Author Archives: Melissa Horwitz

Making digital marketing faster and simpler with the new trafficking workflow

Before the new year, we discussed a number of new capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, like the audience features that allow you more deeply understand your customers, and the integrations that help streamline the tagging process. Today, we’re going to deep dive into the area that makes the execution of all of these capabilities possible: the new trafficking workflow. 

Trafficking can be one of the most labor-intensive aspects of managing digital campaigns. In fact, of the 25+ pain points agencies and marketers have across the campaign life cycle, many involve manual work like difficult-to-edit data entry and quality checks, according to a Boston Consulting Group study. Reducing the time spent on inefficient activities is crucial to maintaining a competitive advantage. We completely re-imagined the workflow that agencies and marketers use to traffic their campaigns by building a faster and more intuitive interface:

Simplifying cross-screen campaigns:
  • You no longer have to create separate ads and placements for mobile devices. Mobile is now a natural extension of your campaigns, with one campaign for all screens. 
  • Additional mobile targeting features — Platform Type, Operating System and Version, Connection Type, Mobile Carrier and Browser — enable you to serve the right message to the right user.
  • With HTML5 support, so you can create just one HTML5 creative that will serve across devices and automatically adjust to the corresponding ad size.
Faster and sleeker interface:
  • The user interface loads in a fraction of a second, and it’s up to five times faster than DFA in responding to your actions.
  • Campaign changes go live in just minutes, whether it’s changing ad targeting or updating creatives. With a faster time-to-live window, you can QA and modify campaigns and rest assured they’ll go live in a fraction of the time.
Easier to use with a redesigned workflow: 
  • A single-page view of all campaign elements allows you to see placement, ad, creative, and tag information in one place. You no longer need to flip through multiple tabs and risk losing your place while navigating across your campaigns. 
  • Efficient assignment workflow makes it much easier to assign multiple placements, ads, and creatives all at once. In fact, the number of clicks to perform common trafficking tasks has been reduced by several orders of magnitude.
  • Bulk edits allow you to change multiple object properties at once, significantly reducing the amount of time it takes to make changes to your campaigns. For example, with bulk name editing, you can make mass naming convention changes, like adding a prefix or suffix, across multiple entities in seconds. And with in-line edits, it’s easier to edit placements, ads, and creative details from the campaign view, without going to a property page.
  • Event tags help you streamline the process of applying and managing pixels in bulk across campaigns or groups of campaigns.
  • You can customize and save your campaign view to your workflow needs, with any combination or grouping of columns. This makes it easy to work your own way.
  • Built-in reporting dimensions make it easy to QA campaigns, with impression and click data directly in the trafficking interface. 
  • A new timezone selector makes it easy to traffic global campaigns without manual time conversions.
Power users from Situation Interactive - Mara Winkler, Senior Media Planner, and Joyce Tse, Media Coordinator - told us about the benefits they’re seeing from using the new trafficking interface: “With the upgrade to DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we’ve been able to streamline the trafficking process. The new trafficking workflow makes it easy to edit everything without switching pages, and allows us to use our time more efficiently. For example, when we swap creative it’s an extremely easy and intuitive process, and changes are reflected almost immediately. This helps us to ensure that the correct creative is running at all times.”

Watch the webinar, under “Learn about DCM”, where we live demoed these new features, and many more.

If you're an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Ian Fulton, Product Manager

Exploring the value of integrated digital marketing platforms

Today, marketers and agencies have countless opportunities to engage audiences with rich formats across channels and devices. And to help them capture the full opportunity, they have an abundance of ad technology solutions to choose from. In fact, the average number of ad tech platforms deployed by organizations grew from 4.3 to 4.7 this year.1

But marketers also know the real opportunity lies in creating unified, cross-channel digital experiences that span multiple touchpoints. 75% of marketers and agencies believe that an integrated platform can meet all their marketing needs - a 23% increase from 2012. And they believe the benefits range from improved customer insights, better campaign performance, and more efficient use of marketing resources.

In our new collection of insights, “Exploring the Value of Integrated Platforms,” you can see how top marketers and agencies are approaching unified buying to transform their businesses and maximize the impact of their marketing. In this collection, you can see how marketers are investing in integrated ad technology platforms to unlock the full potential of digital marketing for their organizations. We look at the latest trends in adoption, case studies and perspectives from industry leaders to answer questions like: What do today’s organizations want from digital marketing platforms? What is the value of an integrated digital platform? How are marketers investing in newly available technologies? How are they measuring success?

In the coming weeks, we will add more research, best practices and perspectives to the collection. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

1 "Unraveling the Digital Display Industry: Understanding the Tools and Benefits of Digital Marketing", DoubleClick by Google, Dec. 2013

Making tagging easy in DoubleClick Campaign Manager

Last week we dove into the new audience capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager that enable you to define, reach, and more deeply understand your customers. Tags plays a critical role in this process, as they allow you to track and measure the impact of your advertising. Today, we’ll dive into how we’re making tagging a much easier and more streamlined part of your digital marketing campaign management.

As it stands today, tagging is one of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of digital campaign management. In fact, on average, marketers host 14 tags on their sites, 68% of which are third-party. Implementing these tags often involves back-and-forth emails, implementation that can take weeks or months, and a lack of transparency about which tags are installed where. And when tags are implemented incorrectly, it can cause further campaign delays and additional implementation cycles.

We recently introduced two features that will greatly reduce the inefficiencies involved in tagging your campaigns: DoubleClick’s integration with Google Tag Manager, and Tag Assistant.

Making conversion tagging easy with Google Tag Manager integration

To streamline the conversion tagging process, DoubleClick Campaign Manager is now integrated with Google Tag Manager, Google’s free tag management solution. With Google Tag Manager, rather than implementing many individual tags across your site, you can implement one site-wide container tag that uses rules to determine which Google and third-party tracking and measurement tags to dynamically fire. The integration allows you to easily push DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag - Floodlight - directly to Google Tag Manager, making tag deployment faster and and more efficient, while still respecting current campaign management roles.


Deploy tags more quickly: You can push Floodlight tags with one click to Google Tag Manager, reducing implementation time from weeks or even months to minutes. This means you’ll save time, and your campaigns can go live faster. Once your tags are implemented, you can update them in the Google Tag Manager interface in minutes, and you will see these tags deployed on your site within 15 minutes or less. The tags are fired asynchronously, which means they load without blocking other elements on the page from loading, enabling sites to load faster during high-traffic times.



Implement tags more efficiently: With Google Tag Manager, you can rest assured your conversion tags are implemented correctly, as there is only one site-wide contain tag to implement. This helps reduce human error and ensures accurate data is recorded, thanks to rules within Google Tag Manager that determine which tracking and measurement tags to dynamically fire. And you will be able to deploy Floodlight tags across both mobile and desktop pages, making the experience consistent across all devices.


Respect tagging roles: We recognize that different roles within your organization may be responsible for each step of the tagging process. Our goal with this integration was to respect these roles and give you tools to implement tags correctly as quickly as possible. Advertisers still have control over which conversion tags are pushed to Google Tag Manager, and webmasters still have control over which tags go on the page, as they can approve or reject tags within Google Tag Manager.


Simplifying ad tagging with Tag Assistant

Beyond simplifying conversion tagging, we’re also improving how you implement ad tags. One of these initiatives is Tag Assistant, which aims at simplifying the QA process.

Tag Assistant is a Chrome extension that automatically validates the implementation of Google tags on any of your pages. The tool is designed for you to checks tags on the fly and escalate more complex or in-depth issues to support teams.


How it works: Tag Assistant has a predefined list of implementation checks to perform for each tag. When the web page loads, Tag Assistant scans the page, compares your tag implementation against the correct/standard implementation, and cross-references the list of implementation checks. If your tag is implemented correctly, Tag Assistant returns a green status. When a problem is found, a red status is returned along with recommendations and support documentation. The tool not only supports DoubleClick ad tags, but Google Tag Manager, AdWords, and Google Analytics tags as well.

If you're an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

A deep dive into the new audience features in DoubleClick Campaign Manager


Understanding your audience is key to delivering them relevant and compelling messages. In DoubleClick Campaign Manager - the upgraded version of DFA - there are a number of new capabilities to help you define, reach, and more deeply understand your audience, so you can engage them in even more powerful ways. We announced some of these audience features when DoubleClick Campaign Manager launched globally, and today we are going to deep dive into the capabilities.

Define your audience with powerful segmentation tools

With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, you can build segments to define your target audience based on specific actions your customers took, like viewing a certain product on your website, or adding items to their shopping cart. You can also build segments based on combinations of data available in Floodlight custom variables. For example, you can segment users with cart values over a certain amount but who did not check out. Best of all, we’ve enabled existing Floodlight tags to be compatible with building segments, so there’s no need to re-tag in order to take advantage of these features.

Reach your audience with powerful targeting tools

Once you’ve built your audience segments, you can leverage them in real time across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. Segments are shared and synced automatically with DoubleClick Bid Manager, allowing you to apply audience insights to engage your audience across your reserved and programmatic buys. For example, you can combine your first-party segments with powerful keyword-contextual and audience targeting capabilities available in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

And with Dynamic Creative pushed from DoubleClick Studio, a single ad template can support millions of iterations, rotating creative elements like background color, headlines, product images, product descriptions, calls-to-action, and pricing. We optimize to the best combination of variables for each audience segment over time, providing the “perfect ad” for each impression.

Understand your audience with deeper insights

Surfacing strategic insights is crucial for optimizing your campaigns. So we introduced new audience performance reporting that brings audience dimensions to all standard reports. This means all campaign metrics, such as clicks or impressions, can be aggregated or filtered by audience characteristics or specific first-party lists. These reports help you answer questions like, “Did my publisher deliver to the audience that we wanted to target?” and “How many impressions did I deliver to my first-party remarketing list versus everywhere else?” As a result, you can better understand the audience segments with which your message resonated most, and use that information to optimize your campaigns.

DoubleClick Bid Manager customers can also report on audience segments created as part of their reservations buy (and see how they overlap with their third-party lists) with the Audience Composition Report available in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

We are continuing to build powerful audience capabilities into DoubleClick Campaign Manager that enable marketers and agencies to deliver the right message to the right user, on any device.

Next week, join us for a deep dive on the tagging capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Adam Champy, Product Manager

What industry leaders value in a digital marketing platform

A few months ago, we launched the new version of DFA - DoubleClick Campaign Manager - globally.

The launch coincided with DFA’s 15th anniversary, so we wanted to use this opportunity to hear from some of our longtime partners. Surely, the world has changed since the early days of DFA, 15 years ago. With new opportunities to reach consumers in more ways than ever, come many new challenges for digital marketers. And marketing platforms must continuously evolve to meet the demands of a shifting and ever-growing industry. 

We asked industry leaders Kurt Unkel, President of Product & Solutions at VivaKi, Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, and Angelina Eng, VP of Digital Media Ops at Carat what they value in a platform in this day and age, and how DoubleClick has evolved to address those needs. Here’s what they told us:
  • Efficiency, reliability, and simplicity are crucial to helping marketers streamline the campaign management process. Kurt Unkel said, ”What we get with DoubleClick that we struggle to see anywhere else is simplicity - the ability to integrate a lot of disparate technologies into a common stack. That’s something that really makes a difference in our business, because it allows us to focus on the bigger, strategic things.”
  • Marketers need integration across channels and screens, and to be able to track and execute across their efforts within one system. Angelina Eng notes, “When we talk about all of these different things that are coming out - verification, video, mobile - how do make that work all together? A company that’s embracing that is one that we want to work with.” 
  • Platforms must help marketers gain more actionable insights and act on them in real-time. “We have almost too much data at our disposal,” Megan Moldovan tells us, “and it can sometimes be hard to sift through all of that information and understand what it really means, and particularly understand what everything means when you look at it together.”


    With DoubleClick, we are investing in tools to help your digital teams work more efficiently to maximize your results across channels and screens. 

    In the coming weeks and months we will deep dive into many of the new product features available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Stay tuned to the blog to learn about the new tools that will simplify digital, help you engage across channels, and enable better decisions.

    If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.