads with Google Attribution because it integrates with ads tools like AdWords and DoubleClick Search. The results are immediately available for reporting, updating bids or moving budget between channels.

“Given today’s multi-device landscape, cross-channel measurement and attribution is indispensable for HelloFresh to have a 360º panorama of our customer journey and gives us the best data to make the best decisions.” -  -‎Karl Villanueva, Head of Paid Search & Display

Google Attribution is now in beta and will roll out to more advertisers over the coming months.

Mobile-local innovations drive more consumers to stores

Mobile has blurred the line between the digital and physical worlds. While most purchases still happen in-store, people are increasingly turning to their smartphones to do research beforehand -- especially on Google.com and Google Maps.
To help consumers decide where to go, marketers are using innovations like Promoted Places and local inventory ads to showcase special offers and what’s in-stock at nearby stores. Now, you can also make it easy for them to find a store from your YouTube video ads using location extensions.

We introduced store visits measurement back in 2014 to help marketers gain more insight about consumer journeys that start online and end in a store. In under three years, advertisers globally have measured over 5 billion store visits using AdWords.

Only Google has the advanced machine learning and mapping technology to help you accurately measure store visits at scale and use these insights to deliver better local ad experiences. Our recent upgrade to deep learning models enables us to train on larger data sets and measure more store visits in challenging scenarios with greater confidence. This includes visits that happen in multi-story malls or dense cities like Tokyo, Japan and São Paulo, Brazil where many business locations are situated close together. Store visits measurement is already available for Search, Shopping and Display campaigns. And soon this technology will be available for YouTube TrueView campaigns to help you measure the impact of video ads on foot traffic to your stores.

Still, measuring store visits is just one part of the equation. You also need insights into how your online ads drive sales for your business. You need to know: are my online ads ringing my cash register? In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out store sales measurement at the device and campaign levels. This will allow you to measure in-store revenue in addition to the store visits delivered by your Search and Shopping ads.

If you collect email information at the point of sale for your loyalty program, you can import store transactions directly into AdWords yourself or through a third-party data partner. And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States. There is no time-consuming setup or costly integrations required on your end. You also don’t need to share any customer information. After you opt in, we can automatically report on your store sales in AdWords.

Both solutions match transactions back to Google ads in a secure and privacy-safe way, and only report on aggregated and anonymized store sales to protect your customer data.

Virgin Holidays discovered that when it factors in store sales, its search campaigns generate double the profit compared to looking at online KPIs alone. A customer purchasing in-store after clicking on a search ad is also three times more profitable than an online conversion.

“Store sales measurement gives us a more accurate view of the impact our digital investment has on in-store results, especially through mobile. This has empowered us to invest more budget in Search to better support this critical part of the consumer journey.” -James Libor, Performance Marketing and Technology Manager

empowered us to invest more budget in Search to better support this critical part of the consumer journey.”

Machine learning delivers more powerful audience insights to search ads

People are often searching with the intent to buy. That’s why we’re bringing in-market audiences to Search to help you reach users who are ready to purchase the products and services you offer. For example, if you’re a car dealership, you can increase your reach among users who have already searched for “SUVs with best gas mileage” and “spacious SUVs”. In-market audiences uses the power of machine learning to better understand purchase intent. It analyzes trillions of search queries and activity across millions of websites to help figure out when people are close to buying and surface ads that will be more relevant and interesting to them.

This is an important moment for marketers. The convergence of mobile, data and machine learning will unlock new opportunities for marketers -- and I’m excited to be on this journey with all of you.

Please join us at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET to see the entire keynote at Google Marketing Next, and all the other innovations we’re planning to announce for ads, analytics and DoubleClick.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Picture this: You're chilling on your couch, streaming your favorite show. In the next ad break, the ad loads slowly and is grainy and pixelated. Clearly, you're frustrated because you expect more from your HD TV and lightning-fast internet connection.

You're not alone. Advertisers and broadcasters hate it when this happens too -- they want you to stay deeply engaged with what you're watching and not be distracted by the streaming experience. But providing TV-quality ad experiences has become challenging with the proliferation of connected TV devices that people use to stream video.

At DoubleClick, we are focused on helping deliver great user experiences by enabling advertisers and TV broadcasters to show seamless, high-quality video ads across all screen sizes and device types.

In this vein, we partnered with the IAB, CBS Interactive, Ad-ID and others last year to develop a new digital video standard that allows advertisers and broadcasters to deliver TV-quality ads to living room screens and devices. This standard, called VAST 4.0, updates previous video standards to work better for the viewing behavior in today’s world.

Today, we’re rolling out support for aspects of VAST 4.0 in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and DoubleClick for Publishers. It was important to launch this standard for both advertisers and broadcasters simultaneously to ensure that the whole ecosystem runs smoothly, from insertion order to ad serving.

To enable optimal viewing experiences on living room screens, we prioritized our focus on two specific aspects of VAST 4.0:

• TV-quality viewing experiences: TV-quality creative files (known as mezzanine files) uploaded to DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick for Publishers can now be passed to services that dynamically stitch ads into video streams (server side ad insertion platforms). This helps ensure a higher quality viewing experience, especially for connected TVs, by enabling the TV-quality ad creative to be transcoded and served in one stream alongside the video content.
• More efficient ad delivery: A universal ad ID system helps the server side ad insertion platform better identify unique vs. existing creatives, which reduces unnecessary transcodes.

This updated set of standards applies across ad servers and server side ad insertion tools, helping advertisers and broadcasters provide high quality viewing experiences for their audiences.

To learn more about VAST 4.0 and how we’re supporting it in DoubleClick, please register for our webinar, coming up next Monday, 5/22, from 12-1pm ET.

Posted by Peentoo Patel and Sunil Gupta
Product Managers, DoubleClick Video Ads