Author Archives: Prema Sampath

Introducing two new solutions powered by Ads Data Hub

Ads Data Hub helps advertisers, agencies and measurement partners do customized analysis of campaigns while protecting user privacy. More than 3,000 brands, agencies, and measurement partners use cloud-based Ads Data Hub to perform analyses for their specific business objectives.

Customers of Ads Data Hub have different needs, so we’ve created more specialized entry points to get started. Marketers require tools to quantify a consumer’s path to purchase and the ability to activate new audiences. At the same time, measurement partners conduct third-party assessment of metrics such as video viewability and audience reach.

To offer a more tailored experience, we are introducing an evolution to the Ads Data Hub core platform by introducing two dedicated solutions: Ads Data Hub for Marketers and Ads Data Hub for Measurement Partners.

New solutions for more catered needs

Ads Data Hub for Marketers offers a new way for advertisers and agencies to analyze their data. With this solution, they can seamlessly access insights to better inform the way they purchase media. This means a simplified experience for marketers running queries and activating their first-party data.

Riot Games, for example, used Ads Data Hub for richer marketing analyses. The company centralized their insights and combined them with Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360 data. This let Riot Games attribute credit to various ad touch points, accurately measure return on ad spend (ROAS), and establish a new benchmark showing that for every $1 Riot Games spent on Google media, it received $2 in revenue. Marketers, like Riot Games, perform these analyses regularly, with hundreds of thousands of queries run in 2022 alone.

Over time, new query templates, automated workflows, and updates to reporting will reduce the need for additional technical resources and decrease time to generate insights - with plans to implement Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation, also known as PAIR. In addition to these improvements, marketers will soon be able to activate their audience segments on new inventory, including YouTube. As privacy expectations evolve, we will continue to build more solutions that enable advertisers and agencies to measure and activate their first-party data with Ads Data Hub for Marketers.

Ads Data Hub for Measurement Partners gives partners a new access point to provide YouTube measurement services on behalf of marketers, advertisers, agencies, or publishers. With this launch, it’ll be easier for partners to offer accurate measurement and deliver near real-time insights. For marketers, this means they can work with independent third-party partners to calculate and report on YouTube ad performance across devices, formats, and metrics.

These third-party independent measurement services are available to marketers via our growing partner ecosystem. With Dynata, and other vendors, we have expanded measurement services on Ads Data Hub to enable cross-media solutions for YouTube. Customers will be able to analyze the performance of YouTube campaigns relative to other media channels (including linear TV, streaming TV, or online video sources). Another partner, DoubleVerify, has earned YouTube Video Viewability accreditation by the Media Rating Council (MRC), in addition to Ads Data Hub’s own accreditation announced last year.

In 2023 we plan to integrate with new partners such as iSpot and VideoAmp, joining the list of measurement partners already available with Ads Data Hub.

Commitment to a privacy-centric future

Marketers and measurement partners will benefit from rigorous privacy checks that protect the personal data of users online while still being able to perform comprehensive analytics. These analyses, in addition to insight generation and audience activation, can all be performed with Ads Data Hub users only having access to aggregated data. By investing in privacy-centric solutions that address the specific needs of marketers and measurement partners, we've simplified the path to accurate measurement across YouTube and Google campaigns.

A key milestone for privacy-centric measurement on YouTube

In October of 2019, we announced that we are continuing to take action to limit the pixels we allow on YouTube, while investing in our cloud-based, privacy-centric measurement and analytics solution called Ads Data Hub. This solution provides three benefits for marketers. First, Ads Data Hub ensures end-user privacy by enforcing privacy checks and aggregating Google data before it leaves the Google-owned Cloud project. Second, because Ads Data Hub does not rely on pixels, it allows advertisers access to comprehensive measurement and insights on how their advertising is performing across screens, including mobile apps, for YouTube media bought via YouTube and Google ad platforms, including Google Ads, Display & Video 360. Finally, Ads Data Hub is paving the way for a durable future for measurement on YouTube, enabling cross-publisher reporting by third parties that are compatible with the privacy-centric world.


Media Rating Council accredits Ads Data Hub

Today, we're announcing Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditations for Ads Data Hub, a first for a clean-room-based measurement product in the industry. Ads Data Hub has been accredited by MRC for Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT)-filtered, rendered and viewable video ad impressions and TrueView Views generated through the Ads Data Hub user interface and API. Accreditation covers desktop, mobile web and mobile in-app for YouTube and Google Video Partners video ads on Google Ads, Display & Video 360 and YouTube Reserve, and includes the processes used in the matching of unique audience identifiers.


New measurement partners complete Ads Data Hub migration

Over the last year, we’ve been working with several measurement partners to migrate their vendor services to Ads Data Hub. As of today, Comscore, DoubleVerify, Dynata, Kantar, Integral Ad Science, Nielsen, and Moat by Oracle have completed migration and have completely switched to Ads Data Hub-based reporting. These measurement partners are in addition to the list of already existing partners reporting on YouTube. We also expect many of these partners will independently seek MRC accreditation of their Ads Data Hub-based reporting.

We are committed to fostering a healthy measurement partner ecosystem, with privacy at its core. With the MRC accreditation of Ads Data Hub and the full migration of global third-party brand-measurement partners, advertisers will gain more comprehensive reporting and measurement, using technology that’s built to enhance user privacy. We are thrilled to mark a big step toward durable, privacy-centric, trustworthy measurement and remain committed to innovation for more capabilities in the future.

Improvements to Ads Data Hub

Today, we’re announcing improvements to Ads Data Hub, our cloud-based solution that enables customized analysis of your Google ad campaigns while protecting user privacy. With these updates, we’re offering more ways to access the data you need, improved usability for key workflows, and new tools that give you more flexibility to run customized analysis.

Over 200 brands, agencies and measurement partners use Ads Data Hub to analyze campaign data so they can understand how people interact with ads. For example, Essence, a global data and measurement-driven media agency, uses Ads Data Hub to deliver a suite of privacy-centric, advanced measurement services for customers across verticals in order to help them make better media decisions, and ultimately get a better return on their ad spend.

Ads Data Hub: Essence Case Study

Ads Data Hub: Essence Case Study

Better ways to get access to the data you need

Earlier this year, we shared updates to Ads Data Hub to help you analyze your data faster and more easily. Since then, we introduced self-service account linking for Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, so you can more easily access Google ad campaign data across multiple products in a secure, privacy-centric environment.

We’ve also heard requests from customers to make it easier to export data to other tools they use for creating reports and dashboards. So we recently made it possible to export query results  for visualization and manipulation in Data Studio and Google Sheets, giving you the ability to  further explore your data in both tools. By connecting Ads Data Hub to Data Studio and Google Sheets, you can unlock the power of your data with interactive dashboards and engaging reports that inspire smarter business decisions. And—as always—there’s an aggregation requirement for output of any data from Ads Data Hub, ensuring user data is protected.

Enhanced usability and more holistic insights

We’re improving the user experience for privacy checks in Ads Data Hub. These changes include an enhanced user interface and faster query execution times, and give you a more complete view of your data in Ads Data Hub, without compromising end-user privacy. Over the coming months, Ads Data Hub will start notifying you when rows of data are suppressed from results due to privacy checks, helping you understand why certain data was not included.

We’ve also improved the algorithms we use to filter query results. Now, queries utilizing data joins are filtered with more precision, so you will have greater flexibility in designing your queries to address the insights you are looking to gain via Ads Data Hub - but in a way that continues to protect user privacy.

New tools to run customized analysis

Ads Data Hub provides tools to help you run analysis including consumer journey paths, launched earlier this year. But we've heard from some customers the need for additional ways to run customized analysis that aligns with unique business needs.

We're now offering Shapley value and Markov chain analysis methods as native Ads Data Hub functions to assign credit to touchpoints along the consumer journey. These functions can be used with Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 data as well as your own business data in Ads Data Hub. Shapley value and Markov chain functions are available in beta today and will roll out to all marketers using Ads Data Hub by the end of the year. We’re also exploring ways to offer more capabilities for customized analysis in Ads Data Hub.

Our mission with Ads Data Hub is to help you tailor your marketing measurement to your unique business needs, while protecting user privacy and upholding Google’s high standards of data security. And we’re investing in privacy research for Ads Data Hub to accelerate improvements to privacy protections, usability, and performance. As we invest in features that make Ads Data Hub faster, more secure, and easier to use, you'll be able to focus on what matters—the growth of your business.

It’s faster and easier to use Ads Data Hub

Advertisers tell us that understanding the business impact of their marketing is more important than ever. But they also report that it’s becoming more difficult as the industry—in response to growing concerns about privacy—changes its practices around how data is collected and used. Ads Data Hub enables customized analysis of your Google ad campaigns while protecting user privacy and upholding Google’s high standards of data security.

Today, we’re providing an update on improvements to Ads Data Hub that help you analyze data more quickly and easily, better understand the way that people interact with your ads, and use insights from your data to reach the right customers. With these updates, you can tailor your measurement to your unique business needs, understand how your marketing is performing, and drive the greatest business impact.

Improvements to help you analyze your data faster and easier

Over the past year, we’ve been investing in the infrastructure that underlies Ads Data Hub to make it available to a larger number of customers and simplify the process of writing queries. Over 200 brands, agencies and measurement partners are actively using Ads Data Hub today. And usage continues to increase, with successful queries up over 145 percent in 2019 compared to 2018. But we’ve heard from customers that we need to make it faster and easier to run analysis.

In the coming weeks, we’ll add self-service account linking for Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, so you can more easily access your Google ad campaign data across multiple products in a secure, privacy-centric environment. This includes allowing you to create multi-tier account structures, which adds flexibility to how brands and agencies can configure ads data within Ads Data Hub to address unique account hierarchies and user access requirements.

Link request.png

Link your Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360 accounts to Ads Data Hub

We’re making it easier to run analysis with a Sandbox environment, which recently rolled out to all customers. This environment includes a test dataset and can be used to experiment with data and query development, which can help make execution faster by giving you a better understanding of the types of queries you can write and insights you can get in Ads Data Hub.

We’ve also launched a new query library that gives you access to over 20 templates for the most common types of analysis run in Ads Data Hub. For example, the All events template can be used to get impressions, clicks, conversions and Active View stats for a specific account. Ads Data Hub users can also suggest new templates directly via the in-product feedback form.

A frequent request we’ve heard from customers is to be able to access and analyze ad data closer to real-time. To address this, we’ve brought latency down from 24-48 hours to 6 hours for display and YouTube ads data from Google Ads, as well as for data from YouTube ads bought via Display & Video 360. That means, if an impression was served at 8am, you can query data associated with that impression from 2pm on the same day.

New ways to understand the consumer journey

Manually stitching together event-level data from Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 to reconstruct the path to purchase is possible today in Ads Data Hub, but it can be time-consuming and difficult. That’s why we’ve introduced consumer journey paths, a set of pre-processed data that automatically join impression, click, and conversion events together if they’re part of a single journey. This will help advertisers get valuable insights about the consumer journey faster and with higher quality output than manual approaches, and is available to all Ads Data Hub customers that have Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 data enabled in their account.

To cover more of the ways people interact with media and your brand, we’re expanding beyond computer, mobile and tablet device measurement to include TV screens. This includes coverage for connected TV and gaming consoles. These devices are becoming a bigger part of many media plans, so understanding their role in delivering value for your business is also becoming more important.

Today, Ads Data Hub includes key advertising metrics such as viewability, impressions, clicks, and conversions from display and video ads in Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360. And in the coming months we’re enabling more measurement use cases by adding advanced Active View metrics for YouTube—including viewability and audibility metrics—that allow you to uncover deep insights into creative performance and user attention.

Reach the right customers with customized audience list creation

Beyond measurement, one of biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from customers is that they’d like to take action on the insights they uncover in Ads Data Hub, while protecting user privacy. We’ve begun a test to allow a limited group of customers to build audience lists based on clicks or conversions from Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, and use these audience lists to inform who sees display ads in Google Ads and Display & Video 360. For example, you could create an audience list in Ads Data Hub of users that have already purchased your product, then use that as an exclusion list to ensure you don’t continue to show them your ads served via Google Ads and Display & Video 360.

User privacy protections are deeply embedded across all of these features, and—as always—there’s an aggregation requirement of at least 50 users for output of any data from Ads Data Hub. Over time, we'll continue to evolve the capabilities of Ads Data Hub by providing access to additional ads datasets and developing deeper integrations across our ad platforms.

Source: Google Ads


It’s faster and easier to use Ads Data Hub

Advertisers tell us that understanding the business impact of their marketing is more important than ever. But they also report that it’s becoming more difficult as the industry—in response to growing concerns about privacy—changes its practices around how data is collected and used. Ads Data Hub enables customized analysis of your Google ad campaigns while protecting user privacy and upholding Google’s high standards of data security.

Today, we’re providing an update on improvements to Ads Data Hub that help you analyze data more quickly and easily, better understand the way that people interact with your ads, and use insights from your data to reach the right customers. With these updates, you can tailor your measurement to your unique business needs, understand how your marketing is performing, and drive the greatest business impact.

Improvements to help you analyze your data faster and easier

Over the past year, we’ve been investing in the infrastructure that underlies Ads Data Hub to make it available to a larger number of customers and simplify the process of writing queries. Over 200 brands, agencies and measurement partners are actively using Ads Data Hub today. And usage continues to increase, with successful queries up over 145 percent in 2019 compared to 2018. But we’ve heard from customers that we need to make it faster and easier to run analysis.

In the coming weeks, we’ll add self-service account linking for Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, so you can more easily access your Google ad campaign data across multiple products in a secure, privacy-centric environment. This includes allowing you to create multi-tier account structures, which adds flexibility to how brands and agencies can configure ads data within Ads Data Hub to address unique account hierarchies and user access requirements.

Link request.png

Link your Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360 accounts to Ads Data Hub

We’re making it easier to run analysis with a Sandbox environment, which recently rolled out to all customers. This environment includes a test dataset and can be used to experiment with data and query development, which can help make execution faster by giving you a better understanding of the types of queries you can write and insights you can get in Ads Data Hub.

We’ve also launched a new query library that gives you access to over 20 templates for the most common types of analysis run in Ads Data Hub. For example, the All events template can be used to get impressions, clicks, conversions and Active View stats for a specific account. Ads Data Hub users can also suggest new templates directly via the in-product feedback form.

A frequent request we’ve heard from customers is to be able to access and analyze ad data closer to real-time. To address this, we’ve brought latency down from 24-48 hours to 6 hours for display and YouTube ads data from Google Ads, as well as for data from YouTube ads bought via Display & Video 360. That means, if an impression was served at 8am, you can query data associated with that impression from 2pm on the same day.

New ways to understand the consumer journey

Manually stitching together event-level data from Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 to reconstruct the path to purchase is possible today in Ads Data Hub, but it can be time-consuming and difficult. That’s why we’ve introduced consumer journey paths, a set of pre-processed data that automatically join impression, click, and conversion events together if they’re part of a single journey. This will help advertisers get valuable insights about the consumer journey faster and with higher quality output than manual approaches, and is available to all Ads Data Hub customers that have Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 data enabled in their account.

To cover more of the ways people interact with media and your brand, we’re expanding beyond computer, mobile and tablet device measurement to include TV screens. This includes coverage for connected TV and gaming consoles. These devices are becoming a bigger part of many media plans, so understanding their role in delivering value for your business is also becoming more important.

Today, Ads Data Hub includes key advertising metrics such as viewability, impressions, clicks, and conversions from display and video ads in Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360. And in the coming months we’re enabling more measurement use cases by adding advanced Active View metrics for YouTube—including viewability and audibility metrics—that allow you to uncover deep insights into creative performance and user attention.

Reach the right customers with customized audience list creation

Beyond measurement, one of biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from customers is that they’d like to take action on the insights they uncover in Ads Data Hub, while protecting user privacy. We’ve begun a test to allow a limited group of customers to build audience lists based on clicks or conversions from Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, and use these audience lists to inform who sees display ads in Google Ads and Display & Video 360. For example, you could create an audience list in Ads Data Hub of users that have already purchased your product, then use that as an exclusion list to ensure you don’t continue to show them your ads served via Google Ads and Display & Video 360.

User privacy protections are deeply embedded across all of these features, and—as always—there’s an aggregation requirement of at least 50 users for output of any data from Ads Data Hub. Over time, we'll continue to evolve the capabilities of Ads Data Hub by providing access to additional ads datasets and developing deeper integrations across our ad platforms.

Source: Google Ads