Tag Archives: 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.

More features now available in the AdWords API

Following the release of AdWords API v201506, we've added a few additional features that are available immediately:
  • Android App ‘first open’ conversion tracking. Recently available in AdWords, this new conversion tracking solution measures when a user first opens an app after clicking on an ad and completing an Android app install. Check out the new FIRST_OPEN conversion type in the AppConversion tracker that also supports Postback URLs for Android.
  • A new report specific to final URLs: FINAL_URL_REPORT. The report replaces the deprecated DESTINATION_URL_REPORT and provides statistics aggregated at the final URL level.
We also launched account hiding support recently—see this announcement if you missed it. If you have any questions, feel free to reach us on the forum or via the Ads Developers Plus Page.

Updating Google Web Designer to help ease the transition to HTML5

As browsers change the way they support Flash, HTML5 is becoming the de facto language for building display ads. In fact, the IAB just launched their updated Display Creative Guidelines to fully embrace HTML5.

To support this transition, we’ve been pivoting our products to better serve an HTML5-first world. In July, we announced file size increases and bidding updates to DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. (These changes will begin rolling out in September.) And today, we’re excited to announce a series of new features for Google Web Designer that help make it easier to build HTML5 ads.

Build content that adapts to different screen sizes:

Instead of laying out your assets using pixel-based values for a specific sized ad (e.g. width = 250 pixels and height = 300 pixels), percent-based authoring lets you build the ad using relative values (e.g. width = 20% of the screen size and height = 10% of the screen size.) Asset size/position is then determined by the screen or viewport size, so that you can build an ad that works on varying screen sizes. Additionally, full-screen support lets ads expand to the full size of the screen. Learn More.

Publish in-app ads to AdMob:

You can now create content in Google Web Designer and publish to the AdMob network. When you choose the AdMob environment from the “New File” dialog, you can select from all the default sizes that AdMob supports. Learn More.

Design better creative:

  • When you build an ad with the new “tilt” event, a viewer can trigger animations or events by simply tilting their mobile device. This is a great way to build ad units that take advantage of the inherent interaction modes of a mobile device. Learn more about events.
  • Users can now create ads that send text messages by using the updated Tap-to-Call component.
  • Find that perfect color and make sure you don’t forget it! The color panel has been updated with a larger color mixer and the ability for users to save color swatches.

More HTML5 resources:

Earlier this summer, we hosted #HTML5Week to provide educational resources for creative developers looking to make the transition to HTML5. View the recordings of our high-level and step-by-step hangouts for more information.

We’re also partnering with the IAB to launch the second wave of the Make Mobile Work Initiative, aimed at educating marketers on how to build successful mobile campaigns. Check out our first webinar from last week, which focused on mobile video and featured speakers from Google, Snapchat, and Tremor Video.
Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Beautiful new designs for full-screen in-app ads

Nearly 60% of smartphone users expect their favorite apps to look visually appealing1. We’ve always believed that in-app ads can enhance an app’s overall experience by being well designed. So today we’re announcing a completely new look for our interstitial in-app ad formats - also known as full-screen ads - that run on apps in the AdMob network and DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Inspired by Material Design, the new app install interstitial comes with a beautiful cover photo, a round install button, and matching color schemes. Technology called “color extraction” makes the ads more consistent with the brand's look and feel -- we extract a dominant color either from the cover photo or app icon and apply it to the footer and install button. We found that having a greater variety of designs and colors can improve conversion rate.

Other features include the app’s rating, and a screenshot gallery which appears when a user taps ‘More images’, so users can learn more about the app without leaving the ad.

The previous design for our app install ads on the left, and our new version on the right.

Different examples of color matching.

Our app install formats have driven more than a billion downloads across Android and iOS. You can use these new designs automatically when you run a mobile app install campaign on the AdMob network in AdWords. That’s right, no extra work required!

Next, our new text-based ads are easier to read, and contain a larger headline and a round call-to-action button that clicks through to a website.

On the left, the previous text ad interstitial design, and the new version on the right.

As with other ad format innovations, our ads UI team test multiple designs - ten in this case over the course of a year - to find final versions that increase clicks and conversions for advertisers, and a positive experience for users. Both app install and text ad formats appear within the app and can be closed easily, so users can return to what they were doing with a single tap.

As we announced at Google I/O this year, the volume of interstitial impressions has more than doubled across AdMob since last July, so now’s a great time to get your business in front of more app users.

If you’re a developer looking to learn more about earning with in-app interstitial ads in your app, visit AdMob now. These new designs will also be available to developers monetizing their apps with DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Posted by Pasha Nahass
Product Manager

1. Mobile App Marketing Insights: How Consumers Really Find and Use Your Apps, Google & Ipsos Media CT, May 2015