Tag Archives: Ads

Changes to our ad policies to comply with the GDPR

In May, Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect. Google is committed to complying with the GDPR, and in preparation, we’ve been working with our customers and partners to inform them about changes we’re making to our policies across our various products.

Today we’re informing advertisers and publisher partners about changes to our ad policies. Google already requires publishers and advertisers using our advertising services to get consent from end users to use our services, as required under existing EU law. However, the GDPR will further refine these requirements.

To comply, we will be updating our EU consent policy when the GDPR takes effect and the revised policy will require that publishers take extra steps in obtaining consent from their users. Before May, we will launch a solution to support publishers that want to show non-personalized ads, and we are working with industry groups, including IAB Europe, to explore proposed consent solutions for publishers.

We’re aware that our customers and partners - European and international - have significant obligations under these new laws, as does Google. Publisher and advertiser partners can expect further updates as we approach the date when GDPR takes effect.

Posted by Carlo D’Asaro Biondo
President, EMEA Partnerships

Changes to our ad policies to comply with the GDPR

In May, Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect. Google is committed to complying with the GDPR, and in preparation, we’ve been working with our customers and partners to inform them about changes we’re making to our policies across our various products.

Today we’re informing advertisers and publisher partners about changes to our ad policies. Google already requires publishers and advertisers using our advertising services to get consent from end users to use our services, as required under existing EU law. However, the GDPR will further refine these requirements.

To comply, we will be updating our EU consent policy when the GDPR takes effect and the revised policy will require that publishers take extra steps in obtaining consent from their users. Before May, we will launch a solution to support publishers that want to show non-personalized ads, and we are working with industry groups, including IAB Europe, to explore proposed consent solutions for publishers.

We’re aware that our customers and partners - European and international - have significant obligations under these new laws, as does Google. Publisher and advertiser partners can expect further updates as we approach the date when GDPR takes effect.

Posted by Carlo D’Asaro Biondo
President, EMEA Partnerships

An advertising ecosystem that works for everyone

Digital advertising plays an important role in making the web what it is today—a forum where anyone with a good idea and good content can reach an audience and potentially make a living. In order for this ads-supported, free web to work, it needs to be a safe and effective place to learn, create and advertise. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Whether it's a one-off accident or a coordinated action by scammers trying to make money, a negative experience hurts the entire ecosystem. That’s why for the last 15 years, we’ve invested in technology, policies and talent to help us fight issues like ad fraud, malware and content scammers. Last year, we were able to remove more bad actors from our ad ecosystem than ever before, and at a faster rate.

We removed 100 bad ads per second

In 2017, we took down more than 3.2 billion ads that violated our advertising policies. That’s more than 100 bad ads per second! This means we’re able to block the majority of bad ad experiences, like malvertising and phishing scams, before the scams impact people. We blocked 79 million ads in our network for attempting to send people to malware-laden sites, and removed 400,000 of these unsafe sites last year. And, we removed 66 million “trick-to-click” ads as well as 48 million ads that were attempting to get users to install unwanted software.

New technology to better protect advertisers

Last year, we removed 320,000 publishers from our ad network for violating our publisher policies, and blacklisted nearly 90,000 websites and 700,000 mobile apps. We also introduced technology that allows us to better protect our advertisers by removing Google ads from individual pages on a website that violate our policies. Last year, we removed 2 million pages for policy violations each month. This has been critical in scaling enforcement for policies that prohibit monetization of inappropriate and controversial content. In fact, after expanding our policy against dangerous and derogatory content in April 2017 to cover additional forms of discrimination and intolerance, we removed Google ads from 8,700 pages that violated the expanded policy.

Fighting deceptive content online

Many website owners use our advertising platforms, like AdSense, to run Google ads on their sites and content and make money. We paid $12.6 billion to publishing partners in our ad network last year. But in order to make money from Google ads, you have to play by rules— that means respecting the user experience more than the ads.

Our publisher policies exist to help us maintain that balance, even as trends change online. For example, in recent years, we’ve seen the rise of scammers trying to take advantage of the growing popularity of online news to make money. We prohibit websites in our ad network from serving ads on misrepresentative content. Essentially this means that you can’t serve ads if you’re pretending to be a legitimate news website based in London when you’re actually a content scammer in a different city. In 2017, we found that a small number of publishers were responsible for the majority of these violations. Of the 11,000 websites we reviewed for potentially violating the misrepresentative content policy, we blocked over 650 of those sites and terminated 90 publishers from our network.  

More frequently, we see violations of our scraping content policy. This type of policy violation occurs when bad actors try to make money as quickly as possible by copying news or content from other sites. In 2017, we blocked over 12,000 websites for “scraping,” duplicating and copying content from other sites, up from 10,000 in 2016.

Does an ad with the headline “Ellen DeGeneres adopts a baby elephant!” make you want to click on it? You’re not alone. In recent years, scammers have tried to sell diet pills and weight-loss scams by buying ads that look like sensational news headlines but ultimately lead to a website selling something other than news. We suspended more than 7,000 AdWords accounts for tabloid cloaking violations, up from 1,400 in 2016.

New policies to tackle emerging threats

We’re constantly updating our policies as we see new threats emerge. Last year, we added 28 new advertiser policies and 20 new publisher policies to combat new threats and improve the ads experience online. This year, we updated several policies to address ads in unregulated or speculative financial products like binary options, cryptocurrency, foreign exchange markets and contracts for difference (or CFDs). We also updated our gambling ads policies to address new methods of gambling with items that have real-world value (e.g., skins gambling). And we will introduce a new certification process for rehabilitation facilities, allowing legitimate addiction treatment centers to connect with people in need.

Our work to protect the ads ecosystem doesn't stop here—it's ongoing. As consumer trends evolve, as our methods to protect the open web get better, so do online scams. Improving the ads experience across the web, whether that's removing harmful ads or intrusive ads, will continue to be a top priority for us.

The Marketer’s guide to TV and video advertising

The way we watch TV has fundamentally changed. The popularity of on-demand and over-the-top streaming services, the proliferation of devices, and the availability of more high-quality content means that we’re able to watch wherever, whenever and however we want.

While this is great for consumers, it can create complexity for marketers. But there is also opportunity — you can now use advanced data and automated technology to more effectively reach audiences wherever they are choosing to watch.

We’ve launched a new guide for marketers that is all about that opportunity. Learn what TV and video viewing behavior looks like in today’s world and get recommendations for how to apply data and automated technology to reach viewing audiences more effectively.

Then, get started today with our 10 best practices for improving your DoubleClick brand campaigns.



Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager

The browser for a web worth protecting

The web is an incredible asset. It’s an engine for innovation, a platform for sharing, and a universal gateway to information. When we built Chrome, we wanted to create a way for people to interact with the magic that is the web, without the browser getting in the way. We created a browser that took up minimal space on your screen, made the omnibar so you could quickly search or get directly to a website, and built our pop-up blocker to help you avoid unwanted content. Since then we’ve also added features such as Safe Browsing, pausing autoplay Flash and more—all aimed at protecting your experience of the web.


Your feedback has always played a critical part in the development of Chrome. This feedback has shown that a big source of frustration is annoying ads: video ads that play at full blast or giant pop-ups where you can’t seem to find the exit icon. These ads are designed to be disruptive and often stand in the way of people using their browsers for their intended purpose—connecting them to content and information. It’s clear that annoying ads degrade what we all love about the web. That’s why starting on February 15, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites that repeatedly display these most disruptive ads after they’ve been flagged. 


To determine which ads not to show, we’re relying on the Better Ads Standards from the the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving the experience of the ads we see on the web. It’s important to note that some sites affected by this change may also contain Google ads. To us, your experience on the web is a higher priority than the money that these annoying ads may generate—even for us.


The web is an ecosystem composed of consumers, content producers, hosting providers, advertisers, web designers, and many others. It’s important that we work to maintain a balance—and if left unchecked, disruptive ads have the potential to derail the entire system. We’ve already seen more and more people express their discontent with annoying ads by installing ad blockers, but blocking all ads can hurt sites or advertisers who aren’t doing anything disruptive. By focusing on filtering out disruptive ad experiences, we can help keep the entire ecosystem of the web healthy, and give people a significantly better user experience than they have today.


We believe these changes will not only make Chrome better for you, but also improve the web for everyone. The web is a vital part of our day-to-day. And as new technologies push the web forward, we’ll continue working to build a better, more vibrant ecosystem dedicated to bringing you only the best experiences.

Source: Google Chrome


The benefits of consolidating media buys on a single platform

With DoubleClick’s Programmatic Guaranteed solution, advertisers and media owners can transact both reservation and open auction media buys programmatically, using a single platform. This means advertisers get one view of all their buys across a campaign, allowing them to more effectively control reach and frequency so they get better results. And advertisers and media owners each benefit from a simpler and more efficient workflow.

We worked with Nielsen and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to quantify the benefits of this technology for advertisers, agencies and media owners.

Across 10 global campaigns, we found that the consolidated ad buying approach offered by Programmatic Guaranteed drove an 11% increase in reach efficiency. This means that marketers in the Nielsen study reached 11% more unique consumers -- without increasing their campaign investment -- when using Programmatic Guaranteed, compared to a siloed approach where reservation and open auction buys were managed separately.1

Buyers and sellers also save significant time when using Programmatic Guaranteed: from insertion order to billing, agency marketers in the BCG study spent 30% less time on set-up and ongoing management of campaigns compared to traditional reservations. Media owners in the BCG study spent 57% less time on set-up and ongoing management of Programmatic Guaranteed campaigns compared to traditional reservations.2

To learn more about the results, make sure to download the full report.

1 Results based on a Google commissioned study conducted by Nielsen. The siloed media buying portion of the test reached on average 322,575 unique consumers for each million impressions compared to the consolidated media portion that reached 359,617 unique consumers.

2 Results based on Google commissioned study conducted by The Boston Consulting Group, “A Guaranteed Opportunity in Programmatic”, February, 2018.
Posted by Andrea Vassalli
Product Marketing Manager

Publishers Save 57% More Time with Programmatic Guaranteed Deals

In an industry moving increasingly towards automation and efficiency, traditional reservations (the one-to-one selling and management of direct media buys) represented $26B in global display and video spend in 2017.1 While media buyers and sellers may still prefer to negotiate their premium reservations directly, new research from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) suggests that using Programmatic Guaranteed for the setup and management of direct media buys can save both parties significant time and add value. The report concluded that publishers and agencies/advertisers save 57% and 29% more time, respectively, when using Programmatic Guaranteed deals versus traditional reservations; while still maintaining the same level of control over their campaigns.2

BCG’s report, “A Guaranteed Opportunity in Programmatic Advertising”, investigates the end-to-end direct deal workflows of over 40 advertisers, agencies, and publishers across 12 countries running both Programmatic Guaranteed and traditional reservation deals. The primary objective of the research is to quantify the operational efficiency of each buying methodology. It also explores the performance lift advertisers can gain from Programmatic Guaranteed’s advanced features, like Audience List Guarantees, Custom Creatives, and Frequency Management.

Get the full report to find out how Programmatic Guaranteed can save you time, as well as to learn:
  • The expected growth of programmatic reservations over the next 3 years
  • The (8) areas where Programmatic Guaranteed improves operational workflows for buyers and sellers
  • The (4) levers you can pull to make the most of your Programmatic Guaranteed deals
Download the report here.

Posted by Justin Bradbury
Product Marketing Manager

Source:
1 Magna Global, “Programmatic 2017,” September 2017.

2 The Boston Consulting Group, “A Guaranteed Opportunity in Programmatic Advertising, February 2018. The Boston Consulting Group, “A Guaranteed Opportunity in Programmatic Advertising, February 2018.

Improve customer calls with notifications from AdWords Express

Last year AdWords Express launched goals to help your ads drive better results, like more in-store visits or calls. If you choose calls as your goal, we want to make sure you get the most out of every call.

Today we’re introducing call notifications, an easy way to give feedback on the calls you get through AdWords Express and to track any missed calls.

Get more relevant calls when you give feedback

When you finish a phone call with a customer who found your ad on Google, you’ll get a notification to give feedback on the call’s relevance. This will help AdWords Express better target your ads to the right customers.

01-call-feedback-notification-nexus5x.png
Giving feedback is quick and easy. Simply click to tell us if the call was relevant to you.

Connect with every customer who calls your business

Business owners and employees are busy and often can’t pick up the phone. In fact, we see that advertisers miss almost one in five calls they get from their AdWords Express ads. Now, if a potential customer calls while you’re working on something else, you’ll get you’ll get a push notification that allows you to call right back.

00-missed-call-notification-nexus5x.png
You can call your potential customer back right from the notification screen.

Set up call notifications with the AdWords Express app

To receive call notifications, you need the AdWords Express mobile app. Once you have the app on your mobile device, simply go into Settings and opt-in for Account updates. You’ll instantly start receiving helpful alerts about the calls you get from your ads.

If you don’t have the AdWords Express mobile app, you can get it on Android or iOS.

Reach sports fans across screens with coordinated TV and digital campaigns

With the Big Game around the corner, brands will soon be debuting their highly anticipated 2018 TV spots. In recent years, we’ve seen marketers adopt a number of strategies across TV and digital to drive brand awareness around the event, from uploading their videos early to YouTube to promoting mobile apps and social hashtags in their commercials during the game.

Today, we’re introducing two new features in DoubleClick Bid Manager that help marketers effectively coordinate their TV and digital campaigns and ensure their message lands during big cultural and real-world moments.

Sports fans are engaging across screens

Cross-screen brand strategies are critical to success, because today’s sports fans are engaging with content across devices more than ever. In a recent study, Ipsos found that 80% of sports viewers say they use a computer or smartphone while watching live sports on TV, to do things like searching for player stats and live scores, messaging other fans, and watching related videos. 1

To reach a broad, engaged audience of sports fans, marketers need to complement their live TV commercials with coordinated messages across digital devices.


Reach audiences around real-world events

Real-time triggers is a new, easy-to-use workflow now available as a beta* in DoubleClick Bid Manager. It allows advertisers to activate display and video campaigns in real-time, based on pre-defined “triggers” or moments that correspond with an event on live TV or in the real world.

Brands define the triggers they care about in Bid Manager and then specify which ad creative they want to go live immediately following that event. For example, during a live televised event, an advertiser might trigger digital video ads to serve right after their commercial airs on TV. These ads could promote a lower-funnel action like an app download or a store visit, or they could promote the new spot that just aired and drive people to watch it again on YouTube. In this way, the brand can extend the reach and impact of their TV campaign by bringing their message to sports fans who may be engaging on second-screen devices.

The real-time triggers workflow makes event-based campaigns scalable and easy to build: set campaigns up ahead of time by selecting the trigger type, defining the moments you care about, and specifying the ads you’d like to serve following that trigger. Bid Manager will then serve your ads automatically when your defined moment occurs.

Key to this new capability is that it’s nearly instantaneous from the time the moment occurs to the time your campaign goes live -- we’ve gotten our serving speed down to just a few seconds so you can provide true real-time coordination between live events and digital campaigns.

In addition to live TV data, we’ve integrated weather data so that advertisers can serve ads based on real-time weather parameters (e.g. when it starts to rain, serve ads for umbrellas). We’ll also be launching sports triggers so that advertisers can serve ads based on real-time occurrences in sporting events (e.g. when a player scores in the game, immediately serve congratulatory ads across devices). This will be particularly useful for all the exciting sports events happening this year.


Measure traditional TV campaigns alongside your digital reporting

Real-time coordination of TV and digital campaigns is important for reaching audiences across screens. But it’s also important for buyers to be able to measure their TV campaigns alongside their digital ones.

Access to TV metrics can help digital buyers better understand how TV dollars are working to reach their audiences. They can then use these insights to better plan and coordinate their digital campaign budgets and tactics.

We’re giving digital buyers access to linear TV campaign data directly in Bid Manager, through a new reporting dashboard called TV Ad Explorer (available in beta*). This launch builds on our efforts to make linear TV buying and impact-based measurement available in Bid Manager.

With TV Ad Explorer, you can immediately begin to explore the metrics from your recent TV campaigns, whether you bought the media through Bid Manager or not. Google collects minute-by-minute ad airings data from standard broadcast sources and partners in a privacy-safe way. This data enables advertisers to see airings data as soon as a day after airing, as well as measure the reach of their TV ads by daypart, demographics, genres, networks and shows.

TV Ad Explorer can help answer questions such as “Did my TV campaign deliver against the intended target?” and “On which shows or content did my TV campaign index heavily?” Brands can use the answers to these questions to inform their digital campaign tactics. Brands can also look at their TV campaign performance around big events from previous years and use those insights to inform creative and media decisions around the same events in the future.
In addition to standard TV metrics, digital metrics such as Search Lift (the change in volume of searches for a brand after an ad airs) will be incorporated into TV Ad Explorer to provide additional information for buyers to measure the impact of their TV ads.

In the future, we plan to enable media planning across TV and digital, so advertisers can leverage insights from their TV campaigns to optimize their digital media plans. For example, advertisers will be able to use TV Ad Explorer to project if and how digital media placements can provide incremental reach or more cost-efficient reach to augment TV.

The way people watch video content has changed. As an advertiser, it's not enough to worry about just one screen anymore. To really break through and ensure your message sticks, you need to connect with people across all the content and screens they are choosing. Today’s launches advance our efforts to help advertisers bridge the gap between TV and digital.

1Google/Ipsos Connect, Sports Viewing Survey, US, December 2017 (n of 1,520 adults aged 18 to 54 who identify themselves as sports fans. Average across 10 sports.)

*The availability of TV Ad Explorer and Real-time triggers varies across regions depending on the type of data and inventory you’re using. Please talk to your DoubleClick Sales rep to understand what is available for your region and campaign type.


Posted by Jean-Claude Homawoo
Product Manager, DoubleClick

Reach sports fans across screens with coordinated TV and digital campaigns

With the Big Game around the corner, brands will soon be debuting their highly anticipated 2018 TV spots. In recent years, we’ve seen marketers adopt a number of strategies across TV and digital to drive brand awareness around the event, from uploading their videos early to YouTube to promoting mobile apps and social hashtags in their commercials during the game.

Today, we’re introducing two new features in DoubleClick Bid Manager that help marketers effectively coordinate their TV and digital campaigns and ensure their message lands during big cultural and real-world moments.

Sports fans are engaging across screens

Cross-screen brand strategies are critical to success, because today’s sports fans are engaging with content across devices more than ever. In a recent study, Ipsos found that 80% of sports viewers say they use a computer or smartphone while watching live sports on TV, to do things like searching for player stats and live scores, messaging other fans, and watching related videos. 1

To reach a broad, engaged audience of sports fans, marketers need to complement their live TV commercials with coordinated messages across digital devices.


Reach audiences around real-world events

Real-time triggers is a new, easy-to-use workflow now available as a beta* in DoubleClick Bid Manager. It allows advertisers to activate display and video campaigns in real-time, based on pre-defined “triggers” or moments that correspond with an event on live TV or in the real world.

Brands define the triggers they care about in Bid Manager and then specify which ad creative they want to go live immediately following that event. For example, during a live televised event, an advertiser might trigger digital video ads to serve right after their commercial airs on TV. These ads could promote a lower-funnel action like an app download or a store visit, or they could promote the new spot that just aired and drive people to watch it again on YouTube. In this way, the brand can extend the reach and impact of their TV campaign by bringing their message to sports fans who may be engaging on second-screen devices.

The real-time triggers workflow makes event-based campaigns scalable and easy to build: set campaigns up ahead of time by selecting the trigger type, defining the moments you care about, and specifying the ads you’d like to serve following that trigger. Bid Manager will then serve your ads automatically when your defined moment occurs.

Key to this new capability is that it’s nearly instantaneous from the time the moment occurs to the time your campaign goes live -- we’ve gotten our serving speed down to just a few seconds so you can provide true real-time coordination between live events and digital campaigns.

In addition to live TV data, we’ve integrated weather data so that advertisers can serve ads based on real-time weather parameters (e.g. when it starts to rain, serve ads for umbrellas). We’ll also be launching sports triggers so that advertisers can serve ads based on real-time occurrences in sporting events (e.g. when a player scores in the game, immediately serve congratulatory ads across devices). This will be particularly useful for all the exciting sports events happening this year.


Measure traditional TV campaigns alongside your digital reporting

Real-time coordination of TV and digital campaigns is important for reaching audiences across screens. But it’s also important for buyers to be able to measure their TV campaigns alongside their digital ones.

Access to TV metrics can help digital buyers better understand how TV dollars are working to reach their audiences. They can then use these insights to better plan and coordinate their digital campaign budgets and tactics.

We’re giving digital buyers access to linear TV campaign data directly in Bid Manager, through a new reporting dashboard called TV Ad Explorer (available in beta*). This launch builds on our efforts to make linear TV buying and impact-based measurement available in Bid Manager.

With TV Ad Explorer, you can immediately begin to explore the metrics from your recent TV campaigns, whether you bought the media through Bid Manager or not. Google collects minute-by-minute ad airings data from standard broadcast sources and partners in a privacy-safe way. This data enables advertisers to see airings data as soon as a day after airing, as well as measure the reach of their TV ads by daypart, demographics, genres, networks and shows.

TV Ad Explorer can help answer questions such as “Did my TV campaign deliver against the intended target?” and “On which shows or content did my TV campaign index heavily?” Brands can use the answers to these questions to inform their digital campaign tactics. Brands can also look at their TV campaign performance around big events from previous years and use those insights to inform creative and media decisions around the same events in the future.
In addition to standard TV metrics, digital metrics such as Search Lift (the change in volume of searches for a brand after an ad airs) will be incorporated into TV Ad Explorer to provide additional information for buyers to measure the impact of their TV ads.

In the future, we plan to enable media planning across TV and digital, so advertisers can leverage insights from their TV campaigns to optimize their digital media plans. For example, advertisers will be able to use TV Ad Explorer to project if and how digital media placements can provide incremental reach or more cost-efficient reach to augment TV.

The way people watch video content has changed. As an advertiser, it's not enough to worry about just one screen anymore. To really break through and ensure your message sticks, you need to connect with people across all the content and screens they are choosing. Today’s launches advance our efforts to help advertisers bridge the gap between TV and digital.

1Google/Ipsos Connect, Sports Viewing Survey, US, December 2017 (n of 1,520 adults aged 18 to 54 who identify themselves as sports fans. Average across 10 sports.)

*The availability of TV Ad Explorer and Real-time triggers varies across regions depending on the type of data and inventory you’re using. Please talk to your DoubleClick Sales rep to understand what is available for your region and campaign type.


Posted by Jean-Claude Homawoo
Product Manager, DoubleClick