Tag Archives: Ads

Programmatic helps brands make the most of micro-moments

Every day, your audience is filling their days with hundreds if not thousands of micro-moments—intent-rich moments when preferences are shaped and decisions are made. As consumers spread their attention across more and more screens and channels, those moments can happen almost anywhere, anytime. People search on their smartphones while in front of the TV. They watch YouTube videos on their tablets while texting their friends. They open a mobile app to shop for the perfect gift, then head to the store to buy it. With mobile devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find and buy anything, anytime.

For marketers, this means the purchase funnel is wildly more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

“Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent.”

It’s hard to plan for nonlinear purchase paths, but programmatic advertising can help, enabling brands to reach the right person with the right message in the moment of opportunity. Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent. That’s a powerful proposition, and it’s why programmatic advertising spend is projected to grow by more than 77% this year.1

In this article, we share four tips for using programmatic to win these micro-moments and examples of brands that are doing it right.

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.

AdWords API Fall 2015 Workshops Announced

The AdWords API Workshops are back, and the registration form and agenda will be available on the website soon: www.adwordsapiworkshops.com. In the meantime, you may review the site Resources section for previous event presentations.

These workshops are a series of technical events, ideal for those who are working with the AdWords API.

Workshops will be held on the following dates and locations:

  • New York City - October 20
  • San Francisco - October 22
  • London - October 27
  • Hamburg - October 29
  • Tokyo - October 29
  • Amsterdam - November 3

Stay tuned and keep an eye on the website for more details on how to register.

--AdWords API Team

Maximize yield with custom and flexible ad sizes on DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Over the years, we’ve found that maximizing competition for every impression produces the best results for you. That’s why we’ve developed new Custom and Flexible Ad Size controls in DoubleClick Ad Exchange to bring you even more competition for every impression so you can sell any ad size programmatically.

Maximum demand for all ad sizes

Region-specific ad sizes have always been difficult to monetize programmatically because they typically do not match IAB standard ad sizes. Now with Custom Size controls on DoubleClick Ad Exchange publishers can easily create and sell ads of any size programmatically. For example, in Northern Europe where the 800x250 ad size is popular, publishers can now benefit from the programmatic demand of Ad Exchange with all the controls and reporting they’re familiar with.

In addition to making it easier to implement Custom Sizes, we’re making it possible to increase the demand available to every ad with Flexible Size controls. Publishers can now allow any ad slot to accept bids from multiple ad creative sizes. For example, a custom size slot like 320x300 can now be filled with popular sizes like 300x250 and 250x250 in addition to exact 320x300 matches. Flexible Ad Sizes is now live on all ad slots for publishers globally and publishers can control the range of sizes their slots accept with the Flexible Size rule type.

With Custom and Flexible Ad Size controls publishers globally can sell ads of any size and maximize yield for them with programmatic demand. During testing, we observed a revenue increase across all Ad Exchange inventory with some publishers seeing CPM gains as high as 30% for affected ad slots.

"Custom Ad Sizes has enabled us to move the bulk of our programmatic deal making to DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which has simplified things a lot. The Finnish market is very much dominated by market-specific ad sizes, especially 980x400 and 300x300."
Ville Holopainen, Sr. Operations and Development Manager, Fonecta

Posted by Zutao Zhu
Software Engineer, DoubleClick

Support for shared negatives in AdWords Scripts

AdWords Scripts now support negative keyword and excluded ad placement lists, and the ability to share them across campaigns. Follow these links for implementation details and code examples: We have also released a new solution named Master Negative List that uses this feature to maintain a master list of negative keywords and placements for AdWords accounts. The list of negative criteria can be managed from a spreadsheet. Separate versions are available for AdWords accounts and manager accounts.

Special thanks goes to Terence Nip, who implemented this feature during his summer internship at Google.

Give this feature a try and let us know what you think! You can post your questions and feedback on our developer forum.

Cutting unwanted ad injectors out of advertising

For the last few months, we’ve been raising awareness of the ad injection economy, showing how unwanted ad injectors can hurt user experience, jeopardize user security, and generate significant volumes of unwanted ads. We’ve used learnings from our research to prevent and remove unwanted ad injectors from Google services and improve our policies and technologies to make it more difficult to spread this unwanted software.

Today, we’re announcing a new measure to remove injected ads from the advertising ecosystem, including an automated filter in DoubleClick Bid Manager that removes impressions generated by ad injectors before any bid is made.

Unwanted ad injectors: disliked by users, advertisers, and publishers

Unwanted ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, in the pages users visit while browsing the web. Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

We’ve received almost 300,000 user complaints about them in Chrome since the beginning of 2015—more than any other issue, and it’s no wonder. Ad injectors affect all sites equally. You wouldn’t be happy if you tried to get the morning news and saw this:

Not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing them in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

Ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.

Removing injected inventory from advertising

Earlier this quarter, we launched an automated filter on DoubleClick Bid Manager to prevent advertisers from buying injected ads across the web. This new system detects ad injection and proactively creates a blacklist that prevents our systems from bidding on injected inventory. Advertisers and agencies using our platforms are already protected. No adjustments are needed. No settings to change.

We currently blacklist 1.4% of the inventory accessed by DoubleClick Bid Manager across exchanges. However, we’ve found this percentage varies widely by provider. Below is a breakdown showing the filtered percentages across some of the largest exchanges:

We’ve always enforced policies against the sale of injected inventory on our ads platforms, including the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Now advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager can avoid injected inventory across the web.

No more injected ads?

We don’t expect the steps we’ve outlined above to solve the problem overnight, but we hope others across the industry take action to cut ad injectors out of advertising. With the tangle of different businesses involved—knowingly, or unknowingly—in the ad injector ecosystem, progress will only be made if we all work together. We strongly encourage all members of the ads ecosystem to review their policies and practices and take actions to tackle this issue.

Vegard Johnsen
Product Manager, Google Ads Traffic Quality

Actionable measurement for mobile app install campaigns in DoubleClick

Mobile has forever changed the way we live, and it’s forever changed what we expect of brands. It’s fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments. Each one is a critical opportunity for brands to shape our decisions and preferences. In these I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go consumer moments, people are turning to mobile apps, in addition to websites, to find what they need.

Given this consumer shift, companies from industries as diverse as Finance, Retail and Travel have jumped into the game, building branded app experiences to engage with their customers. So it’s important that marketers be able to measure and attribute their app-related activities, whether installs, engagement, or purchases, back to their advertising campaigns.

That’s why, today, we’re excited to announce the ability to integrate app install and event data from key third party measurement partners into DoubleClick. Working with third parties (starting with TUNE) we are able to increase the measurement accuracy between different app attribution trackers and DoubleClick, ensuring your data is accurate and reliable.

With this launch, marketers can now use supported third party measurement partners to attribute in-app activities back to the in-app ads they have run through DoubleClick, enabling them to reach their performance goals as they acquire new app customers.

This launch provides customers with:

  • Choice: Use one of several (supported*) app tracking tools, while still accurately attributing installs to your DoubleClick ad campaigns.
  • Accuracy: Get reliable and accurate metrics so you can report on your results with confidence, while getting the benefits of a unified view of all your programmatic or reservation app attribution data inside DoubleClick reporting.
  • Better performance: Minimize cost-per-acquisition to get the best performance for your budget. You can optimize your bids in DoubleClick Bid Manager against your post-view and post-click conversions. You can also create targetable audience lists based on these in-app activities (e.g. customers who’ve installed your app or customers who’ve logged in).

By allowing more choice to advertisers using their preferred third party app measurement tools, we are able to provide more robust and actionable metrics for marketers running mobile app install campaigns on DoubleClick.

To get started with this feature, please follow the directions here for DoubleClick Bid Manager, and here for DoubleClick Campaign Manager (accessible by customers only.)

Posted by Steve Chang
Product Manager, DoubleClick Digital Marketing

*At launch, this feature supports a verified integration with TUNE. Verified support for other third party app trackers is expected to launch later this year.

HTML5 is here, are you ready?

Since its launch in 2008, HTML5 has quickly gained widespread adoption and is now becoming the standard for developing digital creatives. The advertising industry is responding, and increasing numbers of advertisers and agencies are building HTML5 creatives.

If you’re a publisher, this means you’ll want to make your site HTML5-ready and help advertisers get up to speed on developing these new creatives. We know the transition from Flash to HTML5 will require some short-term work on your part, but we’re here to help you and advertisers with the process.

What’s so great about HTML5?

HTML5 has seen high adoption rates for a number of reasons.

One key to its popularity is that HTML5 offers strong cross-device support—the language works well on a variety of browsers and mobile devices. This is hugely important now that more people are searching on mobile devices than on desktops.

HTML5 also plays higher-quality video faster—with an average bandwidth reduction of 35 percent. YouTube notably began defaulting users to its HTML5 player this January.

Browsers have taken note of HTML5’s speed and other benefits and have begun introducing power-saving plugins and reducing support for Flash. To increase page-load times, Chrome recently began auto-pausing Flash content that is not a primary part of a page. Safari had already done this and Firefox blocked Flash from auto-loading in July.

Getting ready for HTML5

With the web moving quickly in the direction of HTML5, here some steps that you, as a publisher, can take to prepare for this transition:

  1. Update your creative specifications: Explicitly include HTML5 as a supported technology and increase associated file-size limits to support large HTML5 creatives.
  2. Educate advertisers: Share the benefits of HTML5 and provide HTML5 creative specifications to your advertisers so they can build creatives that work on your site.
  3. Train your teams: Educate your team about HTML creative specifications and let them know what to do when they receive HTML5 ads from advertisers.
  4. Assist advertisers: Share free HTML5 ad conversion and creation tools with advertisers to ease their transition to HTML5.

All of this and is covered in our new guide to help publishers move to HTML5. If you’re looking for more information as you’re transitioning to HTML5, check out the HTML5 resources and HTML5 Toolkit on the Rich Media Gallery.

Also, our Doubleclick Rich Media team is kicking off an HTML5 Hangout series, where over five weeks we’ll set aside an hour to explore topics ranging from how to QA HTML5 ads to building dynamic creative (See the complete Hangout schedule). The first hangout is on September 10th (3pm - 4pm EST) and will introduce you to HTML5 development tools and best practices. Register here.

We know that change can be hard, so we want to make your move to the future of digital advertising a bit easier.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Back to school with DoubleClick: Learn the ins and outs of HTML5

Earlier this summer we held #HTML5Week to introduce you to resources that can help you develop engaging and relevant HTML5 creative. Now that Chrome has rolled out updates to Flash support, we're heading back to the virtual classroom to provide you with the latest information you need to make the transition to HTML5.

In this vein, we’re kicking off an HTML5 Hangout series, where over five weeks we’ll set aside an hour to explore topics ranging from how to QA HTML5 ads to building dynamic creative (See the complete Hangout schedule).

Our first hangout on September 10th (3pm - 4pm EST) will introduce you to HTML5 development tools and best practices. Register here.

Note: If you’re new to HTML5, we recommend walking through our Rich Media Fundamentals training before attending the HTML5 Hangout series.

We hope to see you in the classroom!

Posted by Hemmy Edge
DoubleClick Rich Media Product Trainer

Manual Ad Break Playback Part Deux: Welcome Back!

Today we’re expanding on our earlier blog post, Manual ad break playback in the IMA SDKs. One of the major benefits mentioned in that blog post is the ability to let your users skip ads they’ve already seen when they resume a video stream they previously suspended. We’re going to show you how to implement that functionality. For the purposes of this demo, we’ll be using the HTML5 SDK, but the principles outlined here can be used to achieve the same functionality in all four of our SDK flavors.

Prerequisites

If you’d like to follow along with these samples, you’ll need to first:

  1. Get a copy of our simple sample for HTML5.
  2. Modify that sample to disable automatic playback of ad breaks, as outlined in this guide. Be sure to remove the original call to adsManager.start() in onAdsManagerLoaded!
  3. Change the ad tag to a playlist with multiple mid-rolls (like this one) so you can see the behavior in action.

Step 1: Saving the user’s progress

The first step towards our ultimate goal is to save the current time of the video when the user leaves the page. For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to be using HTML5’s built-in localStorage object. We’re going to override window.onbeforeunload to grab the current time of the video element when the user leaves the page and save it in local storage.


function init() {
videoContent = document.getElementById('contentElement');
playButton = document.getElementById('playButton');
playButton.addEventListener('click', requestAds);

window.onbeforeunload = onUserExit;
}

function onUserExit() {
if (videoContent) {
localStorage.setItem('watched_time', videoContent.currentTime);
}
}

Step 2: Restoring the user’s progress

Now that we’re saving the user’s progress, we’ll want to restore the video to that point when the user returns to the page. We’re going to add some code to the init method to grab the stored current time (if it exists) and seek to that time when our video loads.


function init() {
videoContent = document.getElementById('contentElement');
playButton = document.getElementById('playButton');
playButton.addEventListener('click', requestAds);

window.onbeforeunload = onUserExit;

watchedTime = localStorage.getItem('watched_time') || 0;
videoContent.addEventListener('loadedmetadata', function() {
videoContent.currentTime = watchedTime;
});

}

Step 3: Skipping previously viewed ads

Now that we’re keeping track of the user’s progress and restoring that progress when the user returns, we can skip and ad breaks they watched in a previous visit. To do that, we’ll modify our adBreakReadyHandler to call adsManager.start() only when the loaded ad break is set to play after the user’s most recent saved progress. To ensure the video starts after the skipped ad breaks, we’ll also add a call to videoContent.play() when we decide to skip an ad break.


function adBreakReadyHandler(event) {
if (event.getAdData().adBreakTime >= watchedTime ||
event.getAdData().adBreakTime == -1) { // -1 ensures we play post-rolls

adsManager.start();
} else {
videoContent.play();
}

}

That’s all there is to it! Try starting your video and watching the first mid-roll break. When you leave the page and come back, clicking the play button will result in the video playing from where you left off. The first ad break you’ll see is the second mid-roll break.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to contact us via the support forum.

Updated AdWords API remarketing guides

Have you ever wanted to advertise to people who previously visited your site or mobile app? This remarketing strategy can be implemented using the AdWords API. For example, you can target ads to people who left your website without buying anything to encourage them to return and make a purchase.

We recently updated our Remarketing and Rule-based Remarketing guides to more clearly show you how to use the API to get started quickly and implement some of the most common remarketing strategies.

Remarketing resources As always, feel free to visit us or ask questions on the AdWords API Forum or our Google+ page.