Tag Archives: DFP

Infographic: 4 Ways Brands Win with Programmatic

Programmatic is changing the way media is being bought and sold, helping brands cut through the clutter to make one-to-one connections with consumers, at scale.
In 2013, as brands took to programmatic, and with the growth of programmatic video, CPMs on the DoubleCick Ad Exchange increased. Preferred Deal impressions also grew 250%.

In this infographic, “Programmatic: The Brand Era”, we explore four ways in which programmatic is changing the game for marketers, winning them the moments that matter with the people they care about.

See the full infographic here.

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Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing Manager

Buzzing towards victory with native: BuzzFeed on DFP

Native advertising is a becoming a dominant force in the online 
advertising industry and at DoubleClick, we’re building tools to power publishers’ native solutions. Today, we’re shining a light on BuzzFeed, who is using DFP to succeed in this space. 

BuzzFeed is a leading social news and entertainment company whose popular website curates viral and shareable online content to over 100 million unique monthly users worldwide. Their mantra is “great advertising is content” and they’ve applied this across their entire monetization strategy. Eric Harris, BuzzFeed’s Executive Vice President of Business Operations explains that the site exclusively uses ‘social advertising’, a form of native advertising, to ‘communicate the aspirations and attributes of the brands we’re working with...and promote it on our site in a way that’s clearly marked as advertising, but similar to how we promote our other content.” Scaling this burgeoning format to a large user base is no small feat. So, we caught up with Eric to learn how DFP is helping BuzzFeed execute against this strategy.

Scaling for success

BuzzFeed needed a customized and robust infrastructure that could keep up with its growth and reliably serve ads across different platforms. The team turned to DFP for it’s scalability, enabling them to “focus on what we do best, and giving us the credibility that comes with working with the industry leader.” Using DFP for ad serving and inventory management has been critical for BuzzFeed’s success. “We haven’t had to worry about anything with DFP – it just works.” Eric emphasizes.

Integrating the best of BuzzFeed with DFP
In addition to ad serving, BuzzFeed leverages the openness and flexibility of the DFP API to integrate its proprietary technologies- which help determine the content to promote- with DFP’s ad targeting and delivering capabilities to serve the ads.

When it comes to tracking, DFP also enables BuzzFeed to accurately measure its social advertising: “The fact that DFP easily integrates with other third-party tracking solutions and our custom analytics – with low discrepancies – is a big benefit for us,” says Eric.

Taking engagement cross-device
Moreover, with over half of its traffic (and growing) coming from mobile devices, BuzzFeed deeply values the ability to work fluidly and consistently across platforms with DFP. “It is hugely important for us that we can work with just one vendor – DoubleClick – to serve ads seamlessly across desktop, mobile web and mobile apps,” notes Eric.

Powering long-term growth
As it examines the future of its native advertising program, BuzzFeed has three clear goals: leadership in social, content-driven advertising, continued growth in mobile, and international expansion. Eric notes, “with the flexibility, scale and robust infrastructure that it offers, DFP plays an important role in all three of these goals.”

To get the full scoop on BuzzFeed’s success with native advertising, download the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick for Publishers blog for even more customer success stories.

Posted by Jane Brinkley, Product Marketing Manager

An important step by the Media Rating Council toward a viewable impression currency

Yesterday, the Media Rating Council (MRC) announced that it is lifting its advisory on transacting on viewability for display advertising, originally issued in November 2012. In taking this step, the MRC is signaling that great strides have been made toward the goal of transacting display advertising using viewable impressions, and the industry is ready to begin the process of adopting viewable impressions as a standard metric. We applaud this move and are thrilled to see the industry move closer to the reality of a true viewability currency.

Google has been a longtime supporter of this effort and we’ve partnered with the industry, the Media Rating Council and the IAB, as part of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, to help guide the definition and adoption of a viewable impression standard. Last April our viewability measurement solution Active View received accreditation by the Media Rating Council and, in the coming months, we’ll be making Active View reporting available to all DoubleClick customers across our platform. We believe that giving marketers, agencies and publishers access to a common, integrated viewable impression metric will set the foundation for viewable impressions to become an actionable currency.

But measurement alone will not make viewable impressions a currency. To become a currency we need technology that allows advertisers and publishers to not only measure, but also transact on viewable impressions. In December, we took our first step toward making viewable impressions a true currency by giving advertisers the ability to target and buy only viewable impressions on the Google Display Network. We’ve seen a strong positive response as thousands of advertisers and brands have adopted viewable impression buying on our network, but we’re not stopping there. We’re investing heavily in Active View and working quickly to enable our DoubleClick platform clients to value, buy, sell, serve and optimize to viewable impressions across the web. 

The MRC announcement represents an important milestone in the journey towards a viewable currency. As marketers and agencies adopt the viewable standard we can start to build a new display market that is more transparent and actionable for brand marketers.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari, Senior Product Manager

Turbocharging the News Business with the Local Media Consortium

Publishers are the lifeblood of the web. Local news providers in particular play vital role in our society, helping us stay in touch with our communities and keep up to date on the news and issues that most closely affect our lives.

We’ve had the good fortune to work with many local news publishers over the years to help power their ads businesses. Today, we’re thrilled to further that commitment with a landmark deal with the Local Media Consortium, an industry body comprising more than 800 daily newspapers and 200 local broadcast stations. Together, we’ll provide the consortium’s membership with a suite of Google advertising products for publishers:
  • A Powerful Private Exchange -- The Local Media Consortium will launch a new private ad exchange, powered by DoubleClick Ad Exchange technology. Programmatic buying is attracting growing budgets (analysts predict 75% growth in 2014). With 10 billion monthly impressions of top quality video and display inventory, this new exchange will enable the consortium to engage with the growing number of national advertisers and agencies investing in programmatic channels and looking to reach audiences at scale.
  • The DoubleClick Platform -- Members will also have access to DoubleClick for Publishers, our widely used ad management platform that lets publishers easily and efficiently manage their digital ads business, across desktop, video and mobile inventory. 
  • AdSense Contextual Ads -- Through AdSense, all members will also have the option to run contextually matched ads on their sites and search results (powered by Google Custom Search). 
The Local Media Consortium represents the best of what the web has to offer in terms of content and engaged local audiences. We’re looking forward to working with their leadership and members to build on this partnership and help grow the businesses of valued newspapers and news stations from across the country. 

Posted by Laurent Cordier, Managing Director, Americas Partnerships - News & Magazines

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

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

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

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

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

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


Posted by Neal Mohan, VP, Display Advertising

Weight Watchers weighs in on their success with Google Publisher Tag and DFP

A top name in weight loss and healthy living for 50 years, Weight Watchers serves over 140 million ad impressions a month at WeightWatchers.com.

Weight Watchers began using the Google Publisher Tag (GPT) in 2012 once they upgraded to the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) ad server. They were hoping for better targeting, but they got much more.

Higher ROI, happier advertisers
With up to five levels of targeting hierarchy, GPT let Weight Watchers improve its targeting and end manual re-tagging. The results have been strong with Click Through Rates across all standard display ad units are up 13%, and for leaderboards up 76%. Advertisers are loving the performance and Weight Watchers now runs four times more monthly campaigns with advanced targeting than with basic demographic and geo-targeting.

100% boost in operational efficiency from DFP

"I would actually say we've had a 100% increase in efficiency," says Jordan Tuck of Weight Watchers. Campaign setup is faster, and new features like the ability to update multiple line items on the same page save even more time later.

30% rise in indirect inventory earnings

With the move to DFP, Weight Watchers benefited from Dynamic Allocation with DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) to monetize indirect inventory. Their indirect inventory rates are up 30% year-over-year, and the clickthrough rate is 2.5 times higher than it was before AdX. AdX now has 70% share of their indirectly sold inventory.

Weight Watchers helps its customers "move the needle," and DFP and AdX have helped them do the same with their own online properties.

Read the full Weight Watchers story »

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

Google Web Designer beta now available: Build beautiful HTML5 creative with ease.

By now, it’s evident that multi-screen consumption is the way of the future; mobile and tablet devices are becoming consumers’ first screens, so the content that is developed needs to work seamlessly across these screens. There are already more end-users in HTML5-compatible environments than there are in Flash-compatible environments, and HTML5 ad spend is expected to overtake Flash spend within the next two years (1). But until recently, advertisers and publishers didn't have the tools they needed to easily develop content fit for today's cross-screen experiences.

Build once, run anywhere 
We’re working hard to solve this development challenge by offering powerful yet easy-to-use tools for HTML5 production. In this vein, we announced DoubleClick Studio Layouts for HTML5 back in August (also available to DFP Premium publishers using DoubleClick Studio), which lets you create HTML5 ads in minutes, and last week we announced Ready Creatives in AdWords, which creates HTML5 ads for you in seconds.

Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta of Google Web Designer, a new professional-quality design tool that makes HTML5 creative accessible to everyone from the designer to the dabbler.

Google Web Designer enables you to:
  1. Create animated HTML5 creative, with a robust, yet intuitive set of design tools. 
  2. View and edit the code behind your designs and see your edits reflected back on the stage automatically. 
  3. Build ad creatives seamlessly for DoubleClick and AdMob, or publish them to any generic environment you choose. 
  4. Receive updates to the product automatically, without having to re-download the application.
  5. Access all of this entirely for free.

Watch the Demo: A quick glimpse of Google Web Designer

Ready to give it a spin? 
  • Download Google Web Designer. 
  • Read through our getting started guide. 
  • Send us feedback! We need your input to make this tool even better, so share your ideas with us in our user forum or on our Google+ page. We’re working hard over the next couple quarters to add new features and improvements to make the product an even more robust offering. 
HTML5 is a universal language for building beautiful, engaging content that can run across desktops, smartphones, and tablets. We think that Google Web Designer will be the key to making HTML5 accessible to people throughout the industry, getting us closer to the goal of “build once, run anywhere.”

NOTE: Publishers using DFP or DFP Small business, see our Help Center articles to learn more about trafficking creatives. DFP Help Center. DFP Small Business Help Center.


Posted by Sean Kranzberg, Lead Engineer, Google Web Designer 
(1) StatCounter, Top 12 Browser Versions in North America, February 2012 to August 2013 

Universal inventory in DoubleClick for Publishers

Over the past few years we’ve witnessed a massive shift in how users consume digital content, using multiple devices interchangeably depending on context. We are now in a multi-device, multi-screen world, which presents great advertising opportunities (and potential challenges) to publishers and advertisers.

A multi-screen world doesn’t have to mean complexity with numerous ad technologies for each screen-type. We believe a multi-screen world presents publishers and advertisers with an opportunity to provide an even better experience for their audience and customers.

This is why in February we released Adwords enhanced campaigns to make it easier for advertisers to reach their audience across all devices with smarter ads that are relevant to their customers’ intent and context, without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.

For publishers we’ve worked hard over the past year evolving DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) for the multi-screen world to reduce complexity and help publishers save time so they can focus on what they do best - creating great content.

Since a publisher’s audience is constantly switching between devices to consume content, ad inventory shouldn’t be tied to a specific device, but instead to content and audience. Going forward, inventory in DFP will no longer be tied to only desktop or mobile campaigns, rather all inventory will now be able to accommodate any campaign for any device.

With this update, publishers will be able to forecast, traffic, and report on campaigns across all devices without having to split an advertiser’s impressions, budget, or campaign objectives across multiple inventory units. Publishers will have the flexibility to target mobile or desktop attributes for all inventory.

Unified inventory is designed to help you succeed in a multi-screen world and will roll-out to publishers on DFP and DFP Small Business this summer. Here are some helpful resources to help you get started.

Posted by Florent de Gantes, Product Manager