The best ads tell stories that pull people in, capture their attention and make them want to believe in what they’re being told. Digital video has given advertisers the canvas to do just that on more screens than ever before. And they’re taking note–digital video spend grew 35% last year alone. ¹ But as powerful as video ads are, they have historically been limited to the confines of players and in-stream video content–missing important consumer moments throughout the day like reading the news, playing a game, or scrolling through a social app.

To help advertisers engage their audiences in more places, and to enable publishers to capture growing video budgets across their non-video content on sites and apps, we recently released four new programmatic out-stream video formats in a new beta on DoubleClick. We’re also working closely with the IAB Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group to ensure that all of our new video formats are easily measurable across all platforms and devices.

In-article and in-feed formats put video ads front and center in publisher content

With out-stream ads on DoubleClick, publishers can serve video ads across their content feeds and within their articles programmatically. Both in-feed and in-article video ads seamlessly fit a user's scrolling behavior on both web and apps; and they are muted by default to ensure they don’t disrupt the user. Moreover, the ads only play when 50% or more of the ad is in view, ensuring higher viewability rates. If users choose to engage with an ad, they can tap to unmute the video.

On average, out-stream video ads are earning 8.9x higher CPMs compared to standard banner ad CPMs on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. ² And in certain regions, among the 100+ publishers who have already signed up for the beta, partners have seen substantially greater CPM lift as we’ve continued to fine tune and scale the new formats.

In-Article Video Demo

In-Feed Video Demo

Native video ads conform to perform

Native video ads are designed to fit the form and function of the surrounding page or app. Using standardized ad components like headline, description, logo, and video files, publishers can create custom ad experiences that are seamlessly integrated across their sites and apps.

Since launching their “Adapt” native video ad format with DoubleClick, Time Inc. has seen a 5x increase in video inventory available across their properties. Ashley Allen, Director of Ad Product Solutions at Time Inc. commented, “Adapt gives us the flexibility to meet the demands of our advertisers while responding to the behaviors of our audiences. DoubleClick’s native ad technology has enabled us to capture this opportunity as quickly as we’ve been able to.”

Native Video Demo

Rewarded video ads deliver value for users and engagement for game developers

Games are among the most popular types of apps, pulling in a high percentage of male and female users of all ages, 96% of whom engage with gaming apps every week.³ Game developers using DoubleClick Rewarded video ads are capitalizing on growing usage by creating non-intrusive, user-initiated ad experiences that offer users something of value (like an extra life in a game) in exchange for viewing a video ad.

In 2017, Nestlé ran a campaign in the UK with King, the gaming company behind Candy Crush, offering users an extra life or boost in their games in exchange for watching a video ad. The user-initiated placements generated a 99.5% view-through rate and a 3% click-through rate across Android devices.⁴ Performance like this underlines the fact that when users’ experiences and choices are respected, both the advertiser and the publisher benefit from increased engagement.

Rewarded Video Demo

Ensuring accountability across new video formats, devices and platforms

In addition to developing new video ad formats, we're also working to ensure that video viewability is easily measurable across all platforms and devices -- including mobile apps. To accomplish this, we’re integrating the Open Measurement SDK into both our Google Mobile Ads and Interactive Mobile Ads SDKs. Once implemented, mobile app publishers and game developers will be able to power any vendor’s measurement tools, which in turn will reduce development time and streamline deal negotiations with advertisers.

The initiative marks a significant step towards improving the measurability of in-app video ads and we're working closely with partners like King to test the Google Mobile Ads SDK integration in their gaming apps.

"For the industry at large, The Open Measurement SDK will create a universal standard for the collection of video viewability data and reduce reporting inconsistencies across the mobile app landscape. For King, the single-source solution will enable us to engage with advertisers regardless of their preferred measurement vendor. As a result, mobile in app video will become a more predictable advertising channel, which in turn will create more demand for our inventory."

--Brian Ames, President of Advertising at King

Out-stream video formats are poised to play an important role in the future of video advertising for publishers, because they create a meaningful opportunity to increase the demand for and value of their content and audiences. As advertisers continue to demand more premium video inventory, non-video publishers and game developers should take note, as they may be sitting on a treasure trove of video ad impressions. We look forward to sharing more of our work and innovations in these areas in the months ahead.

Posted by Benyah Shaparenko Product Manager, Google

¹ “Global Ad Spend Forecast”, Dentsu Aegis Network, Jan 2018 
² DoubleClick Ad Exchange Data, Sept-Dec 2017
³ ”Something for everyone,” Ipsos MORI mobile app research report, July 2017
⁴ “How Nestlé Achieved Brand Goals in Mobile App Environment”, Think with Google, May 2017

I used to wait all week to watch 90210 on Thursday nights at 9:00. Today, I can binge watch Breaking Bad whenever I want, wherever I want. Whether it’s 1997 or 2017, there is one simple thing that keeps us coming back to TV — great content. But the issue today is that the experience and the content are often at odds — while the content is addictive, the experience is not.

I believe that the future of TV is one that’s smarter — that brings together the TV content you love with the seamless experience of digital — on every screen or surface. Building towards that future, at our Partner Leadership Summit in Chicago early this month, we announced several new products and features to DoubleClick for Publishers, made for our TV.

Video ad experiences get smarter, live and on-demand, with Dynamic Ad Insertion

Over the years, we’ve rebuilt our video platform from the ground up — we knew that TV was a very different experience from the web and we knew that broadcasters had different challenges, infrastructure, distribution partners and content from web publishers. With TV coming to digital, we put our stake in the future of building for a better user experience — one that was connected, always on, and on-demand.

Powering dynamic ad insertion has become a leading benefit of our platform. Over the last couple of years, we’ve successfully powered dynamic ad insertion for live streaming and on-demand content for many of the largest news, sports events and episodic premiers. In fact, over the past two years alone we’ve seen a 4X increase in ad impressions delivered via our Dynamic Ad Insertion product by TV partners like CBSi, AMC, Bloomberg, TF1 and many more.¹

Smarter TV ad breaks optimize revenue within each pod, programmatically

We’re also bringing new updates to a key feature of our platform — smarter TV ad breaks. With this update, ad slots no longer need to be sold as fixed lengths in the break. Smarter TV ad breaks automatically optimize your ad break to the revenue-maximizing combination of ads, personalized and relevant for each viewer. For example, a ninety second ad break can now be filled by two 15-second and two 30-second ads or one 15-second, one 60-second and two 6-second bumper ads depending on what will bring you the most revenue. Importantly, we’re able to do this across your programmatic or reservation deals, while respecting your business rules, such as competitive exclusions and frequency capping within the break or stream.

Content gets smarter with TV Content Explorer

To effectively monetize TV content, you need a platform that can better understand the content you’re monetizing, the audiences engaging with it and serve the right ad in just the right moment no matter where users are consuming it. That’s why we’re launching TV Content Explorer in DoubleClick for Publishers, available in beta by the end of 2017.

Leveraging Google’s machine learning expertise and smart heuristics, TV Content Explorer creates and automatically organizes an intuitive catalog of your shows and clips. We analyze millions of signals from video content feeds, automatically applying classifiers and making recommendations for how content should be organized across dimensions like show, genre, trending, dayparts, etc. With this inventory catalog, you’ll get a clearer view of the opportunities and packages available to sell.

But that’s not all. To ensure that you aren’t leaving any revenue on the table, the Explorer will also proactively surface deeper insights into audiences and monetization opportunities via insight cards. We’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this feature and are excited to bring even more innovation to this Explorer in the future.

Inventory decisions get smarter with updated forecasting and pacing models

Accurately predicting inventory volumes across a multitude of devices for TV content requires consideration for factors such as seasonality of content, unpredictable viewership spikes for live events and varying programming schedules.

That’s why our new forecasting and pacing models, currently in beta, were built to include a lookback window of 18 months, consideration for organic growth over time, audience seasonality and one-off anomaly corrections for unpredictable events like breaking news. Soon, it will also allow you to import offline traffic data and upload custom pacing curves to inform the algorithm for greater accuracy.

Audience strategies get smarter with insights from Google

We recently shared that we’re starting limited tests to help our partners better understand their audiences with new insight reports that expose demographic and interest data from Google. This presents an opportunity for broadcasters and programmers to personalize ad experiences more effectively and package digital inventory similarly to how TV is bought and sold. Additionally, we’re starting limited tests to help partners serve ads against demographic data from Google via Programmatic Guaranteed deals with DoubleClick Bid Manager.

TV is here to stay because there’s no such thing as too much good content — it’s hard for me to imagine a world without 90210, Breaking Bad or Designated Survivor. By bringing everything that’s good about digital to TV, we’re only making it unstoppable. Stay tuned to learn more about how we’re evolving our platforms for a future where TV will be smarter, just as it will continue to be everywhere.

Posted by Rany Ng Director, Product Management, Google

¹DoubleClick Internal Data, Jan-Sept 2015 and Jan-Aug 2017

There are many issues impacting the health of the advertising ecosystem today. Counterfeit, misrepresented, and fake ad inventory are diverting revenue from high quality publishers. And, publishers are looking for tools to help them stop unsuitable ads from appearing alongside their content and damaging their brand. Addressing these challenges is critical to creating a healthy ecosystem where publishers can thrive. That’s why we’ve been investing in multiple initiatives to help alleviate these problems for our partners.

Helping stop the sale of counterfeit ad inventory

When counterfeit inventory is allowed to be sold or an unauthorized reseller puts underpriced inventory into the market, it prevents publishers from receiving the full value of their inventory. That’s why we fully support the IAB Tech Lab’s ads.txt standard. Ads.txt gives publishers and distributors a simple, flexible and secure method to disclose the companies they authorize to sell their digital inventory. It increases transparency in the inventory supply chain making it more difficult to sell counterfeit inventory or resell inventory without a publisher’s approval.

We recently announced that DoubleClick Bid Manager will only buy a publisher’s inventory from sources identified as authorized sellers in its ads.txt file when a file is available. At our recent Partner Leadership Summit, we announced three updates to our publisher ad platforms to support the IAB Tech Lab’s ads.txt standard.

• AdSense has begun to display ads.txt alerts in the user interface to let publishers know if we identify errors in their ads.txt file.
• By the end of October, DoubleClick for Publishers will include an ads.txt generator and validator to help publishers create their initial ads.txt file and correct and modify their existing ads.txt files.
• And most importantly by the end of this year, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense will filter unauthorized inventory, as identified by a publisher’s ads.txt file, from our auction.

The growth we’ve seen in ads.txt adoption has been strong. As of October 12, our ads.txt crawler has found files from over 11,000 urls. However, only 252 of the comScore 1000 publishers have published ads.txt files. The broader the adoption of ads.txt, the faster we’ll be able to help prevent the sale and purchase of counterfeit inventory and foster a fair and safe market for publishers to grow their businesses.

Number of urls that have posed an ads.txt file globally as found by our crawler

Keeping unsuitable ads off of publisher sites

We've heard from our publishers that they want more options and control to determine the types of ads that appear on their sites from our advertising partners. While we have strict policies on our own platforms to protect publishers and our users from harmful, misleading and inappropriate ads, we are introducing more controls and filters so publishers can make their decisions about what is and what isn't suitable for their brand.

We have released two new controls in DoubleClick that allow publishers to block sensational, tabloid-style ads and racy, suggestive ads from their sites. And we recently made changes to significantly improve the accuracy and quality of our automated creative classification filters. We’ve always had comprehensive controls to help publishers automatically block the types of ads that appear on their sites, and these updates will help publishers fine tune the types of ads that appear alongside their content.

Mock-ups of a racy, suggestive ad and a sensationalist ad blocked by our sensitive category controls

Creating a fair and safe marketplace for publishers

Helping publishers create sustainable businesses and continue to grow is core to our mission. That cannot happen without a healthy advertising ecosystem. By helping to stop the sale and purchase of counterfeit inventory, and giving publishers the controls to prevent unsuitable and unsafe ads from appearing next to their content, we hope to make it easier for our partners to succeed.

Posted by Pooja Kapoor
Head of Global Strategy, Programmatic and Ecosystem Health

At Google, we’ve always believed that our mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” is closely aligned with that of the media industry. Without you, there’s no information. This partnership is what sets us apart, and what fuels our commitment to helping you build thriving and sustainable businesses.

Our commitment is particularly evident in how we’re evolving DoubleClick. There’s no doubt that the dual explosions of programmatic advertising and mobile devices have ushered in a new digital era fueled by data. Today, you can be better news publishers, entertainment programmers or app developers — and make smarter content and business decisions — with the immense amount of information available to you.

We believe there is a new opportunity emerging to turn raw data into powerful insights. So, we are announcing the Insights Engine Project, an ongoing initiative to bring Google’s cloud computing and machine learning expertise to DoubleClick’s reporting and forecasting systems. We want to make it easier for you to optimize your business for success with both consumers and advertisers. Our teams have been hard at work for some time now, and today we are announcing seven features in development, many of which are already in testing with select partners.

Custom data analysis and visualization with BigQuery and Data Studio

All the data in the world is not much use if you can’t analyze it and see the results. To make this easier, we are connecting DoubleClick to two powerful Google tools — BigQuery and Data Studio. BigQuery is Google’s fully managed, petabyte scale, low cost enterprise data warehouse for analytics. Data Studio turns your data into customizable informative dashboards and reports that are easy to read and share. Both connectors are in beta now, with broad availability in early 2018.

Smarter decisions with insight cards and a new forecasting experience

Late last year, we started using Google machine learning to offer opportunities and experiments in DoubleClick for Publishers and Ad Exchange. So far, our partners have implemented more than 6,700 recommendations worth millions of dollars in new revenue.¹ Often, the most valuable insights are not simply into what has happened in your business, but also into what your peers are doing, and especially into what comes next.

In the months to come, a new set of insight cards in DoubleClick will give you information about how you are performing relative to your peers on key success metrics like ad viewability, site latency, and more. And to help you be more confident about the future, we will also be launching a new forecasting experience that includes automatic growth detection, seasonal adjustments, and easy viewing of historical data side by side with future predictions.

Audience insights for more relevant content and ads

The Insights Engine Project does not stop with business data. We also believe that helping you learn more about your audience can help you deliver more relevant and higher quality experiences. In the months to come, we will be conducting two limited tests of sharing demographic and interest insights with our partners, including using those insights to deliver more relevant ads in programmatic deals with DoubleClick Bid Manager advertisers. These tests will help us explore the best way to make ads and content more relevant for users, while ensuring their privacy and preferences are respected.

Supporting the news industry with subscription offers

Finally, subscriptions are becoming a more and more important part of the business of our partners in the news industry. So, we are also testing the application of machine learning and audience insights to the subscription business — helping you optimize the best moment to reach users when they have a higher likelihood of paying.

The first step

As we enter the next phase of digital growth, in a world that’s AI-first and where data is king, we’re excited to partner with you in new ways to drive sustainable growth beyond tomorrow into the further future. We are confident that when you have the right pieces of information in the right places, the possibilities are endless. The Insights Engine Project starts with the initiatives I have described here, but will continue into 2018 and beyond, so stay tuned to learn more about how you can start taking advantage of these new capabilities.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack Director of Product Management, Publisher Platforms

¹ DoubleClick Internal Data, Oct 2016 - Sept 2017

Cross-posted from The Keyword

At some point, we’ve all been caught off guard by an annoying ad online—like a video automatically playing at full volume, or a pop-up standing in the way to the one thing we’re trying to find. Thanks to research conducted by the Coalition for Better Ads, we now know which ad experiences rank lowest among consumers and are most likely to drive people to install ad blockers.

Ads, good and bad, help fund the open web. But 69% of people who installed ad blockers said they were motivated by annoying or intrusive ads. When ads are blocked, publishers don’t make money.

In June we launched the Ad Experience Report to help publishers understand if their site has ads that violate the Coalition’s Better Ads Standards. In just two months, 140,000 publishers worldwide have viewed the report.

“This report is great for helping publishers adapt to the Better Ads Standards. The level of transparency and data is incredibly actionable. It literally says here’s the issue, here’s how to fix it. I think it will be helpful for all publishers.”
Katya Moukhina, ‎Director of Programmatic Operations, POLITICO

We're already starting to see data trends that can give publishers insights into the most common offending ads. Here's a look at what we know so far.

It's official: Popups are the most annoying ads on the web

Pop-up ads are the most common annoying ads found on publisher sites. On desktop they account for 97% of the violations! These experiences can be bad for business: 50% of users surveyed say they would not revisit or recommend a page that had a pop-up ad.

Instead of pop-ups, publishers can use less disruptive alternatives like full-screen inline ads. They offer the same amount of screen real estate as pop-ups—without covering up any content. Publishers can find more tips and alternatives in our best practices guide.

Mobile and desktop have different issues

On mobile the issues are more varied. Pop-ups account for 54% of issues found, while 21% of issues are due to high ad density: A mobile page flooded with ads takes longer to load, and this makes it harder for people to find what they're looking for.

Most issues come from smaller sites with fewer resources

Our early reporting shows that most issues are not coming from mainstream publishers, like daily newspapers or business publications. They come from smaller sites, who often don’t have the same access to quality control resources as larger publishers.

To help these publishers improve their ads experiences, we review sites daily and record videos of the ad experiences that have been found non-compliant with the Better Ads Standards. If a site is in a “failing” or “warning” state, their Ad Experience Report will include these visuals, along with information about the Better Ad Standards and how the issues may impact their site.

We encourage all publishers to take a look at their report. Here’s how.

1. Gaining access to the report
   The Ad Experience Report is part of Google Search Console, which means you need to be a verified site owner to access it. You can either ask your webmaster to add you as an owner or user, or verify ownership yourself. Learn more.


2. Understanding the report
   If your site has been reviewed and the status is “Warning" or "Failing," the report will show videos of the ad experiences that are likely to annoy or mislead your visitors. Click on desktop or mobile reports to see the specific experiences identified.





3. Fixing the issues and requesting a review
   Once you’ve identified the violating experiences, work with your ad ops and site design teams to remove the annoying experiences. After that, describe how you addressed each of the issues in the ‘Request review’ area and click ‘I fixed this’. You’ll receive a confirmation email saying your review is in progress. Learn more.

Looking ahead

Over the next few weeks we’ll begin notifying sites with issues. For even more insights on the types of sites and violations found, publishers can visit The Ad Experience Report API.

The good news is that people don’t hate all ads—just annoying ones. Replacing annoying ads with more acceptable ones will help ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to sustain their work with online advertising. This is why we support the Coalition’s efforts to develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards and will continue working with them on the standards as they evolve.

Scott Spencer Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads

Cross-posted from The Keyword

At some point, we’ve all been caught off guard by an annoying ad online—like a video automatically playing at full volume, or a pop-up standing in the way to the one thing we’re trying to find. Thanks to research conducted by the Coalition for Better Ads, we now know which ad experiences rank lowest among consumers and are most likely to drive people to install ad blockers.

Ads, good and bad, help fund the open web. But 69% of people who installed ad blockers said they were motivated by annoying or intrusive ads. When ads are blocked, publishers don’t make money.

In June we launched the Ad Experience Report to help publishers understand if their site has ads that violate the Coalition’s Better Ads Standards. In just two months, 140,000 publishers worldwide have viewed the report.

“This report is great for helping publishers adapt to the Better Ads Standards. The level of transparency and data is incredibly actionable. It literally says here’s the issue, here’s how to fix it. I think it will be helpful for all publishers.”
Katya Moukhina, ‎Director of Programmatic Operations, POLITICO

We're already starting to see data trends that can give publishers insights into the most common offending ads. Here's a look at what we know so far.

It's official: Popups are the most annoying ads on the web

Pop-up ads are the most common annoying ads found on publisher sites. On desktop they account for 97% of the violations! These experiences can be bad for business: 50% of users surveyed say they would not revisit or recommend a page that had a pop-up ad.

Instead of pop-ups, publishers can use less disruptive alternatives like full-screen inline ads. They offer the same amount of screen real estate as pop-ups—without covering up any content. Publishers can find more tips and alternatives in our best practices guide.

Mobile and desktop have different issues

On mobile the issues are more varied. Pop-ups account for 54% of issues found, while 21% of issues are due to high ad density: A mobile page flooded with ads takes longer to load, and this makes it harder for people to find what they're looking for.

Most issues come from smaller sites with fewer resources

Our early reporting shows that most issues are not coming from mainstream publishers, like daily newspapers or business publications. They come from smaller sites, who often don’t have the same access to quality control resources as larger publishers.

To help these publishers improve their ads experiences, we review sites daily and record videos of the ad experiences that have been found non-compliant with the Better Ads Standards. If a site is in a “failing” or “warning” state, their Ad Experience Report will include these visuals, along with information about the Better Ad Standards and how the issues may impact their site.

We encourage all publishers to take a look at their report. Here’s how.

1. Gaining access to the report
   The Ad Experience Report is part of Google Search Console, which means you need to be a verified site owner to access it. You can either ask your webmaster to add you as an owner or user, or verify ownership yourself. Learn more.


2. Understanding the report
   If your site has been reviewed and the status is “Warning" or "Failing," the report will show videos of the ad experiences that are likely to annoy or mislead your visitors. Click on desktop or mobile reports to see the specific experiences identified.





3. Fixing the issues and requesting a review
   Once you’ve identified the violating experiences, work with your ad ops and site design teams to remove the annoying experiences. After that, describe how you addressed each of the issues in the ‘Request review’ area and click ‘I fixed this’. You’ll receive a confirmation email saying your review is in progress. Learn more.

Looking ahead

Over the next few weeks we’ll begin notifying sites with issues. For even more insights on the types of sites and violations found, publishers can visit The Ad Experience Report API.

The good news is that people don’t hate all ads—just annoying ones. Replacing annoying ads with more acceptable ones will help ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to sustain their work with online advertising. This is why we support the Coalition’s efforts to develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards and will continue working with them on the standards as they evolve.

Scott Spencer Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads

When we announced the beta of DoubleClick Native Ads, our goal was to help our partners earn the most money possible with ad experiences that are both engaging and complementary to the user experience. Since then, we’ve seen hundreds of partners deliver beautiful native ads that match the look, feel and function of the surrounding content. And we’ve learned that advertisers are willing to pay more for and users are more likely to engage with native ads compared to traditional ad experiences.

Today we’re happy to announce that all partners on DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) can now deliver native ads programmatically to users across any screen with DoubleClick Native Ads.

Grow your business with native ads

DoubleClick Native Ads provide a dynamic framework for delivering ad experiences that advertisers and users love. Rather than serving a static image or text ad, native ads deliver an engaging user experience by taking multiple creative components — such as a headline, thumbnail and description — and assembling them in real-time to match the style of the site or app. Partners like the New York Times are using DoubleClick Native Ads to deliver premium standalone ad experiences, increasing CTRs 6X. Accuweather is using native ads to grow programmatic yield on their existing ad placements. In fact, this strategy has improved CPMs 40%, with over 15% of their total impressions won by native-specific demand.

“DoubleClick's native product provides the perfect solution for us to increase CPMs while delivering a mobile experience that is consistent with what users expect from Accuweather,” says Bill McGarry, Vice President of Advertising Sales at Accuweather. “Since implementing DoubleClick Native Ads, we've seen a significant increase in CPMs and we look forward to expanding our investment in native.”

All of DoubleClick, one flexible native solution

With DoubleClick Native Ads, you can deliver beautiful native ads while leveraging the efficiency and scale of a single platform that works across all of your advertising inventory, sales channels and ad formats — whether they’re custom display, video or native ads.

One of DoubleClick’s strengths is the multiple ways it connects buyers and sellers. Whether it’s a Programmatic Guaranteed deal or Private Auction, DoubleClick gives you more ways to work directly with advertisers on high-value transactions — now across all of your native inventory.

We’re also helping you maximize your revenue by allowing these new formats to compete with traditional banner ads. By activating native demand across your existing ad units, you can capture the highest value from a broader group of advertisers competing to serve ads to your audience.

New tools for designing beautiful native ads

Finally, we’ve made it easier for partners to implement DoubleClick Native Ads with the launch of 22 new and customizable native styles in DFP. Though partners can also build custom integrations from scratch, these templates can serve as a great starting point.

The templates take advantage of the many new features we’ve added this year:

• Ad attribution and AdChoices badges can now overlap the primary image, removing the need to place these elements in a separate row.
• Additional style targeting options, like devices and negative key values, help you to show the right style at the right time.
• Better previews make it easier to see how your native style will look while you build it.

We’ve also developed a guide to building great native ads, with advice from Google’s design team and feedback from advertisers about the type of inventory they want to buy, to help you create beautiful and high-performing native ads.

In a world where high-quality ad experiences are more important than ever, DoubleClick Native Ads provide a solution for delivering beautiful and impactful ad experiences efficiently while helping you build thriving and sustainable businesses.

To get started with DoubleClick Native Ads, visit our Help Center or contact your account manager today.

Posted by Aaron Karp
Product Manager, DoubleClick

At DoubleClick, we've always had a single mission — to help you grow revenue and build sustainable businesses with advertising. That means ensuring we're helping you make the most revenue from every impression, with solutions that keep up with advertiser demands for more programmatic access to inventory, while at the same time delivering on the expectations of users for great experiences with your sites and apps on every screen. To that end, over the last year we launched products like Optimized Private Auctions, optimized pricing in the Open Auction and DoubleClick for Publishers First Look.

Today, we’d like share some updates on how we’re using the power of automation and machine learning to create sustainable solutions that drive greater advertising performance and revenue for our partners.

Smarter yield through machine learning

Programmatic buying has created many opportunities for publishers to maximize revenue, but optimizing manually puts publishers at a disadvantage when programmatic buyers are constantly investing in smarter bidding technology. That’s why we’ve been applying optimization and machine learning techniques developed over the years at Google to help publishers make more money from programmatic demand. In fact, since 2016 we have run hundreds of experiments resulting in over 50 improvements to our auction algorithms. These optimizations have generated 15% more revenue for publishers using DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Actionable insights with Opportunities & Experiments

Data can be an important input for making better decisions, but the best yield management strategies also include constant testing and measurement. To make this process easier, we recently launched a new Opportunites & Experiments tool that puts publishers in control of Google intelligence.

Publisher opportunities and experiments in DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange provide customized, actionable and quantifiable suggestions on how to increase yield. With a few clicks, publishers can safely run an experiment, and if they like the results, accept the change to apply it across their account. Publishers including The Soul Publishing in Russia, TV2 in Norway, and Match.com in the U.S. have grown revenue with Opportunities and Experiments.

"Opportunities and experiments lets us bypass the heavy, manual labor part of the yield optimization process. It lets us skip straight to projecting results of possible changes and testing a yield hypothesis against a control test group in a safe way. Essentially, the feature helps us find the test cases worth our time automatically, letting us focus on increasing yield and revenue,” says Mikaela Rimaila, Programmatic Manager, TV2. "Personally I’d love to do all my yield optimization through this feature, as it adds a safety layer to rule changes, easily giving us the chance to compare and analyse the effects of the test.”

"Opportunities and experiments in AdX has helped streamline our yield optimization process and boosted our indirect revenue. We receive customized suggestions to increase our yield, such as floor adjustments, and have seen significant gains as a result."
- Gregg Murphy Senior Director, Revenue Operations, Match.com

Bringing Exchange Bidding to more partners demand without compromising user experience

We’ve made a lot of progress since announcing our test of Exchange Bidding last year, and today we’re happy to announce the Open Beta of Exchange Bidding, available for publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers^* globally. Exchange Bidding helps publishers bring more of their programmatic demand together into a unified auction and the results have been impressive. On average Exchange Bidding is delivering double-digit programmatic revenue uplift, with some publishers seeing programmatic lift as high as 40% with minimal impact to user experience. Today, 100+ publishers can choose from 7 trusted third party exchanges, including our new partners, COMET, OpenX and Sovrn.

"We've been working with Google on the development of Exchange Bidding for several months now and while it's still early, we are pleased with the level of partnership and transparency we have seen from the Google team. While there are still issues to be resolved and the product is very complex, their efforts have resulted in real and positive changes to the Exchange Bidding product. Based on our experience so far, and the excellent results we have seen to date, we are optimistic that we can deliver material value to our publisher partners via Exchange Bidding."
- Jason Fairchild, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, OpenX

Driving sustainability in the future

Looking back at the results from our latest yield management improvements shows us what’s possible, but I think we can do more. We’ve shown how machine learning can deliver more value to publishers, and in the future, we’ll continue to invest in it to deliver even more innovations. Also, the work our teams have been doing on server side technologies have revealed more opportunities to improve publisher revenue by taking advantage of synergies across our products. Publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange may have noticed our first step in this direction, a unified UI for both platforms. Moving forward you should expect more innovations like these to increase publisher yield.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack Director of Product Management, Publisher Platforms

^*Exchange Bidding is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

When we announced the pilot program for Exchange Bidding last year, our goal was to help publishers earn the most money possible, with the least complexity, while maintaining the best user experience.

We’ve been working on Exchange Bidding in collaboration with our publisher and exchange partners for the last year, and today we’re happy to announce the Open Beta of Exchange Bidding, available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers^* globally. Our partners have been seeing great results during our testing, and we’d like to give you more details about this powerful enhancement to DoubleClick for Publishers.

Greater revenue without compromising user experience

When every millisecond counts, the fastest solutions yield the best results. Relying on client side connections over mobile networks to manage yield can result in annoyed users, lower viewability and lost opportunities.

That’s why we challenged ourselves and worked hard to prioritize speed during the closed Beta. To maximize revenue without compromising on user experience, we built Exchange Bidding directly into DoubleClick for Publishers.

The results speak for themselves. Publishers in our closed beta have seen double-digit programmatic revenue lift on average, with some seeing programmatic lift as high as 40%. Plus, Exchange Bidding is up to 15x faster than client side or server side solutions in the market today. While header bidding solutions add on average 500ms to 1,000ms of delay to ad delivery speed, Exchange Bidding adds only 60ms seconds of delay.

Publishers like Hearst Digital are seeing great results.

“Our goal is to move as much of our advertising code off our sites as possible. Less code loading on the client side is better. Exchange Bidding is great because it helps us move in that direction. It’s simple to setup and works with our existing DoubleClick tags.”
- Scott Both, Director of Programmatic Sales Engineering, Hearst Digital Media

Reduced complexity with all demand in one ad tag

Beyond speed and revenue lift, Exchange Bidding creates greater value for publishers by reducing the complexity of their existing yield management setups. Because Exchange Bidding is built into DoubleClick for Publishers, it works with our existing ad tags, requires no additional coding to a publisher’s site or app or additional line items cluttering up a publisher’s ad server, and puts no additional burden on users.

Instead of taking days or weeks of development and adjustments to set up, publishers can get Exchange Bidding up and running in less than a day. Instead of constantly updating the price and priority of partner line items or adding hundreds or thousands of new line items to implement header bidding, publishers simply create a handful of yield groups that define which third party exchanges can bid on specific inventory. And instead of spending days collecting reporting and billing information from multiple partners, reconciling discrepancies, and waiting to get paid, Exchange Bidding provides publishers unified reporting and consolidated billing on our standard terms.

“Integrating and maintaining client side headers is a significant investment for any publisher. Setting up server side bidding with Exchange Bidding was simple. It also helped us reduce a lot of the operational overheads associated with headers and it promises to reduce latencies and discrepancies whilst improving scalability”.
- Nat Poulter, Head of Programmatic at MailOnline

We only succeed when our partners succeed

We understand that in order to help publishers thrive we must foster a sustainable advertising ecosystem. That means creating solutions that deliver the most revenue possible for publishers, while maintaining great experiences for users, and providing all players in the industry equal access to high quality inventory.

To ensure we were getting the right feedback from all parties, we created an advisory board with members from our initial exchange partners. It’s feedback from this group that helped inform the development of Exchange Bidding and make it work better for every participant.

"We've been working with Google on the development of Exchange Bidding for several months now and while it's still early, we are pleased with the level of partnership and transparency we have seen from the Google team. While there are still issues to be resolved and the product is very complex, their efforts have resulted in real and positive changes to the Exchange Bidding product. Based on our experience so far, and the excellent results we have seen to date, we are optimistic that we can deliver material value to our publisher partners via Exchange Bidding."
- Jason Fairchild, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, OpenX

We’ve seen great results during the testing phase of Exchange Bidding. Today, 100+ publishers can choose from seven trusted third party exchanges including our new partners, COMET, OpenX and Sovrn to compete equally in a unified auction against a publisher’s direct sold campaigns in DoubleClick for Publishers and bids from DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We look forward to working with our existing and new users to make Exchange Bidding the best solution for the industry.

Posted by Sam Cox
Group Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

^*Exchange Bidding is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business