Category Archives: DoubleClick Advertiser Blog

News, features, tips, and training – DoubleClick Advertisers

A Programmatic New Year: What’s your resolution for 2016?

At this time last year, we suggested three resolutions for 2015 to help you achieve more success with your programmatic campaigns.

Since then, the landscape has continued to evolve for marketers. There are more devices, more micro-moments, more ways to reach consumers. Not surprisingly, more people want to know about programmatic, too: Google searches for “programmatic” were 46% more popular this year vs. last year, and more than twice as popular from just two years ago1.

For 2016, we’re sharing some new resolutions — and want to help you find the one that is just right for you.

Programmatic New Year is an interactive quiz that recommends personalized “programmatic resolutions”. These are ways you can further develop your brand’s programmatic strategy for 2016. Whether you’re experienced in programmatic or just getting started, the resolutions serve as a starting point for building your expertise, identifying opportunities and helping your brand succeed.

Take the quiz to find out your Programmatic New Year’s resolution. Consider sharing your resolution with friends and colleagues—it might just help you stick to it.

Posted by Carlo Acenas
Associate Product Marketing Manager


1 Google Trends data

Netshoes sees 5X increase in conversion rates with DoubleClick Bid Manager

E-commerce in Brazil has grown 20+% year over year for the last five years1. In this highly competitive environment, choosing the right advertising partner is a critical strategic decision for a retail brand to ensure their message breaks through.

Netshoes is the world's largest sports retailer, selling everything from basketball shoes to fitness gear across all of Latin America. Historically they have been deeply focused on performance advertising, and at times have used up to 8 different advertising platforms and retargeters at once in search of the best results.

But recently, Netshoes decided this approach wasn't giving them the best results. They found they were competing against themselves by bidding for the same audience with multiple ad providers, driving costs up and ROI down. When they consolidated their media buys across display and video with DoubleClick Bid Manager, the results speak for themselves:
  • 400% better conversion rate than with other channels.
  • 30% view rate on TrueView video ads, with CPVs lower than the market average.
  • 15% time savings across the Netshoes media buying team.

"The results we get from DoubleClick are simply much better than those from other partners in our past"
—Danilo Mangini, Marketing Manager, Netshoes

Learn more about Netshoes’ approach in the full case study.
Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, Google
1 Source: e-bit Webshoppers

Mobile micro-moments: Creating valuable programmatic advertising with search insights

Year after year we've heard pundits announce that this is "The Year of Mobile," but we don't quite seem to get there. Still, the facts don't lie: eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for 72% of U.S. digital ad spend by 2019 and Google's tech-forward target audience spends more than 74% of its time on mobile.1

Because mobile devices are consumers' always-on, constant companions, Google Marketing wanted to deliver personalized, contextual creative programmatically via ads. To show how the Google app can add value in people’s lives, Google Marketing brought the app’s functionality into the ad units themselves. Combining aggregated search insights, geo-targeting, and dynamic creative, the ads proactively fed users with helpful, relevant information.

The Google Marketing team followed four key steps as it developed the creative for the Google app. To learn more about the approach, check out the full case study.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, Google
1 ComScore MobileMetrix, September 2015.

Protecting marketers from falsely represented inventory

As we've stated before, we're committed to keeping fraudsters out of the broader advertising ecosystem. Today we're looking at a specific aspect of this fight: the false representation of domains in ad inventory.

Deceptive ad inventory

Imagine ordering a designer handbag, only to receive a cheap imitation. Unfortunately, this type of misrepresentation happens all too often with ad inventory.

The false representation of domains in ad inventory occurs when publishers intentionally make it look like their traffic is coming from another website (usually a well-known, premium website) in order to charge higher rates for ads. This practice deceives advertisers who end up paying to appear on sites with which they may not want to be associated, and harms legitimate publishers, who aren't actually receiving the funds from ads sold in their name.

The two examples below illustrate how a branded ad can end up on a sketchy website through false representation of a domain.

Protecting against falsely represented inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager

As part of our commitment to strengthening the integrity of our digital marketing solutions, we've added a new feature to DoubleClick Bid Manager that blocks many cases of domain misrepresentation, one of the most severe types of falsely represented ad inventory.

When a source of fraudulently misrepresented domain information is identified in Bid Manager, a filter is used to exclude invalid inventory with a high degree of confidence before advertisers bid on it, regardless of exchange or reported domain. We’ve discovered that in some instances this type of activity has accounted for up to 40% of inventory for a particular exchange.

Percent of misrepresented ad domains by exchange1

As a recent example, we noticed a publisher attempting to sell ad inventory on a pirated movie sharing website that was falsely represented with the domain name of a well-known newspaper. Fortunately, our new filter prevented ads from being purchased and displayed, thereby safeguarding advertisers from fraud and preventing this copyright infringing publisher from receiving advertising revenue.

Publishers benefit as well

It’s not just advertisers who will benefit from this new feature. The filter ensures that high quality inventory from top publishers is correctly valued and better defended against misrepresentation. As a case in point, we found that 10% of inventory offered for sale claiming to come from two popular US newspapers was in fact from other publishers falsely representing themselves as the two newspapers.

We also recognize that there are valid use cases for selling inventory via alternate domains, which is why we have taken great care to ensure that our filter targets only cases where the false representation masks the real value of the inventory.

Available to all marketers on Bid Manager

We continually look for new ways to improve and defend our advertising platforms against ad fraud, and we’re proud to offer this new feature directly on Bid Manager, without the need for advertisers to maintain blacklists or configuration settings. We’re happy to further protect advertisers and legitimate publishers by giving the boot to pretenders offering bad inventory.

Posted by Andres Ferrate
Chief Advocate, Google Ad Traffic Quality
1 Includes only exchanges from which DoubleClick Bid Manager buys >1 million impressions per day

Reach holiday shoppers at scale with DoubleClick Ad Exchange

It’s the most wonderful time of the year...for you to reach holiday shoppers with your brand and products. We know shoppers come in all shapes and forms, researching and buying across screens and in-stores. That’s why you need to ensure that you’re reaching your target audiences across all the premium publishers where consumers are already spending their time, both on the web and in apps.

Last week, we announced that native ads and mobile video interstitials are now available to buyers on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. These high-impact formats, coupled with the cleanest (fraud-free) inventory and the broadest reach of premium inventory, help you accomplish your campaign goals at scale.

Check out our holiday guide to learn more about how DoubleClick Ad Exchange can help you reach holiday shoppers this season.

Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

New ways to reach your audience in DoubleClick Bid Manager

You know your customers and their preferences better than anyone else, but reaching these users as they explore sites and content online can be challenging. That's why we're excited to bring additional audience targeting options to DoubleClick Bid Manager to help you connect with customers at the right moments with the right message.

Bid Manager now enables you target your campaigns by demographic, affinity, in-market, and similar audience profiles to help you precisely reach users who are most likely to care about your brand or product. These targeting options complement any first and third-party data you may already be using in Bid Manager.

Reach customers throughout all stages of the purchase funnel

Bid Manager's new targeting options are designed to help you reach new and existing customers throughout all stages of the customer purchase funnel:

  • Demographic: Demographic targeting is what it sounds like-a way to find your target by age and gender. It can help you reach a specific target based on stage of life to continue to serve the most relevant messages to consumers.
  • Affinity: Affinity audiences can help you move beyond demographics and reach people who care about your brand. With over 80 unique personas based on lifestyle and interests, affinity audiences mimic the depth and breadth of TV-style audiences, so marketers can engage with precise audiences at scale.
  • In-market: Reach potential customers while they're actively browsing, researching or comparing the types of products you sell. Connect with those most interested in what you have to offer, using precise segments that classify users based on their demonstrated in-market behavior and purchase intent.
  • Similar audiences: Similar audiences looks at data about your existing remarketing audiences and finds new and qualified consumers who have shared interests with that audience. It's a powerful - but simple - way to reach a much larger audience and drive clicks and conversions among new prospects.

Audience solutions in action

Suppose you own a bicycle shop and you want to reach users who are interested in purchasing a new bicycle. Users with this intent may browse sites or content online as they begin to consider purchasing a new bicycle. Other users may be actively browsing product listings and committed to purchasing a new bicycle.

As a bicycle shop owner, each user represents an opportunity, and Bid Manager's audience targeting can help you reach the right user at exactly the right moment. For example, affinity targeting can be used to reach biking enthusiasts who are currently considering purchasing a new bicycle. In-market targeting can then be used as the user begins evaluating different bicycles to purchase.

We've seen customers have success using these new targeting options for all phases of the purchase cycle. AMNET Spain, for example, helps clients increase the reach on their target audience across TV and online video media buys:

"For branding campaigns, it is essential that we reach as much of our target audience as possible. In one particular case, we were asked to reach women in Spain between ages 25-45. By using Google Demographic Targeting and Google Affinity Audiences, we were able to achieve an extra 20% reach when compared to using TV alone.”
Ramón de la Guardia, Country Manager, AMNET Spain and Portugal

When your message reaches the right audience, you'll see higher engagement and improved performance. Danone Italy has experienced:

“We worked with Mindshare to drive awareness of our yogurt brands in women of different age groups in Italy. Google Demographic Targeting in Bid Manager helped us achieve our target coverage against this demographic and increase engagement, with a 20% uplift in CTR."
Valeria Surico, Marketing Connection Manager, Danone

These new audience targeting options are available today in DoubleClick Bid Manager. Learn more.

Posted by Maithreyi Raman
Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager

Dynamic creative comes to Google Web Designer

As the holiday season gets underway, you’re likely focused on reaching holiday shoppers as they browse for gifts for their family and friends. Dynamic creative strategies are key to getting the most relevant messages and products in front of these shoppers. But with consumers’ increased usage of mobile devices, you need to build your dynamic creative in HTML5, and this confluence of technologies can lead to complexity.

Streamlining production of dynamic creative in Google Web Designer

To make it easier for you to build relevant and engaging cross-screen creative, we’re excited to announce the launch of simplified workflows in Google Web Designer that make it even easier to build dynamic creative in HTML5. You can now easily choose which data signals/feed attributes to connect to each dynamic element, pulling directly from the dynamic profile you’ve set up in DoubleClick Studio.

We’ve already seen some teams find success with the new dynamic workflow. Kaymu, one of the largest online retail marketplaces for emerging markets, used Google Web Designer to build an HTML5 dynamic remarketing campaign and show relevant products to shoppers. This strategy drove a 580% increase in CTR compared to their previous, non-HTML5, non-dynamic campaign, and the team’s dynamic creative build time dropped from 3 days to 10 minutes.

CyberAgent, a media agency based in Japan, also used Google Web Designer for a recent dynamic remarketing campaign. To provide the time needed to focus on the creative strategy, the team first automated the bidding and targeting for the campaign. They then could build and test several dynamic templates, using advanced animations and multiple dynamic elements. Ultimately, these advanced creatives led to a 40% higher CTR and a 28% lower CPC compared to the previous dynamic remarketing campaign that didn’t use Google Web Designer.

In addition to the new dynamic support in Google Web Designer, we’re also excited to launch:

  • Animation improvements, which help you build smooth animations
  • Updates to our text authoring capabilities, which make editing and manipulating the text in your ad units much easier and more intuitive
  • Two new components in our components gallery: a Spritesheet component, so you can more easily build out your spritesheets, and a Streetview component, so you can add location-based imagery to your ads. (We’ve kept this component separate from the Google Maps component to help you keep your file sizes smaller.)

Upcoming Google Web Designer Hangout on Air

Want to learn more about the new features? Sign up for one of our Hangouts on Air. Sean Kranzberg, Engineering Manager for Google Web Designer, will walk through the new features and take your questions.

  • Wednesday, Dec. 9th @ 12pm ET / 9am PT. RSVP here
  • Thursday, Dec. 10th @ 5pm PT / Friday, Dec. 11th @ 12pm Sydney time (APAC Friendly time) RSVP here
Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

Active View updates: Improved cross-screen options for brands and publishers

When advertisers pay for an ad, the chance for it to be seen is a basic expectation. Advertisers shouldn’t have to pay extra to measure and ensure that it was viewable. These expectations drove the launch of Active View back in 2013, an effort to establish a neutral and common set of viewability metrics used by both advertisers and publishers. Since then we've continued to invest in this technology across DoubleClick, YouTube and the Google Display Network, and today we're happy to share two new updates that will help advertisers and publishers run more effective cross-screen campaigns.

Announcing Active View optimization in DoubleClick Bid Manager - A better way to programmatically buy viewable impressions

Today, we're introducing Active View bid optimization in DoubleClick Bid Manager for clients globally. This new bid optimization feature uses the collective intelligence from many signals (e.g. URL, time of day, page category) to predict, impression by impression, the probability that it will be viewable. It then dynamically adjusts bids higher or lower based on that probability to deliver the viewable CPM target that advertisers set for their video and display campaigns. Active View optimization delivers what advertisers actually care about - the total volume of viewable impressions - and doesn’t fixate on a viewable percentage.

This will help solve a common problem: when marketers buy viewable impressions programmatically using current viewability targeting, the decision to bid on a single impression is very basic. Buyers choose a target viewable percentage (e.g. 50%) and their programmatic buying system bids the same amount for any impressions with a likelihood of being viewed above that target - or nothing at all for impressions with a likelihood of being viewed below that target. This means that buyers are missing out on wide swaths of inventory that may actually be viewable and are driving up competition (and CPMs) for the inventory they are buying.

Announcing Active View for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange - Bringing holistic viewability measurement to publishers

We believe that viewability metrics should be a standard currency between buyers and sellers. To enable this, we've been investing in features that allow publishers to see and report on a holistic picture of viewability across their channels and content. We're continuing that momentum today by announcing Active View reporting for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers and on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. With the consumer shift to mobile reshaping how publishers engage with their audience and those interactions increasingly happening on mobile apps, this new measurement solution completes the picture for publishers helping them see how viewability plays out across all of their properties.

At Google, we remain committed to investing in a broad set of measurement solutions for brands and publishers through a combination of product innovation with our own solutions and partnerships with leading third parties. These announcements are two big steps in our ongoing effort to help our clients measure every moment that matters.

Posted by:

Ari Feldman
Product Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers Reporting and Active View
Deepti Bhatnagar
Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager Brand Measurement and Optimization

Jellyfish drives more online university students with DoubleClick Search

Since its beginnings in 1999, digital marketing agency Jellyfish has been at the forefront of digital advertising, helping clients of all shapes and sizes succeed in digital.

Most recently, Jellyfish partnered with a leading international online university who wanted to attract prospective students using online search. To meet the challenge, Jellyfish turned to DoubleClick Search and its ability to respond in real-time to optimize performance as the best tool for the job.

Goals

  • Hit regional lead volume and cost-per-lead goals.
  • Maximize quality of leads.

Approach

  • Tailor bid strategies by region with the Performance Bidding Suite.
  • Use bid strategies to respond to real-time, data-driven feedback including online and offline conversions.
  • Deploy best practices with bid strategies.

Results

  • Increased lead volume by 29%.
  • Decreased cost per lead by 84%.
  • Effectively generated quality leads for the university's search program internationally.

To learn more about Jellyfish’s approach, read the full case study.

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

Payment IDs now available in DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Last week, the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) announced the “Verified by TAG” initiative to help increase transparency of digital advertising transactions across the industry. We’re fully supportive of both programs outlined in TAG’s announcement and we’re currently in the process of applying for TAG Registration. To support the adoption of Payment IDs across the ecosystem, starting today our version of Payment IDs is available in DoubleClick Ad Exchange to all buyers globally.

Currently, if a programmatic buyer finds they’ve bought fraudulent inventory, there is no way to directly identify the supply source responsible for the fraud. The Payment ID system we proposed to the TAG Anti-Fraud working group fixes this problem by asking all supply sources (e.g. ad exchanges, ad networks, supply side platforms) of advertising inventory to create and provide unique and persistent anonymous identifiers that link every impression to who is paid in their accounting systems. If a buyer finds invalid activity from any source in their supply chain, these Payment IDs will help the buyer to identify who is responsible and blacklist those suppliers from their campaigns.

We’ve always invested heavily to keep DoubleClick Ad Exchange free of invalid activity and ensure that money spent on our platform only goes to support legitimate publishers, app developers, and content creators. To show our commitment to a better ads ecosystem, accelerate the adoption of Payment IDs, and help DSPs start integrating them, we’ve implemented the standard as it exists today, and we’ll continue to work closely with TAG and others in the industry to formalize an industry-wide Payment ID program. When the TAG Anti-Fraud Working Group has finalized the broader industry standard, we’ll happily make any changes to ensure we are compliant with TAG’s efforts.

"Google has been at the forefront of the fight against digital ad fraud, and this announcement advances our work together to develop an industry-wide Payment ID system. We look forward to continued collaboration with Google and other programmatic leaders through the TAG Anti-Fraud Working Group to create a fully transparent digital ad supply chain that will expose the bad actors and cut off their financial support."
Mike Zaneis, CEO, TAG

Leading programmatic buyers, DoubleClick Bid Manager, Dstillery, Magnetic, MediaMath, Rocket Fuel, The Trade Desk, and Turn have all committed to integrating Payment IDs into their systems in the coming months.

Posted by:

Vegard Johnsen
Product Manager, Google Ads Traffic Quality
Chetna Bindra
Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange