Author Archives: Nicole Burgan

Luxury Automakers, Ads from Big Game Hit It Big on YouTube Ads Leaderboard

The YouTube Ads Leaderboard showcases the most creative ads that people choose to watch each month.

Last month’s Leaderboard revealed the ads that were getting the most buzz leading up to the big game. This month we look at those that are continuing to capture consumers’ attention long after the final whistle, including Chrysler and Bob Dylan’s “America’s Import,” Coca-Cola’s “America Is Beautiful” and Microsoft’s “Empowering.” We also welcome some new players to the Leaderboard; luxury automakers grabbed the interest of consumers with the U.S. launch of Maserati’s Ghibli and Hennessey’s demonstration of the world’s fastest legal street car.

See who else made the list and watch the videos on Think with Google.

Ads are determined for the YouTube Ads Leaderboard by an algorithm that factors in paid views, organic views and audience retention (how much of a video people watched). For additional coverage of the YouTube Ads Leaderboard, go to Adweek.com.

Holiday results: VivaKi Search Hub increases conversions by 360 percent and decreases costs by 27 percent with real-time bid optimization

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog

During the 2013 holidays, we shared some tips and tricks on how to adjust your bid strategies to take advantage of seasonal opportunities. Today, we wanted to take a look back and highlight one of our holiday success stories with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite for real-time bid optimization. The following story comes from the VivaKi Search Hub -- VivaKi’s marketing support service that uses a deep knowledge of DoubleClick Search to drive results for their advertisers’ search programs.  

One of the VivaKi Search Hub’s advertisers, a large retail brand, looked to the team to overhaul their current strategies for maximizing results over the 2013 Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days. To prepare for this peak time, the team turned to the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite to automate bids based on real-time conversion data, and respond immediately to market changes. 

Timothy Lackhouse, Team Lead for Bid Strategy at the VivaKi Search Hub, was in charge of managing the advertiser’s bid strategies. “The bid strategies in DoubleClick Search are incredibly clear to set up and modify,” said Lackhouse. “With near real-time and granular reporting, we don’t need to spend countless hours or days waiting for the data. We’re able to get a deep level of insight into our performance right away -- assessing what’s working, what’s not, and making tweaks as necessary.” 

Within days of launching the new bid strategies, the positive results were irrefutable. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the VivaKi Search Hub was able to increase its advertiser’s conversions by 360 percent while lowering CPO by 27 percent -- all while saving 90 minutes a day. 

To get the full scoop on the VivaKi Search Hub’s success with the Performance Bidding Suite, read the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog and Google+ page for even more customer success stories.

Investing in a cleaner, more accountable web with spider.io

Advertising helps fund the digital world we love today -- inspiring videos, informative websites, entertaining apps and services that connect us with friends around the world. But this vibrant ecosystem only flourishes if marketers can buy media online with the confidence that their ads are reaching real people, that results they see are based on actual interest. To grow the pie for everyone, we need to take head on the issue of online fraud.

This is a fight we’ve taken seriously from the beginning. Over the years, we’ve invested significantly in the technology and talent to prevent fraud and create greater accountability online. For example, we put extensive resources towards keeping bad actors out of our ad systems -- last year alone, we turned down millions of applications from sites looking to join our network because of suspected fraudulent activity. We also introduced new measurement tools, like MRC-accredited Active View, which lets advertisers buy only those ads that are viewable on a page. Active View offers greater peace of mind to all media buyers, but is especially important for brand marketers who want to know, first and foremost, that their ad has a chance to be seen.

Today we’re announcing our latest investment: we’ve completed an acquisition of spider.io, a company that has spent the past 3 years building a world-class ad fraud fighting operation.

Our immediate priority is to include their fraud detection technology in our video and display ads products, where they will complement our existing efforts. Over the long term, our goal is to improve the metrics that advertisers and publishers use to determine the value of digital media and give all parties a clearer, cleaner picture of what campaigns and media are truly delivering strong results. Also, by including spider.io’s fraud fighting expertise in our products, we can scale our efforts to weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem.

Of course, this is not an issue we’re fighting alone. We applaud industry efforts like the IAB’s Traffic of Good Intent (TOGI) task force, which also play a critical role, as well as major commitments from others in the space. As an industry, we can address this issue and block those who seek to game the system. We can make digital the platform of choice for all marketers -- including brands -- to invest.  And we can offer accountable media for all; we’re excited to take this big next step.

-- Neal Mohan, VP, Display Advertising

Shopping campaigns now available to all advertisers around the world

Last year, we introduced Shopping campaigns to a limited number of advertisers as a new, retail-centric way to manage and promote your products on Google. It allows you to browse your inventory directly in AdWords, streamlining how you organize, bid and report on your Product Listing Ads.

We received great feedback from advertisers so far, who say that Shopping campaigns help them save time organizing their inventory and discovering new opportunities to optimize and grow their traffic online. Here are just a few things we’re hearing from retailers.

  • "We're very excited about the opportunities that come with Shopping campaigns. It makes life easier for retailers who want to get more granular with their targeting, solving many problems that exist today. Its features help clients manage, exclude and prioritize their products and can help clients continue to see increased ROI on PLAs in the future." - Todd Bowman, Product Manager, RKG

  • "Thanks to Shopping campaigns, our 8000+ product catalog is manageable now. The advanced competitive metrics, such as impression share and benchmark max. CPC, really help us manage bids efficiently." - Nick Carter, Director of Marketing & Sales, ValuePetSupplies

  • "The transition was very easy. We quickly created product groups for the top 25 brands and a ‘top sellers’ strategy and saw a 6% reduction in CPC and a 13% increase in conversion rate. The combined benefit of these two improvements alone has meant our CPA has reduced by 20% since we launched Shopping campaigns." - Rich Brown, Head of PPC, Farfetch

  • “Transitioning our customer AllesRahmen.de to the new Shopping campaigns was the best decision. They not only saved us time, but the additional information on benchmark CTRs and max CPCs also helped us to optimize the campaign efficiently, lowering our CPA by 88%.” - Melanie Lang, Head of SEA, Beyond Media

  • "Shopping campaigns definitely gave us more control over our bidding, helping us quadruple our click-through rate, reduce our cost-per-order by two-thirds, and increase our conversion rate by 88% year on year." - Shira Reineking, Head of Campaign Management Online Business, real, - 

Starting today, Shopping campaigns are now available to all advertisers around the world.

Based on feedback from early adopters, Shopping campaigns also now allow you to bulk edit your product groups at scale. API support and a bid simulator are coming soon. We’ll continue to build out support for Shopping campaigns, working closely with external agencies and search management platforms as well.

Learn how to get started with the help of a few resources:

Need additional assistance? We’re happy to help. Feel free to visit our Help Center or contact us.

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

“Making mobile work” for the advertising industry

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog

Today, almost 50% of the US population has a smartphone* and one in five webpage views now occur on mobile devices.** Even though consumers have quickly incorporated these devices into their daily routines, advertisers haven’t necessarily followed suit. While a few of the savviest advertisers are taking advantage of the multiscreen opportunity, it’s time that the entire industry think critically about how to make mobile a first class citizen in their campaigns.

One key aspect of “making mobile work” is using mobile-compatible ad creative; HTML5 creative works on smartphones, tablets and desktops, allowing advertisers to build a single ad unit that can run across all screens. By using HTML5, advertisers open the door to cross-screen branding opportunities, as well as enable publishers to monetize their highly-trafficked mobile properties.

To call out this need, the IAB today published an open letter, signed by Google, 16 US publishers and six UK publishers, asking marketers to use HTML5 for their ad creative so that their campaigns can show up properly across screens.

This plea to marketers is the first step in a larger “Make Mobile Work” Initiative, in which the IAB, supported by Google and the other publishers, will provide additional resources to marketers to educate them on how to implement successful mobile campaigns.

By fostering the conversation and educating marketers, we hope the “Make Mobile Work” Initiative will invigorate the production of mobile-compatible campaigns, enable marketers to take advantage of the mobile opportunity, and provide publishers with the inventory they need to monetize their mobile properties.

Posted by Bonita Stewart, VP Americas Partner Business Solutions, Google

*source: eMarketer “US Mobile Phone Internet Users and Penetration, 2012-2017.”
**source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-201012-201312

Introducing the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite: A smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog Here at DoubleClick Search, we’ve been focused on developing tailored solutions for retail advertisers  -- delivering the scale, performance, and speed our customers need to maximize revenue for their businesses. Today, we’re excited to introduce the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, a robust toolset offering a smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management. The suite is comprised of solutions that help you automatically create and update text ad and PLA campaigns based on your product catalog, leverage real-time data to optimize against your product or category-level business goals, and measure it all with flexible, product-based reports.

Putting “product” at the core of commerce investments
We designed the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite with products at the core, letting you efficiently build, manage, and optimize campaigns by seamlessly integrating with your existing product investments. As the only platform directly integrated with Google Merchant Center, we make your product inventory visible and accessible within DoubleClick Search -- meaning there’s no need to navigate a separate interface, manage a manual upload, or wait for a separate team to deliver product feed data. Instead, anyone on your marketing team can act on live updates, as they happen.

For example, inventory-aware campaigns uses this live product information to automatically create and update text ads, keywords, and bids based on real-time changes to your Google Merchant Center feed -- inclusive of updates to pricing, availability, product descriptions, and more -- with no extra work, and at no extra cost to set up.

For ATG Stores, an ecommerce company for home goods, the ability to directly interact with Google Merchant Center data in DoubleClick Search was crucial in allowing the team to quickly iterate across their four million SKUs. “Inventory-aware campaigns have been a game changer,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG Stores. “It’s impressive to see that what would previously have taken a full week to do is now being updated in the system in less than an hour.” In addition to time savings, this smart automation also helped the team take advantage of broader long-tail keyword coverage to widen reach and uncover incremental revenue. As a result, ATG Stores tripled their return on ad spend (ROAS) for their inventory-managed campaigns.

Today, we’re extending the power of this product-centric automation with two new capabilities for Product Listing Ads (PLAs):

  • Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation, an extension of inventory-aware campaigns, lets you automatically generate and update PLA campaigns in real time, based on your Google Merchant Center feed.
  • Product Listing Ads optimization with intra-day bidding based on the freshest data lets you react quickly to changes in the market -- executing bids to meet your ROI goals on both high-volume products, as well as the long tail.

Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation
In addition to your text ads, you can now dynamically manage your PLA campaigns using the same, seamless workflow you use for the rest of your campaigns  -- ensuring you’re always up to date, maximizing coverage, and driving better ROAS and volume.

Already, advertisers are seeing the benefits. “The ability to auto-generate PLA campaigns from existing product inventory drastically simplifies our setup process,” said Carissa McStay, Associate Manager at global marketing firm The Search Agency. “I was able to generate new PLA campaigns with over 1000 ad groups by product type in a matter of minutes -- not only saving us hours of time, but ensuring that our new customers see the most compelling ads that are relevant to them.”

Product Listing Ads optimization (beta)
Our Performance Bidding Suite offers the flexibility to optimize from a variety of signals and conversion sources including formula columns, external data (like calls), and Google Analytics goals; now, these same powerful bidding algorithms extend to your PLA campaigns. With more product-level information available, DoubleClick Search bid strategies can fine-tune bids on high-volume products to drive the most revenue, as well as handle the long-tail products that may receive less traffic.

And like with the rest of DoubleClick Search bid strategies, PLA bid strategies benefit from access to the same real-time data, with bids based on up-to-the-minute conversions to capture every new opportunity. This allows advertisers to respond to market changes at the drop of a hat -- even during the busiest holiday shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Valentine’s Day.

As the global leader in performance marketing, iProspect understands that speed is often the difference between seized and missed opportunities for retail clients. "Real-time is the future of retail, and DoubleClick is leading the way with the ability to optimize from real-time conversion information,” says Jeremy Hull, Director of Bought Media at iProspect. “With fast, accurate data, DoubleClick Search offers clients the tools they need to optimize throughout the day as traffic shifts occur.”

Just the beginning
This product-centric focus will continue to guide our feature development, helping us quickly innovate additional tools that will drive revenue for the ecommerce business. To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and new technology integrations and partnerships, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, or follow us on Google+.

Making creative more intelligent

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog

Your media plan is only as good as your creative message. Once you reach the right people, are you telling them something they actually want to hear?
- Pete Crofut, Creative Platforms Evangelist, Google

For the past six months, we’ve partnered with iMedia Connection on a series of articles that explore modern storytelling and the ways that new digital technologies are making ad creative more intelligent. We laid out the challenges advertisers face, examined engaging and data-infused creative examples, and discussed how to make these ads captivating across screens, measurable and scalable. 

Today, we conclude this series with a final article, “Technology makes creative more intelligent,” which provides new creative examples and explains how the creative imperative fits into Google’s broader perspective on the "what,” "why" and "how" of modern brand building (entitled the Engagement Project.)

The tools and technology are available to help make your stories come to life online. Now’s the time to embrace the opportunity and think about your creative from a cross-screen, digital-first perspective, to craft messages that will engage people wherever they are. 

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Marketing

Making digital marketing faster and simpler with the new trafficking workflow in DoubleClick Campaign Manager

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog
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

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog
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

Celebrating ads people chose to watch in 2013

We know it's already been a big week for reflecting back on 2013 on YouTube. But with the year fast coming to a close, we wanted to shine the light a little bit brighter on the great work done by brands.

Remember those adorable dancing babies? Or that time Usher was thrown through a high-rise window? And who could we forget the car salesman threatening to kill a disguised Jeff Gordon?

2013 was a year in which brands re-invented ads on YouTube - by making ads people chose to watch. And as a result these ads became bigger than ever, and helped shape cultural moments throughout the year.

To celebrate this amazing year, and gear up for what's sure to be an even bigger 2014, we put together a recap of some of the top brand moments from 2013:

To see the full list of top ads from 2013, visit our YouTube Ads Leaderboard. For even more top lists of the year from around the world, visit the YouTube Rewind 2013 Channel.

And if you want to keep up to date on the most popular and relevant content on YouTube, subscribe to our weekly digest, YouTube Re:View.

Posted by David Kagan & Jim Habig, Product Marketing Managers, YouTube