Author Archives: Melissa Horwitz

with DoubleClick: T-Mobile increases creative effectiveness across screens using HTML5

This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

T-Mobile is one of the largest mobile providers in the US. As a cutting-edge company, it was fitting that they create a cutting-edge brand experience when it came time to showcase the powerful new Samsung Galaxy S5.


The team was looking to maximize reach on mobile devices for the digital campaign. But ads built using Flash - the animation standard for many years - was a big obstacle in getting mobile reach, as the format won’t render on mobile at all. So instead of engaging with rich ads, mobile users are served a static backup image. With over 25% of all global web usage occurring on smartphones or tablets*, that's a bad experience for users, and lost opportunity for advertisers.

T-Mobile, along with its agencies, Publicis Seattle and Optimedia, turned to the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, and built rich, engaging HTML5 creatives to solve this shortcoming. HTML5 is a universal language for display ads that ensures they render seamlessly across any screen - smartphone, tablet, or desktop. Beyond improving campaign reach, the team would no longer need to build separate creative assets for desktop and mobile, saving lots of creative time and resources.

They then targeted a tech-savvy audience across devices. Optimedia was even able to target users of competing mobile providers, to entice them to switch to T-Mobile, thanks to the targeting capabilities available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.


T-Mobile's campaign results confirmed the power of HTML5:
  • Eliminated 85% of all instances of static mobile creatives. There was a 1.1% creative backup rate on HTML5 impressions, versus 7.3% for Flash.
  • Mobile CTR was 400% that of desktop. The team believes this improved result was due largely to HTML5 providing a more richly engaging experience for more mobile users.
  • Equal or better performances than Flash desktop ads in key conversion categories. Once on T-mobile.com, users who had clicked on HTML5 smartphone ads were just as likely or more likely than Flash desktop users to explore content, interact, and show intent to purchase.
  • Lower serving fees. "HTML5 uses cloud technology, so its file sizes are much smaller than Flash," says Nelson Fortier. "This results in lower ad serving fees, saving T-Mobile valuable media dollars."
Armed with these results, T-Mobile and Publicis Seattle have begun using HTML5 for other campaigns with DoubleClick.

"We saw a huge difference with HTML5 compared to similarly-targeted Flash banners," says Nelson Fortier of Publicis Seattle. "It’s compelling proof that with HTML5 and DoubleClick, T-Mobile's reach on both desktop and mobile devices far eclipsed that of Flash-based ads."

To learn more about the team's approach and results, check out the full case study here.

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* "2014 Internet Trends," by Mary Meeker. Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, Byers, May, 2014.  http://goo.gl/DxrLAJ

with DoubleClick: Neo@Ogilvy drives 38% higher ROI for major hotel chain

This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

Neo@Ogilvy, Ogilvy & Mather’s global media agency, manages the digital performance and media strategy for some of the world’s most innovative and respected brands.

The Neo@Ogilvy team needed the right tools in place to execute on clever, innovative campaigns for their clients, in addition to a better understanding the impact of their campaigns. To focus on these more strategic activities, they needed to change how their team worked, by spending less time on manual tasks that were time-consuming and inefficient.

They started using DoubleClick Digital Marketing to streamline the end-to-end campaign management process. With an intuitive interface that lets you view all campaign information from a single page, the platform has freed up 40 hours of Account Executive time per week - that is one full hire. Javier Oliete Vivas, Manager Director at Neo@Ogilvy told us, “DoubleClick Digital Marketing enables us to standardize analysis and have just one single approach, one way of analyzing all channels.”


Beyond the time and resource savings, the efficiencies from using a unified platform led to real campaign performance gains. Neo@Ogilvy was able to optimize their campaigns in real-time with clean, fresh cross-channel data, resulting in tremendous uplift. For one client, a major hotel chain, their conversion rate improved by 400%, and their ROI increased by 38% after moving onto the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. At the same time, their CPA improved 40%.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, watch the video below.


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with DoubleClick: How Media Partnership helped leading health care firm decrease CPA by 25%

This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.
A leading health care firm turned to Media Partnership, an Interpublic Group media agency, to help them increase online health insurance applications, and better understand where to invest its digital marketing dollars. Media Partnership was already using the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to reach prospective customers with relevant messages across search and display.

In order to make the best decisions about how to allocate budget, the team needed to understand the path of exposure across channels that led to a conversion. They began using DoubleClick attribution tools, like the Path to Conversion report. Greg Young, media strategy supervisor at Media Partnership, said, "It gave us very interesting insights into the consumer journey and allowed us to develop an understanding of how certain vendors or media executions affected the end conversion."

This understanding helped the team move beyond last-click attribution, which gives all of the credit for a conversion to the last click before a conversion occurs. The team then began experimenting with the Attribution Modeling Tool to build custom models. They defined exactly how they wanted to apply different credits to different interactions, analyzed the implication on channel performance, and reallocated budget.

Just three months after beginning to adjust spend and media tactics based on their attribution analysis, the team doubled the conversion rate for the campaign, resulting in many more online health insurance applications. At the same time, they were able to drive down overall CPA by 25%.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, check out the full case study here.

with DoubleClick: 20% boost in revenue for Chain Reaction Cycles

This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

Net Media Planet - traditionally an SEM agency with a proven record in paid search marketing - was looking to expand its services and grow its business. They adopted the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, starting with DoubleClick Search. The tool allowed the agency to work more efficiently and increase search performance for its clients. Building on this, they then expanded to display using programmatic buying on the platform to access new revenue streams and boost performance.

Chain Reaction Cycle - the world’s largest online bike retailer - is a key client who benefited from streamlining its operations. With all their data in one place, the team was able to really focus on identifying strategic opportunities. As a result, they increased revenue by 20%, and increased the number of clicks per month by 35%.


“Growing a search management agency can be challenging, being a very saturated sector, standing out is hard”, notes Luke Judge, Sales and Marketing Director for Net Media Planet. Not only did the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform allow the agency to work more efficiently and improve performance, but the tool also allowed the agency to unlock new opportunities for its clients.

Display now accounts for 20% of Net Media Planet’s revenues, and projections for future growth are more than positive: “We expect this to grow 70% year on year for the next 2-3 years”, says Luke.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, watch the video below and check out the full case study here.

with DoubleClick: AlmapBBDO helps increase sales by 56% for Gol Airlines

This is the first customer spotlight in the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

Brazilian airline Gol Linhas Aéreas had a goal to increase ticket sales by engaging the country’s thriving online market of 100 million people. Along with their agency, AlmapBBDO, they recognized they needed a better understanding of how their digital ads were reaching and influencing potential fliers across channels. Using the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, they were able to integrate workflows, create targeted messages, and measure the overall impact of their campaigns, resulting in a 56% increase in Gol’s sales.


In order to reach more travelers and increase ticket sales for Gol, the team was looking to gain a unified view of its marketing and customers. They began using the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to bring all of their digital efforts together. "Before the arrival of DoubleClick, we had to implement everything from zero. We never had a single vision of the campaign," says Ana Cester, Almap’s Director of Insights and Analytics. DoubleClick gave them that single vision by integrating their workflows and insights across the creation, execution, and measurement of their campaigns for search, programmatic and reservations display, and rich media.

And with fresh, cross-channel data in one place, Almap and Gol began digging into the powerful DoubleClick attribution tools. With a better understanding of the customer journey, and which channels were driving conversions, the team was able to make more strategic decisions about where to spend its digital marketing dollars.

Since adopting the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, Gol’s sales increased by 56% from the previous year, and the company doubled its ad spend return.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, watch the video below and check out the full case study here.

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… with DoubleClick



Digital has redefined our daily lives - changing how we stay informed, shop, communicate, and stay entertained. The essence of this is captured in the video above, where even high school basketball games will never be the same. 

For marketers, this means new opportunities to reach more consumers in more ways. They must focus on delivering the right message to the right user at the right time on the right screen. To achieve this, many brands and agencies are turning to integrated marketing platforms to help them save time, achieve better campaign performance, and make better decisions. 

To both celebrate and learn from the success advertisers are having, we are launching with DoubleClick, a weekly series where we’ll highlight success stories and perspectives about how advertisers are changing the ways their teams work, seeing better performance, and making better decisions with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.

Today, we’ll start by shining a light on a recent study, “Adding Data, Boosting Impact”, where the Boston Consulting Group found that advertisers and agencies are leaving opportunity on the table because of inexperience with new capabilities, inconsistent campaign execution, and a fragmented approach to campaign development and delivery.

The good news is, when marketers use advanced data-driven techniques, they are seeing major uplifts in performance and engagement. For example, the brands in the study saw a 32% average decrease in cost per action. To achieve these kinds of results, the study identifies five critical steps marketers should take. 

The first step is adopting a unified technology platform. Marketers need de-duplicated conversions and cross-channel data. They need to be able to buy, execute, and optimize campaigns across screens in order to create the most compelling consumer experience. And more and more we are seeing advertisers and agencies turn to unified platforms, like DoubleClick Digital Marketing, to bring all their digital efforts together, simplify their strategies, and attack the fragmentation that exists today. 

Next week, look out for our first with DoubleClick customer spotlight: AlmapBBDO and what they did to increase sales by 56% for Gol Airlines.

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Introducing DoubleClick Planning: unifying cross-channel planning and buying

Starting today, DoubleClick clients will have a brand new way to manage their planning and buying: DoubleClick Planning. In today’s fragmented media landscape, marketers need a simple way to put their dollars to work across channels and screens, whether the media is bought programmatically or traditionally. DoubleClick Planning begins to unify programmatic and traditional reservation inventory management, enabling you to carry out all of your buys in one place. 

We will host a live webinar (register here) and discuss the feature at IAB MIXX, but in the meantime, we chatted with Adam Champy, lead Product Manager for DoubleClick Planning, to hear his thoughts on the changing digital media landscape and thinking behind DoubleClick Planning.

Q: What is the vision for DoubleClick Planning?
A: Marketers can only make better decisions if they are looking at their media plans holistically - across all channels and screens. Our goal is to help marketers and agencies make smarter buying decisions, seamlessly coordinate with inventory providers, and ultimately drive better campaign performance. To achieve this, we had to rethink how buyers and sellers communicate - challenging today’s methods and timelines in the traditional RFP process. The vision for DoubleClick Planning is to help marketers and agencies do just this: plan, discover, and acquire inventory in one place, across channels and screens. 

Q: How does DoubleClick Planning fit in today’s digital media buying landscape?
A: We are seeing that digital media teams today are trying to break down the silos that are in the way of making fast, smart decisions. One critical divide has been between channels and media - as specialized teams and platforms were built to tackle one particular piece of the digital marketing puzzle - such as programmatic-, mobile-, or video-specific platforms. As a result, most products in the market today don’t help marketers and agencies actually make decisions across channels and all types of buys.

We started to address this with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, built to unify the process and enable a true cross-media customer experience. Now, DoubleClick Planning is a tool within the platform that brings together reservations and programmatic capabilities to help marketers and agencies discover and buy the best inventory, regardless of how it is bought. DoubleClick Planning was built to help teams work better together, across the customer journey, with the following features:

Today
  • Two-way sync between planning and campaign execution 
    • Most of the information required to traffic campaigns is already generated during the planning process. Now you can take advantage of that, with the seamless integration of planning and campaign execution, by pushing campaign information directly into trafficking.
  • Efficient Request for Proposal (RFP) process
    • Create, issue, and track RFPs so publishers can provide inventory options that meet your goals. You can also track negotiations and publisher provided inventory electronically.
  • IO management and billing actualization
    • Create order documents like insertion orders and change orders with custom terms and contracts. And create billing actualization reports to measure delivery against contracted amounts.
In the next few months
  • Unified Alerts
    • Automatically get alerts and notifications about discrepancies between planning and trafficking, including under-delivery and verification errors.
  • Integrating DoubleClick Insights 
    • Learn from previous campaign data and optimize media allocation across channels and inventory sources with auto-generated insights built directly into DoubleClick Planning.
Q: What is the plan for MediaVisor?
A: MediaVisor has served our customers well over the years, but this new world of buying and planning requires new tools. We’ll be winding down support for MediaVisor by the end of 2014 and working with our customers to transition them to the new tool

Q: Looking ahead, what are the major opportunities for digital planners and buyers in the next year?
A: First, there is a major opportunity to make media planning and buying even more efficient. For example, in the next few months, we’ll be bringing automation to traditional reservations. The elements that make products like DoubleClick Bid Manager so powerful - direct access to inventory, zero-discrepancy clearing, and buyer data and targeting - will become available for guaranteed reservation deals. 

Second, marketers will begin to consolidate their insights across channels and screens, building one, integrated media plan across all types of buys. Whether a published proposed inventory or you are buying on an exchange, you will be able to put together a multi-channel plan, and get a unified view of your inventory portfolio.

Faster and more efficient cross-channel planning will enable more responsive strategies, better discoverability of unique inventory sources, and ultimately, better campaign performance.

Learn more about DoubleClick Planning by registering for our webinar with the product team, which will include a live demo and time for Q&A.

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Broader views and faster action for marketers: Google Analytics Premium integrates with DoubleClick Digital Marketing

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics blog

“With Google, we’re getting actionable insights, whereas before we were just getting a lot of data.”
- Lee Pinnington, Multi-Channel Marketing Director, Matalan

As we announced earlier this week, Google Analytics Premium is now integrated with both DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. This enhancement is now available for Google Analytics Premium customers.

Today's consumers move easily across many channels and devices on their journey to a purchase. Top marketers rely on the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to run the sophisticated cross-channel ad campaigns that can reach their customers every step of the way. This new step gives Google Analytics Premium users even better ways to see the full customer journey, so they can adjust and make the most of marketing dollars across all channels and devices. 

The integration is providing a whole new level of visibility for display advertising by reporting on view-through visits in addition to click-through visits.  We're now reporting detailed post-view and post-click engagement and conversion metrics to offer a better view of your strongest opportunities.

1. A clearer view of the customer journey
Display campaigns are typically used in the upper funnel, so they don't get credit in simplistic last-click attribution models. But better attribution models can give full credit to display and other top-of-funnel marketing tools. With the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration you can link your DoubleClick Campaign Manager campaign information into Google Analytics Premium reports, Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) and/or Data-Driven Attribution (DDA), and as a result, you'll see a much more holistic view of how display works together with other channels to drive site engagement and conversions.  

“This gives us the ability to see the hidden power of different channels. One of the most interesting things about the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration has been around assisted conversions. It’s really helpful to see how one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel.”
 - Adam McCann, Online Search & Affiliate Assistant, Matalan

2. Better investment decisions
With a complete view of the customer journey, you can make smarter decisions on how to allocate your marketing spend. This change helps Google Analytics Premium customers analyze campaigns and ROI at the level that matters to them most, even down to specific versions of creative. It's even easier now to act on this data in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, since Google Analytics Premium uses the same campaign hierarchy and dimensions as DoubleClick Campaign Manager. 

3. Greater speed
The integration with DoubleClick Campaign Manager means you can spend less time merging campaign data and more time planning winning strategies.  We've also made this integration easier, starting with new automatic campaign tagging within DoubleClick for Google Analytics Premium. In the past you had to manually tag every single campaign, creative and landing page URL for them to be recognized in Google Analytics Premium. Now, in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, a simple checkbox makes it incredibly easy to accurately track those campaigns in Google Analytics Premium. 

4. Automated and customized marketing
Advertisers are seeing great results with Google Analytics remarketing, for example, Watchfinder revealed a 1300% return on their campaign investment. We’re improving these tools by enabling you to create granular remarketing lists from your Google Analytics Premium account and then share the lists with a DoubleClick Bid Manager advertiser account for real-time remarketing. Plus, Google Analytics Smart Lists feature also works with this integration, allowing you to generate a remarketing list of your best users automatically, based on machine learning from their conversion data. 

We added Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration this year in order to further optimize our strongest lead generating campaigns. 70% of our display leads come from our retargeting campaigns, and the Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration allows us to move beyond optimizing by site and creative, to quickly personalizing creatives - optimizing using our knowledge of distinct visitor segments not just generic visits.  
- Melissa Shusterman, Strategic Engagement Director, MaassMedia

The amazing changes in customer journeys are opening up real opportunities for businesses. Making the most of those opportunities starts with seeing the journey more clearly, then reacting quickly to reach the right customers at the right moments with messages that are designed just for them. This new integration is designed to help Google Analytics Premium customers do all those things. We’re just getting started as we’re planning deeper integrations within DoubleClick Digital Marketing in the coming months so stay tuned!

Learn more today and get started
Find out more about the Google Analytics Premium integrations with DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager.  And download a case study. 

Posted by: Ravi Mruthyunjaya, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Join us for a conversation on the future of digital advertising

Digital is no longer just another marketing channel. It’s a medium that’s changing the art of storytelling and reinventing the way companies connect with consumers.

How will digital advertising evolve next? You’re invited to tune in live as industry leaders tackle the question at DoubleClick’s annual event on digital trends.

Speakers include:
  • Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation
  • Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer at Google
  • Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising at Google

Wednesday, June 4
9:30 am PDT - 10:45 am PDT / 12:30 pm EDT - 1:45 pm EDT

Time not convenient? When you register you’ll receive a link to watch the recording on demand.

We hope you can join!

Here’s footage from last year’s event to give you a taste of the 2014 live stream:


Insights at your fingertips, for more effective campaigns

Today we are excited to announce Insights, a brand new, beautiful reporting tool that provides marketers and agencies with auto-generated insights about campaign performance across channels to help optimize future campaigns.

To ensure their messages are seen by the right users, today, advertisers spend hours analyzing data, or digging through spreadsheets to find meaningful campaign insights. It shouldn’t be this way. In today’s constantly connected world, where we reach consumers across many screens and channels, real-time, actionable insights are more critical than ever. However, fragmented tools and reporting are major pain points that prevent this, according to a study conducted with the Boston Consulting Group.

Actionable insights at a glance

The Insights tool allows advertisers to view campaign performance at a glance, without having to dig through data or build complex reports manually. You can learn about campaign factors that you undervalued, or ones you may have overlooked. This new tool helps you answer questions like:
  • Which publisher had the lowest cost-per-action (CPA) in previous campaigns for the same advertiser?
  • What time of day generates the highest cost-per-click (CPC)?
  • How does campaign performance vary by mobile platform?
  • Do certain creatives perform better on certain browsers?
  • Am I maximizing exposure on high-performing placements?
Interactive design for faster and more efficient media planning 

Real-time visualizations and graphs replace manual spreadsheets, showing you detailed information faster. The new Insights tool in reporting is highly interactive, with the ability to drill down based on the following:
  • Dimensions
    • Publisher; Placement; Creative; Geo; Platform type; Browser
  • Goals
    • Click-through rate; Cost per click; Conversions per impression; Conversions per click; Cost per activity; Rich media interaction rate; Rich media click rate; Video completion rate
Over the coming weeks and months, you will see more and more dimensions added into the tool that will help you surface key insights for smarter campaign management.

Insights across channels

This new tool includes data across both reservations and programmatic buys. Today, the data is presented together across channels, and in the coming months, we will provide data that is broken out between your reservations and programmatic buys.



Matthew McIntyre, Senior Media Manager at Unique Digital, told us about the benefits they are seeing with the new tool:
“The new Insights tool is really exciting for us as an agency because it lets us see where and how we can make improvements in our campaigns almost immediately. The customizable goals and visualizations allow us to tailor the dashboard for every campaign and instantly make decisions which will drive better results for our clients. The insight provided on performance gives our planners more time and clearer data to make future media plans faster and with more clarity on how to drive the best performance.”
Our goal with DoubleClick Digital Marketing is to integrate your digital marketing efforts seamlessly, so your teams can effectively manage your cross-channel campaigns. With data that is fresh, de-duplicated, and auto-generated, the Insights tool takes us a step closer to this goal. 

Insights is available to all DoubleClick Campaign Manager customers, globally, so if you’re still using DoubleClick for Advertisers, ask your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Oren Mor, Product Manager, DoubleClick