Tag Archives: doubleclick bid manager

Programmatic Guaranteed: Now available to advertisers, publishers globally

Six months ago at the US DoubleClick Leadership Summit, we announced the start of testing for Programmatic Guaranteed, a new way to use programmatic pipes to execute direct deals. In this time, over 300 advertisers and 200 publishers have tested this capability, and we’ve seen impression volumes double every quarter. Based on your feedback, we’ve made several changes and significantly improved the product. So today, we’re announcing the public beta of Programmatic Guaranteed and opening it to any advertiser using DoubleClick Bid Manager or publisher using DoubleClick for Publishers*.

Programmatic direct spending was expected to reach $8 Billion in 2015 in the US alone - more than 50% of total programmatic display ad spend1. Initial steps to bring the benefits of programmatic to direct deals have been focused on automating the deal booking process. While that’s a good start, it only scratches the surface of what programmatic technology can do. The true value of programmatic direct will be achieved when the power of real-time, data-driven decisions is combined with access to brand safe, reserved publisher inventory currently available through direct sales. This will not only shorten the time it takes to book and execute high value reservations type deals, but also improve advertising performance.

That was our goal when developing Programmatic Guaranteed. It’s the only product available today that uses real-time bidding infrastructure to bring the power of programmatic to direct sales. Advertisers and agencies get access to premium guaranteed inventory with cross-campaign / advertiser optimization and frequency management across programmatic and reservation inventory. Publishers can lock in revenue through reservations, forecast against programmatic deals, and enjoy the ease of automated billing and collections. All that without the need to email tags, worry about creative controls, resolve discrepancies, or fax I/Os back and forth.

Finally, we’ve found that Programmatic Guaranteed is creating new opportunities for advertisers and publishers to connect. Here’s what some of our partners are saying about Programmatic Guaranteed:

“The way we stay ahead is by constantly experimenting and pushing technology to work for us. With Programmatic Guaranteed we can lock in revenue by selling a guaranteed number of impressions at pre-negotiated rates. We’ve seen great success with an initial batch of advertisers so far. Programmatic Guaranteed is simple and effective, and it’s ideally suited to the direct sales environment because clients really understand it.”
-Joe Alicata, VP Revenue Product and Operations, VOX Media

"As a premium publisher we will automate what today is manual. Programmatic Guaranteed is definitely an end to end solution. It is exactly what a publisher like Conde Nast needs to do more in a digital environment that is constantly changing and becoming more demanding."
-Elia Blei, Commercial Director Digital and Large Markets, Condé Nast

“At Generator Media we aim to provide a holistic solution for our clients. Including Programmatic Guaranteed in our offering allows us to manage valuable reserved buys alongside our open exchange and private marketplace activity. Doing so provides a level of frequency and messaging control previously unattainable across large scale digital media buys.”
-Russell Wagner, Director of Platform Integrations, Generator Media

"Programmatic Guaranteed helps the publisher deliver very high quality inventory to the advertiser. When we start a campaign, we always have to start with the publisher: we then fix the price with the publisher, define the placement, the timeline and then we define the volume. Through this, if you compare direct sales with Programmatic Guaranteed, we are returning better results."
-Andrea Di Fonzo, Managing Director, MediaCom Italy

Programmatic Guaranteed is now available to all marketers and buyers using DoubleClick Bid Manager, and all publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers. If you have a reservation deal that would benefit from the efficiencies of programmatic, reach out to your DoubleClick account team today to get started. We’re excited to bring this innovative advertising tool to the market and we look forward to your feedback on how we can best improve Programmatic Guaranteed during the public beta.

Posted by Kurt Spoerer
Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick

1 eMarketer, Oct 2015
* Programmatic Guaranteed is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

Netshoes sees 5X increase in conversion rates with DoubleClick Bid Manager

E-commerce in Brazil has grown 20+% year over year for the last five years1. In this highly competitive environment, choosing the right advertising partner is a critical strategic decision for a retail brand to ensure their message breaks through.

Netshoes is the world's largest sports retailer, selling everything from basketball shoes to fitness gear across all of Latin America. Historically they have been deeply focused on performance advertising, and at times have used up to 8 different advertising platforms and retargeters at once in search of the best results.

But recently, Netshoes decided this approach wasn't giving them the best results. They found they were competing against themselves by bidding for the same audience with multiple ad providers, driving costs up and ROI down. When they consolidated their media buys across display and video with DoubleClick Bid Manager, the results speak for themselves:
  • 400% better conversion rate than with other channels.
  • 30% view rate on TrueView video ads, with CPVs lower than the market average.
  • 15% time savings across the Netshoes media buying team.

"The results we get from DoubleClick are simply much better than those from other partners in our past"
—Danilo Mangini, Marketing Manager, Netshoes

Learn more about Netshoes’ approach in the full case study.
Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, Google
1 Source: e-bit Webshoppers

Mobile micro-moments: Creating valuable programmatic advertising with search insights

Year after year we've heard pundits announce that this is "The Year of Mobile," but we don't quite seem to get there. Still, the facts don't lie: eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for 72% of U.S. digital ad spend by 2019 and Google's tech-forward target audience spends more than 74% of its time on mobile.1

Because mobile devices are consumers' always-on, constant companions, Google Marketing wanted to deliver personalized, contextual creative programmatically via ads. To show how the Google app can add value in people’s lives, Google Marketing brought the app’s functionality into the ad units themselves. Combining aggregated search insights, geo-targeting, and dynamic creative, the ads proactively fed users with helpful, relevant information.

The Google Marketing team followed four key steps as it developed the creative for the Google app. To learn more about the approach, check out the full case study.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, Google
1 ComScore MobileMetrix, September 2015.

Protecting marketers from falsely represented inventory

As we've stated before, we're committed to keeping fraudsters out of the broader advertising ecosystem. Today we're looking at a specific aspect of this fight: the false representation of domains in ad inventory.

Deceptive ad inventory

Imagine ordering a designer handbag, only to receive a cheap imitation. Unfortunately, this type of misrepresentation happens all too often with ad inventory.

The false representation of domains in ad inventory occurs when publishers intentionally make it look like their traffic is coming from another website (usually a well-known, premium website) in order to charge higher rates for ads. This practice deceives advertisers who end up paying to appear on sites with which they may not want to be associated, and harms legitimate publishers, who aren't actually receiving the funds from ads sold in their name.

The two examples below illustrate how a branded ad can end up on a sketchy website through false representation of a domain.

Protecting against falsely represented inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager

As part of our commitment to strengthening the integrity of our digital marketing solutions, we've added a new feature to DoubleClick Bid Manager that blocks many cases of domain misrepresentation, one of the most severe types of falsely represented ad inventory.

When a source of fraudulently misrepresented domain information is identified in Bid Manager, a filter is used to exclude invalid inventory with a high degree of confidence before advertisers bid on it, regardless of exchange or reported domain. We’ve discovered that in some instances this type of activity has accounted for up to 40% of inventory for a particular exchange.

Percent of misrepresented ad domains by exchange1

As a recent example, we noticed a publisher attempting to sell ad inventory on a pirated movie sharing website that was falsely represented with the domain name of a well-known newspaper. Fortunately, our new filter prevented ads from being purchased and displayed, thereby safeguarding advertisers from fraud and preventing this copyright infringing publisher from receiving advertising revenue.

Publishers benefit as well

It’s not just advertisers who will benefit from this new feature. The filter ensures that high quality inventory from top publishers is correctly valued and better defended against misrepresentation. As a case in point, we found that 10% of inventory offered for sale claiming to come from two popular US newspapers was in fact from other publishers falsely representing themselves as the two newspapers.

We also recognize that there are valid use cases for selling inventory via alternate domains, which is why we have taken great care to ensure that our filter targets only cases where the false representation masks the real value of the inventory.

Available to all marketers on Bid Manager

We continually look for new ways to improve and defend our advertising platforms against ad fraud, and we’re proud to offer this new feature directly on Bid Manager, without the need for advertisers to maintain blacklists or configuration settings. We’re happy to further protect advertisers and legitimate publishers by giving the boot to pretenders offering bad inventory.

Posted by Andres Ferrate
Chief Advocate, Google Ad Traffic Quality
1 Includes only exchanges from which DoubleClick Bid Manager buys >1 million impressions per day

New ways to reach your audience in DoubleClick Bid Manager

You know your customers and their preferences better than anyone else, but reaching these users as they explore sites and content online can be challenging. That's why we're excited to bring additional audience targeting options to DoubleClick Bid Manager to help you connect with customers at the right moments with the right message.

Bid Manager now enables you target your campaigns by demographic, affinity, in-market, and similar audience profiles to help you precisely reach users who are most likely to care about your brand or product. These targeting options complement any first and third-party data you may already be using in Bid Manager.

Reach customers throughout all stages of the purchase funnel

Bid Manager's new targeting options are designed to help you reach new and existing customers throughout all stages of the customer purchase funnel:

  • Demographic: Demographic targeting is what it sounds like-a way to find your target by age and gender. It can help you reach a specific target based on stage of life to continue to serve the most relevant messages to consumers.
  • Affinity: Affinity audiences can help you move beyond demographics and reach people who care about your brand. With over 80 unique personas based on lifestyle and interests, affinity audiences mimic the depth and breadth of TV-style audiences, so marketers can engage with precise audiences at scale.
  • In-market: Reach potential customers while they're actively browsing, researching or comparing the types of products you sell. Connect with those most interested in what you have to offer, using precise segments that classify users based on their demonstrated in-market behavior and purchase intent.
  • Similar audiences: Similar audiences looks at data about your existing remarketing audiences and finds new and qualified consumers who have shared interests with that audience. It's a powerful - but simple - way to reach a much larger audience and drive clicks and conversions among new prospects.

Audience solutions in action

Suppose you own a bicycle shop and you want to reach users who are interested in purchasing a new bicycle. Users with this intent may browse sites or content online as they begin to consider purchasing a new bicycle. Other users may be actively browsing product listings and committed to purchasing a new bicycle.

As a bicycle shop owner, each user represents an opportunity, and Bid Manager's audience targeting can help you reach the right user at exactly the right moment. For example, affinity targeting can be used to reach biking enthusiasts who are currently considering purchasing a new bicycle. In-market targeting can then be used as the user begins evaluating different bicycles to purchase.

We've seen customers have success using these new targeting options for all phases of the purchase cycle. AMNET Spain, for example, helps clients increase the reach on their target audience across TV and online video media buys:

"For branding campaigns, it is essential that we reach as much of our target audience as possible. In one particular case, we were asked to reach women in Spain between ages 25-45. By using Google Demographic Targeting and Google Affinity Audiences, we were able to achieve an extra 20% reach when compared to using TV alone.”
Ramón de la Guardia, Country Manager, AMNET Spain and Portugal

When your message reaches the right audience, you'll see higher engagement and improved performance. Danone Italy has experienced:

“We worked with Mindshare to drive awareness of our yogurt brands in women of different age groups in Italy. Google Demographic Targeting in Bid Manager helped us achieve our target coverage against this demographic and increase engagement, with a 20% uplift in CTR."
Valeria Surico, Marketing Connection Manager, Danone

These new audience targeting options are available today in DoubleClick Bid Manager. Learn more.

Posted by Maithreyi Raman
Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager

Active View updates: Improved cross-screen options for brands and publishers

When advertisers pay for an ad, the chance for it to be seen is a basic expectation. Advertisers shouldn’t have to pay extra to measure and ensure that it was viewable. These expectations drove the launch of Active View back in 2013, an effort to establish a neutral and common set of viewability metrics used by both advertisers and publishers. Since then we've continued to invest in this technology across DoubleClick, YouTube and the Google Display Network, and today we're happy to share two new updates that will help advertisers and publishers run more effective cross-screen campaigns.

Announcing Active View optimization in DoubleClick Bid Manager - A better way to programmatically buy viewable impressions

Today, we're introducing Active View bid optimization in DoubleClick Bid Manager for clients globally. This new bid optimization feature uses the collective intelligence from many signals (e.g. URL, time of day, page category) to predict, impression by impression, the probability that it will be viewable. It then dynamically adjusts bids higher or lower based on that probability to deliver the viewable CPM target that advertisers set for their video and display campaigns. Active View optimization delivers what advertisers actually care about - the total volume of viewable impressions - and doesn’t fixate on a viewable percentage.

This will help solve a common problem: when marketers buy viewable impressions programmatically using current viewability targeting, the decision to bid on a single impression is very basic. Buyers choose a target viewable percentage (e.g. 50%) and their programmatic buying system bids the same amount for any impressions with a likelihood of being viewed above that target - or nothing at all for impressions with a likelihood of being viewed below that target. This means that buyers are missing out on wide swaths of inventory that may actually be viewable and are driving up competition (and CPMs) for the inventory they are buying.

Announcing Active View for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange - Bringing holistic viewability measurement to publishers

We believe that viewability metrics should be a standard currency between buyers and sellers. To enable this, we've been investing in features that allow publishers to see and report on a holistic picture of viewability across their channels and content. We're continuing that momentum today by announcing Active View reporting for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers and on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. With the consumer shift to mobile reshaping how publishers engage with their audience and those interactions increasingly happening on mobile apps, this new measurement solution completes the picture for publishers helping them see how viewability plays out across all of their properties.

At Google, we remain committed to investing in a broad set of measurement solutions for brands and publishers through a combination of product innovation with our own solutions and partnerships with leading third parties. These announcements are two big steps in our ongoing effort to help our clients measure every moment that matters.

Posted by:

Ari Feldman
Product Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers Reporting and Active View
Deepti Bhatnagar
Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager Brand Measurement and Optimization

Webinar: Reach the right audience, faster with comScore vCE in DoubleClick

Just a few weeks ago we announced the release of comScore vCE in DoubleClick, the first completely tagless GRP measurement solution integrated directly into an ad server. With comScore vCE in DoubleClick, Brand Marketers in the US get the trusted comScore audience measurement solution for both video and display ads that delivers 100% coverage.

Register now for a webinar on October 21st at 11am PST / 2pm EST, where you’ll be joined by Anne Hunter, SVP Global Marketing Strategy at comScore, Inc. and Paul Trieu, Product Manager at Google, to learn about:

  • How reach, demographics and GRPs can help enhance campaign success
  • Share practical tips for enabling comScore vCE in DoubleClick in DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Campaign Manager
  • Unveil best practices on using comScore vCE in DoubleClick to measure campaigns
  • Perform a demo of the new simple and easy to read reports
  • Host Q&A
Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing, Video Platforms & Brand Measurement, Google

Programmatic momentum across our platforms

Mobile has forever changed the way we live, and it’s forever changed the way we engage with brands. It has fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments -- the moments in time when consumers' preferences are shaped and decisions are made. Each one is a critical opportunity for brands, and increasingly we are seeing advertisers turn to programmatic to reach and engage audiences everywhere and win these moments.

As the industry gears up for Advertising Week next week, I want to reflect on the momentum we’re seeing in programmatic buying across our platforms, especially in mobile. At DoubleClick, the number of advertisers using our programmatic solutions has grown nearly 2x in the last 18 months, and now includes over 80% of the AdAge top 100 advertisers. More broadly, IDC estimates that programmatic spending on mobile display and video advertising in the U.S. will grow from $4.7 billion in 2015 to $22.8 billion in 2019 (a CAGR of 65%.)1

With people switching between multiple devices throughout their day and increasing their consumption of mobile video, advertisers have changed how and where they buy programmatically in order to connect with people in micro-moments. Both mobile and video impressions served on DoubleClick Bid Manager have grown more than 3.5x since last year, and impressions served via direct deals that are transacted programmatically have nearly tripled. To provide you with the largest pool of inventory, DoubleClick Bid Manager has access to 70 exchanges and API partners, and we prioritize mobile and video inventory sources when identifying new integrations to pursue.

Ultimately, our engineers spend each day thinking about how to build innovative products that help you win these micro-moments by connecting with the people you want to reach, across screens and at scale. The growth in usage of our platforms shows that we are making progress, but we are even more excited for what's to come. Google has a great line-up of talks set for next week in New York - we hope to see you there.

Posted by Neal Mohan
VP, Display & Video Advertising, Google
1. IDC Report #256782, June 2015 “WW and US Programmatic growth forecasts, 2015-2019”

Programmatic helps brands make the most of micro-moments

Every day, your audience is filling their days with hundreds if not thousands of micro-moments—intent-rich moments when preferences are shaped and decisions are made. As consumers spread their attention across more and more screens and channels, those moments can happen almost anywhere, anytime. People search on their smartphones while in front of the TV. They watch YouTube videos on their tablets while texting their friends. They open a mobile app to shop for the perfect gift, then head to the store to buy it. With mobile devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find and buy anything, anytime.

For marketers, this means the purchase funnel is wildly more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

“Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent.”

It’s hard to plan for nonlinear purchase paths, but programmatic advertising can help, enabling brands to reach the right person with the right message in the moment of opportunity. Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent. That’s a powerful proposition, and it’s why programmatic advertising spend is projected to grow by more than 77% this year.1

In this article, we share four tips for using programmatic to win these micro-moments and examples of brands that are doing it right.

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.

Cutting unwanted ad injectors out of advertising

For the last few months, we’ve been raising awareness of the ad injection economy, showing how unwanted ad injectors can hurt user experience, jeopardize user security, and generate significant volumes of unwanted ads. We’ve used learnings from our research to prevent and remove unwanted ad injectors from Google services and improve our policies and technologies to make it more difficult to spread this unwanted software.

Today, we’re announcing a new measure to remove injected ads from the advertising ecosystem, including an automated filter in DoubleClick Bid Manager that removes impressions generated by ad injectors before any bid is made.

Unwanted ad injectors: disliked by users, advertisers, and publishers

Unwanted ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, in the pages users visit while browsing the web. Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

We’ve received almost 300,000 user complaints about them in Chrome since the beginning of 2015—more than any other issue, and it’s no wonder. Ad injectors affect all sites equally. You wouldn’t be happy if you tried to get the morning news and saw this:

Not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing them in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

Ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.

Removing injected inventory from advertising

Earlier this quarter, we launched an automated filter on DoubleClick Bid Manager to prevent advertisers from buying injected ads across the web. This new system detects ad injection and proactively creates a blacklist that prevents our systems from bidding on injected inventory. Advertisers and agencies using our platforms are already protected. No adjustments are needed. No settings to change.

We currently blacklist 1.4% of the inventory accessed by DoubleClick Bid Manager across exchanges. However, we’ve found this percentage varies widely by provider. Below is a breakdown showing the filtered percentages across some of the largest exchanges:

We’ve always enforced policies against the sale of injected inventory on our ads platforms, including the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Now advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager can avoid injected inventory across the web.

No more injected ads?

We don’t expect the steps we’ve outlined above to solve the problem overnight, but we hope others across the industry take action to cut ad injectors out of advertising. With the tangle of different businesses involved—knowingly, or unknowingly—in the ad injector ecosystem, progress will only be made if we all work together. We strongly encourage all members of the ads ecosystem to review their policies and practices and take actions to tackle this issue.

Vegard Johnsen
Product Manager, Google Ads Traffic Quality