Tag Archives: 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

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

Capture growing video budgets with new out-stream formats on DoubleClick

The best ads tell stories that pull people in, capture their attention and make them want to believe in what they’re being told. Digital video has given advertisers the canvas to do just that on more screens than ever before. And they’re taking note–digital video spend grew 35% last year alone. 1 But as powerful as video ads are, they have historically been limited to the confines of players and in-stream video content–missing important consumer moments throughout the day like reading the news, playing a game, or scrolling through a social app.

To help advertisers engage their audiences in more places, and to enable publishers to capture growing video budgets across their non-video content on sites and apps, we recently released four new programmatic out-stream video formats in a new beta on DoubleClick. We’re also working closely with the IAB Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group to ensure that all of our new video formats are easily measurable across all platforms and devices.

In-article and in-feed formats put video ads front and center in publisher content

With out-stream ads on DoubleClick, publishers can serve video ads across their content feeds and within their articles programmatically. Both in-feed and in-article video ads seamlessly fit a user's scrolling behavior on both web and apps; and they are muted by default to ensure they don’t disrupt the user. Moreover, the ads only play when 50% or more of the ad is in view, ensuring higher viewability rates. If users choose to engage with an ad, they can tap to unmute the video.

On average, out-stream video ads are earning 8.9x higher CPMs compared to standard banner ad CPMs on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. 2 And in certain regions, among the 100+ publishers who have already signed up for the beta, partners have seen substantially greater CPM lift as we’ve continued to fine tune and scale the new formats.

In-Article Video Demo


In-Feed Video Demo

Native video ads conform to perform

Native video ads are designed to fit the form and function of the surrounding page or app. Using standardized ad components like headline, description, logo, and video files, publishers can create custom ad experiences that are seamlessly integrated across their sites and apps.

Since launching their “Adapt” native video ad format with DoubleClick, Time Inc. has seen a 5x increase in video inventory available across their properties. Ashley Allen, Director of Ad Product Solutions at Time Inc. commented, “Adapt gives us the flexibility to meet the demands of our advertisers while responding to the behaviors of our audiences. DoubleClick’s native ad technology has enabled us to capture this opportunity as quickly as we’ve been able to.”

Native Video Demo

Rewarded video ads deliver value for users and engagement for game developers

Games are among the most popular types of apps, pulling in a high percentage of male and female users of all ages, 96% of whom engage with gaming apps every week.3 Game developers using DoubleClick Rewarded video ads are capitalizing on growing usage by creating non-intrusive, user-initiated ad experiences that offer users something of value (like an extra life in a game) in exchange for viewing a video ad.

In 2017, Nestlé ran a campaign in the UK with King, the gaming company behind Candy Crush, offering users an extra life or boost in their games in exchange for watching a video ad. The user-initiated placements generated a 99.5% view-through rate and a 3% click-through rate across Android devices.4 Performance like this underlines the fact that when users’ experiences and choices are respected, both the advertiser and the publisher benefit from increased engagement.

Rewarded Video Demo

Ensuring accountability across new video formats, devices and platforms

In addition to developing new video ad formats, we're also working to ensure that video viewability is easily measurable across all platforms and devices -- including mobile apps. To accomplish this, we’re integrating the Open Measurement SDK into both our Google Mobile Ads and Interactive Mobile Ads SDKs. Once implemented, mobile app publishers and game developers will be able to power any vendor’s measurement tools, which in turn will reduce development time and streamline deal negotiations with advertisers.

The initiative marks a significant step towards improving the measurability of in-app video ads and we're working closely with partners like King to test the Google Mobile Ads SDK integration in their gaming apps.

"For the industry at large, The Open Measurement SDK will create a universal standard for the collection of video viewability data and reduce reporting inconsistencies across the mobile app landscape. For King, the single-source solution will enable us to engage with advertisers regardless of their preferred measurement vendor. As a result, mobile in app video will become a more predictable advertising channel, which in turn will create more demand for our inventory."

--Brian Ames, President of Advertising at King


Out-stream video formats are poised to play an important role in the future of video advertising for publishers, because they create a meaningful opportunity to increase the demand for and value of their content and audiences. As advertisers continue to demand more premium video inventory, non-video publishers and game developers should take note, as they may be sitting on a treasure trove of video ad impressions. We look forward to sharing more of our work and innovations in these areas in the months ahead.
Posted by Benyah Shaparenko
Product Manager, Google
1 “Global Ad Spend Forecast”, Dentsu Aegis Network, Jan 2018 
2 DoubleClick Ad Exchange Data, Sept-Dec 2017
3 ”Something for everyone,” Ipsos MORI mobile app research report, July 2017
4 “How Nestlé Achieved Brand Goals in Mobile App Environment”, Think with Google, May 2017

Maximize customer potential with adaptive remarketing

Remarketing lists are a great way to reconnect with previous visitors to your website. They can also provide valuable customer insights that can be used to find new opportunities to help you reach your goals. However, due to the number and size of your lists, these insights can often be difficult to identify.

With adaptive remarketing, DoubleClick Search will automatically find those opportunities and create more focused remarketing targets to help you reach visitors who are interested in other products and services you offer.

Get more out of your remarketing lists

Adaptive remarketing is easy to use. Simply enable “remarketing targets” under Adaptive settings in your campaign settings page after applying a Smart bidding strategy or conversion goal. DoubleClick Search will then continuously compare the conversion rates of your remarketing lists against the conversion rates of the campaigns they’re applied to. Whenever a list has a conversion rate that varies significantly from its campaign, a new remarketing target will be created so you can set optimal bid adjustments.

For example, let’s say you’re a travel advertiser with a campaign for vacations in Chicago. You know you’re reaching people who’ve shown interest in traveling to Chicago, however you might not realize that conversion rates for Chicago may be higher for audiences who’ve previously shown interest in other cities.

By comparing performance, adaptive remarketing sees that many people who purchase Chicago vacations are the same ones who’ve shown interest in San Francisco vacations. As a result, your 'San Francisco' remarketing list would be automatically applied to your Chicago campaign, allowing you to easily adjust your bids for these customers to drive more revenue.
You can apply adaptive remarketing in your campaign settings

Get better results with Smart Bidding

DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding automatically finds the optimal bid to get you the best return on investment (ROI). By combining adaptive remarketing with Smart Bidding, you can enjoy even more benefits from automation.

When you apply a bid strategy or conversion goal to your adaptive campaign, we’ll continuously assess existing and auto-generated remarketing targets to align with your goal. Using the previous example, Smart Bidding will automatically adjust bids for your ‘San Francisco’ remarketing targets and ensure that your bid adjustments are always optimized.

Learn more about how adaptive remarketing can help you uncover business opportunities in the DoubleClick Search Help Center.

Posted by Amit Varia
Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Discover the true value of each click with data-driven attribution

From buying a TV to planning a holiday vacation, it takes consumers, on average, four clicks before completing a transaction online.¹ Some of these clicks matter more than the others, yet 40% of businesses still use first-touch or last-touch attribution when measuring ad performance.²

In order to understand the true value of each of those clicks, you need an attribution model that better reflects the new fragmented mobile-first consumer journey. Data-driven attribution (DDA) in DoubleClick Search solves this by helping you better understand the value of each ad click throughout your customer’s journey.

Create a model that fits your needs

Machine learning sets DDA in DoubleClick Search apart from rules-based attribution models. Unlike those models, DDA calculates the value of each ad click using your Floodlight conversion data, including conversions that happen across devices and browsers. By looking at all the clicks that happen across all those conversions, DDA can assign more value to the clicks that are driving conversions, and less value to those that don't.

Over time, your model will become more accurate as more data becomes available to inform your bids with. You can also customize your DDA model to fit your business goals.

DDA gets results

Here’s how DDA has already created value for advertisers around the world:



“Data-driven attribution has taken our campaign performance to the next level. By creating tailored attribution models for both new and existing customer journeys, we’re able to easily see which campaigns are contributing to our chosen business objective,” says Matt Darbon, Online Marketing at Waitrose. The British supermarket chain decreased its cost-per-order by nearly 40% while significantly increasing sales volume.




Walks of Italy provides immersive tour experiences around Italy's major cities and attractions. Using DDA and Smart Bidding, the brand saw a 31% increase in ticket sales, compared to 11% for other non-brand campaigns not running on DDA bid strategies. It also saw 25% growth in overall return on investment (ROI).




Volkswagen Group, one of the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers, saw sales leads increase by nearly 6% and cost-per-lead decrease by 17% in Brazil with DDA.






TalkTalk, the UK’s leading value-for-money telecoms provider, partnered with mSix to implement DDA for its campaigns. As a result, the brand saw its total volume of sales increase by 9% while maintaining its cost-per-acquisition.




Make DDA work for your business

Here are some best practices to help ensure your data-driven attribution models are customized to meet your business goals:

  • Apply your customer and market knowledge. Create and apply DDA specific labels to your campaigns based on the role that Search activity plays in the customer journey. Learn more
  • Check the accuracy of your model with Floodlight columns. Once you’ve created your custom DDA model, create Floodlight columns for DDA conversions to ensure your model is set up correctly. Learn more
  • Track your performance against other models. For easier monitoring, add your DDA model to your favorite reports. Create a custom column that shows the percentage difference in conversion value assigned to keywords, campaigns and labels between your attribution models. Learn more
  • Re-evaluate keywords, campaigns and labels for performance. Now that you’re measuring the value of every click, you may discover that some of your campaigns are performing better than before. Make sure your budget and bids are updated based on the insights provided by DDA. Learn more
  • Automate your bids based on your new model. To get the full benefits of DDA, use Smart Bidding with your DDA model to automatically set optimal bids across your campaigns. Learn more

Learn more about data-driven attribution in the DoubleClick Search Help Center.

¹ Google Analytics MCF data for single device measurement, Feb. 2017
² Google/Forrester, "Cross Channel Attribution is Needed to Drive Marketing Effectiveness," May 2014, U.S.
Posted by Michel van Luijtelaar
Measurement & Attribution Specialist, DoubleClick Search

Preventing unauthorized inventory

Advertising should be free of invalid activity – including unauthorized, misrepresented, and fake ad inventory – which diverts revenue from legitimate publishers and tricks marketers into wasting their money. Earlier this year we worked with the IAB Tech Lab to create the ads.txt standard, a simple solution to help stop bad actors from selling unauthorized inventory across the industry. Since then, we’ve shared our plans to integrate the standard into our advertiser and publisher advertising platforms.

As of November 8th, Google’s advertising platforms filter all unauthorized ad inventory identified by published ads.txt files:
  • Marketers and agencies using DoubleClick Bid Manager and AdWords will not buy unauthorized impressions as identified by publishers’ ads.txt files.
  • DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense publishers that use ads.txt are protected against unauthorized inventory being sold in our auctions.

Preventing the sale of unauthorized inventory depends on having complete and accurate ads.txt information. So, to make sure our systems are filtering traffic as accurately as possible, we built an ads.txt crawler based on concepts used in our search index technology. It scans all active sites across our network daily, over 30m domains, for ads.txt files, to prevent unauthorized inventory from entering our systems.



The adoption of ads.txt has been growing quickly and the standard is reaching scale across publishers:
  • Over 100,000 ads.txt files have been published
  • 750 of the comScore 2,000 have ads.txt files
  • Over 50% of inventory seen by DBM comes from domains with ads.txt files

We believe ads.txt is a significant step in cleaning up bad inventory and it's great to have the broad support of our partners like L’Oreal, Omnicom Media Group, and the Financial Times.
“Consumers place enormous value on the ability to trust brands, which is why transparency in advertising is a top priority at L’Oreal. We look forward to collaborating with Google on this initiative as we continue to encourage the industry to follow suit.”
- Marie Gulin-Merle, CMO L’Oreal USA
"Removing counterfeit inventory from the ecosystem is critical to maintaining trust in digital. The simple act of publishing an ads.txt file helps provide the transparency we need to quickly reduce counterfeit inventory from harming our clients."
- Steve Katelman, EVP Global Strategic Partnerships, Omnicom Media Group
“It's great to see adoption of ads.txt across the industry and we're happy to see Google put their support behind this initiative. By eliminating counterfeit inventory from the ecosystem, marketers' budgets will work that much harder and revenue will reach real working media to fund the independent, high-quality journalism which society depends upon."
- Anthony Hitchings, Digital Advertising Operations Director, Financial Times

It’s amazing to see how fast the industry is adopting ads.txt, but there is still more to be done. Supporting industry initiatives like ads.txt is critical to maintaining the health of the digital advertising ecosystem. That’s why we’ll continue to invest and innovate to make the ecosystem more valuable, transparent, and trusted for everyone.

Posted by Per Bjorke
Product Manager, Google Ad Traffic Quality

Preventing unauthorized inventory

Advertising should be free of invalid activity – including unauthorized, misrepresented, and fake ad inventory – which diverts revenue from legitimate publishers and tricks marketers into wasting their money. Earlier this year we worked with the IAB Tech Lab to create the ads.txt standard, a simple solution to help stop bad actors from selling unauthorized inventory across the industry. Since then, we’ve shared our plans to integrate the standard into our advertiser and publisher advertising platforms.

As of November 8th, Google’s advertising platforms filter all unauthorized ad inventory identified by published ads.txt files:
  • Marketers and agencies using DoubleClick Bid Manager and AdWords will not buy unauthorized impressions as identified by publishers’ ads.txt files.
  • DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense publishers that use ads.txt are protected against unauthorized inventory being sold in our auctions.

Preventing the sale of unauthorized inventory depends on having complete and accurate ads.txt information. So, to make sure our systems are filtering traffic as accurately as possible, we built an ads.txt crawler based on concepts used in our search index technology. It scans all active sites across our network daily, over 30m domains, for ads.txt files, to prevent unauthorized inventory from entering our systems.



The adoption of ads.txt has been growing quickly and the standard is reaching scale across publishers:
  • Over 100,000 ads.txt files have been published
  • 750 of the comScore 2,000 have ads.txt files
  • Over 50% of inventory seen by DBM comes from domains with ads.txt files

We believe ads.txt is a significant step in cleaning up bad inventory and it's great to have the broad support of our partners like L’Oreal, Omnicom Media Group, and the Financial Times.
“Consumers place enormous value on the ability to trust brands, which is why transparency in advertising is a top priority at L’Oreal. We look forward to collaborating with Google on this initiative as we continue to encourage the industry to follow suit.”
- Marie Gulin-Merle, CMO L’Oreal USA
"Removing counterfeit inventory from the ecosystem is critical to maintaining trust in digital. The simple act of publishing an ads.txt file helps provide the transparency we need to quickly reduce counterfeit inventory from harming our clients."
- Steve Katelman, EVP Global Strategic Partnerships, Omnicom Media Group
“It's great to see adoption of ads.txt across the industry and we're happy to see Google put their support behind this initiative. By eliminating counterfeit inventory from the ecosystem, marketers' budgets will work that much harder and revenue will reach real working media to fund the independent, high-quality journalism which society depends upon."
- Anthony Hitchings, Digital Advertising Operations Director, Financial Times

It’s amazing to see how fast the industry is adopting ads.txt, but there is still more to be done. Supporting industry initiatives like ads.txt is critical to maintaining the health of the digital advertising ecosystem. That’s why we’ll continue to invest and innovate to make the ecosystem more valuable, transparent, and trusted for everyone.

Posted by Per Bjorke
Product Manager, Google Ad Traffic Quality

Three new tools to improve the performance of your holiday campaigns

With the all important holiday shopping season about to begin, you can’t afford to miss any revenue opportunity. But you also need to be careful about how much you push your already stretched team. This is why we recently introduced three new tools, available to all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts, that will help you reach more consumers while reducing manual work.

Expand your reach

First, as part of the new planning workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager, we recently launched a new campaign object that lets you group Insertion Orders (IOs), so you can more efficiently manage your ad buys. For example, this will help you improve the reach of your campaign by allowing you to set up frequency capping across Programmatic Direct deals and open auction IOs, so you can be sure that your open auction campaigns reach consumers who haven’t been already exposed to your ads. You can create a new campaign in just a few simple steps*.

Second, we have introduced a slider that lets you expand your similar audience lists* so you can choose if you want maximum reach, higher similarity or a balance of the two. For example if you’re a toy retailer, your sales during the holiday season are likely going to be critical in determining your success for the entire year. To capture the increased holiday demand, you can use the slider to choose to reach the most possible consumers who look like your frequent purchasers. Once the sales peak has passed, you can scale your similar audience campaigns back to focus on more similarity.

You can find the new expansion slider in the Audience lists targeting tab of your line item level settings.

Optimize campaigns faster

By following the steps above, you can improve the setup of your campaigns and give them the best chance of success, but once your campaigns are up and running, you need a fast way to spot if things are not going according to plan. To help you with this, we recently introduced a new optimization view that allows you to quickly focus on campaigns that are not on track to achieve their spend and performance goals.

Once you know where you should focus your attention, you’ll be able to quickly determine what is driving the poor performance. By segmenting the data along dimensions (site, time of day, day of week, environment and more), you can easily see what is impacting performance.

In addition to surfacing key insights, the optimization view also provides suggestions on how you could optimize Line Item budgets within an IO. This way you can spend time making strategic decisions and not calculating how you should re-allocate budget across different Line Items.


Since using the new optimization view, our partner OMD Australia has been getting more granular insights faster:

"The optimization view has been helping us get quick insights, such as top performing placements and times of day. With this information we can immediately change our strategies to boost campaign performance without having to manually pull reports."
- Jiff Kumar, Programmatic Trader at OMD Sydney

You can access the new optimization view* at the IO or Line Item level by selecting Optimization from the drop down menu next to the New Insertion Order or New Line Item buttons in the DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Posted by Deirdre Athaide and Rod Lopez
Product Managers, DoubleClick Bid Manager


*A DoubleClick Bid Manager account is required to visualize the article.

Google Analytics 360 + Salesforce: A Powerful Combination

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics blog

We often hear from marketers how challenging it is to piece together online and offline customer interactions in order to see a complete view of a customer’s journey. That’s why we’re excited to share that Google and Salesforce are working together to seamlessly connect sales, marketing and advertising data for the first time, giving you the full view of what’s working and what isn’t as customers engage with your ads, websites, apps, emails, call centers, field sales teams and more.

Today at Dreamforce, Google and Salesforce are announcing a strategic partnership to deliver four new, turnkey integrations between Google Analytics 360, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud:
  • Sales data from Sales Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in attribution, bid optimization and audience creation
  • Data from Analytics 360 will be visible in the Marketing Cloud reporting UI for a more complete understanding of campaign performance
  • Audiences created in Analytics 360 will be available in Marketing Cloud for activation via direct marketing channels, including email and SMS
  • Customer interactions from Marketing Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in creating audience lists

These new connections between our market-leading digital analytics solution and Salesforce’s market-leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform will change the game for how our clients understand and reach their customers — and how they measure the impact of their marketing. These integrations are fully consistent with our privacy policies and have settings that offer privacy controls and choice on how data is used.

By integrating your customer data, you can see a customer’s path from awareness all the way through to conversion and retention. And with connections to Google’s ad platforms and Salesforce’s marketing platform, you can quickly take action, engaging them at the right moment. You'll see these new integrations begin to arrive in the first half of 2018.

Example of a complete customer journey funnel in Google Analytics 360 joining website data (pageviews, leads submitted) with pipeline data from Sales Cloud (lead and opportunity stages); example also shows a prompt to create a new audience segment to take action

New insights

Until now, businesses have not been able to connect offline interactions, such as an estimate provided by a call center rep or an order closed by a field sales rep, with insights on how customers use digital channels. With the connection between Sales Cloud and Analytics 360, soon you’ll be able to include offline conversions in your attribution modeling when using Google Attribution 360, so you’ll have a more complete view of ROI for each of your marketing channels and even more reason to move away from a last-click attribution method. This integration will also let you see how your most valuable customers engage with your digital properties, answering some important questions like, what are they looking for and are they actually finding what they need?

With the integration allowing data from Analytics 360 to be visible in Marketing Cloud, you’ll gain a more complete understanding of how your marketing campaigns perform. For example, if you send an email campaign to frequent shoppers to promote your fall fashion line, you’ll be able to see right in Marketing Cloud information such as how many pages people visited when they came to your site, the number of times people clicked on product details to learn more, and how many people added items to their shopping cart and converted.

Easy to take action

Today, Google Analytics allows you to create audience lists and goals that you can easily send to AdWords and DoubleClick for digital remarketing and to optimize bids. With the new connection from Sales Cloud to Analytics 360, in addition to unlocking new insights and more data for attribution modeling, you’ll be able to combine Salesforce data (such as sales milestones or conversions) with behavioral data from your digital properties to create richer audiences and for smarter bidding.

For example, if you’re a residential solar panel company and want to find new customers, you can create an audience in Analytics 360 of qualified leads from Sales Cloud and use AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people with similar characteristics. Or, create a goal in Analytics 360 based on leads marked as closed in Sales Cloud, and automatically send that goal to AdWords or DoubleClick Search to optimize your bidding and drive more conversions.

With the Analytics 360 connection to Marketing Cloud, you’ll be able to use customer insights to take action in marketing channels beyond Google’s ad platforms, such as email, SMS or push notification. For example, you can create an audience in Analytics 360 of customers who bought a TV on your site and came back later to browse for home theater accessories, and use that list in Salesforce to promote new speakers with a timely and relevant email.

Powerful combination

Every day, Google Analytics processes hundreds of billions of customer moments, Salesforce Marketing Cloud sends 1.4 billion emails, and there are over 5 million leads and opportunities created in Salesforce Sales Cloud. These new integrations represent a powerful combination, and we believe they will help marketers take a big step closer to the ultimate dream: providing every customer with a highly relevant experience at each step of their journey.

You’ll see these new joint capabilities become available beginning in 2018, and we'll be sure to keep you updated along the way. Contact us here if you would like to learn more about Analytics 360. We hope you’re as excited as we are!

Posted by Babak Pahlavan
Senior Director of Product Management, Measurement & Analytics

The Google Analytics 360 + Salesforce integrations are just one part of a broader strategic alliance announced today between Google and Salesforce. Read about new integrations between G Suite and Salesforce and a new partnership between Google Cloud and Salesforce here.

The importance of site-wide tagging for accurate conversion measurement in DoubleClick Search

Measurement is foundational to digital marketing. Heading into the holidays, it’s more important than ever to make sure all of your online sales, reservations and leads are measured accurately. To that end, we wanted to bring an important update to your attention: the recent introduction of Intelligent Tracking Prevention affects conversion measurement on Safari. It’s important to update your website tags as soon as possible to support measurement of conversions from Safari. This is in line with Apple's recommendations for ad attribution. Without updating your tags, it will be difficult to measure the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.

Site-wide tagging preserves your visibility

There are multiple ways to measure the performance of your online advertising. The best options rely on site-wide tagging—tagging that’s applied to every page on your site. Applying the tag to every page of your site keeps your measurement updated and helps to measure conversions more accurately, including in Safari's ITP environment.

There are two options for complete measurement of conversions from Safari in DoubleClick Search:

Option 1: Install the global site tag (gtag.js) on your entire site

The global site tag (gtag.js) is a new web tagging library that works across Google's site and conversion measurement products–giving you better control while making implementation easier. The new tag will now serve as the single tag for both AdWords and Google Analytics, with support for DoubleClick Search coming mid-November. By setting it on every page of your site, and including event snippets on your active conversion pages, the global site tag will send conversion data whenever event calls are made.

Stay tuned to learn more about DoubleClick Search support for the new global site tag in November.

Option 2: Use Google Tag Manager

For customers who are already using Google Tag Manager, there's no need to make any changes to your page—simply add the Conversion Linker tag in the Tag Manager interface, and set it to fire on all pages.

If you're not using Google Tag Manager, you can get started today. Alternatively, you can start with the global site tag (option 1 above) and then easily upgrade to Tag Manager in the future.

If you’re using a non-Google tool for website measurement, check with your vendor to make sure your solution allows you to measure conversions in Safari's ITP environment.

Estimating untracked conversions in DoubleClick Search

To help you accurately measure and take action on your conversion data, DoubleClick Search uses statistical modeling. Statistical modeling gathers website conversions for traffic that can’t be measured from Safari and includes them in your DoubleClick Search reporting.

We’ll continue to use statistical modeling in Doubleclick Search where site-wide measurement isn’t applied. However, using site-wide tagging will let you better understand your marketing performance across all DoubleClick products.

Measurement in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager

The two options outlined above also provide more complete measurement of conversions in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. You can use Google Tag Manager today and the new global site tag in mid-November. Campaign Manager and Bid Manager customers using these two measurement solutions will start to see improvements in measurement coverage over the next few months.

Posted by Sriram Parameswar
Product Manager, DoubleClick Search