If you’re hoping to attract new advertisers and earn the most value from your first-party data, it’s critical to explain what makes your audiences special. But it often takes technical skills or data expertise to develop insights that add order and meaning to your data. 

To help simplify this process and increase the value of publishers’ first-party data, in the coming weeks we’ll be launching Audience Explorer for partners using Google Ad Manager's Audience Solutions — a suite of premium features that enable publishers to ingest, build, activate and now analyze first-party audience segments within the platform. 

Audience Explorer was built to help publishers better understand and activate their first-party audience data. Without needing advanced tools or technical capabilities, publishers will be able to analyze their audience segments, develop enhanced narratives about their data and optimize their monetization strategies for both reservation and Programmatic Direct deals.

Easing access to audience insights

Audience Explorer delivers new dashboards and improved workflows that help publishers who are investing in first-party data strategies more easily understand their audiences. To ensure the new capabilities met the needs of publishers, we worked with over a dozen global partners to help develop and test the new solution. 

“Macy's Media Network uses a data-driven approach to connect our shoppers with brands through a wide range of digital advertising services. Ad Manager's Audience Explorer tool helps us manage and scale our first party audiences to effectively plan and deliver targeted media for our advertising partners.”

- Melanie Zimmermann, Vice President, Macy’s Media Network, Macy’s 

“Partnering with Ad Manager on the development of Audience Explorer has been important for our first-party data initiatives. With more than 100 million monthly active users across our 1,200+ communities, the new dashboard will help us better understand our audiences and package our inventory in new, compelling ways for our advertiser clients.”

- David Domitrovic, Director, Data Strategy & Analytics, VerticalScope

Integrating the feedback we received, Audience Explorer allows publishers to visualize and interpret their first-party data in a variety of different ways. Partners can now explore the composition and behavior of a single audience segment, compare two segments side by side, or even overlap segments to better understand the similarities or differences in membership. Here are a few different ways publishers can benefit from Audience Explorer.

Scorecard table

When an Ad Manager user navigates to Audience Solutions in the platform, they’ll now be able to click on the title of an audience segment to open the new Audience Explorer dashboard. At the top of the dashboard, users will see the segment’s Scorecard. The Scorecard provides a quick snapshot of an audience segment over a specified period of time. High-level metrics in the Scorecard, like total unique identifiers or total ad impressions, can help publishers quickly understand which segments offer enough scale for the deals they're working on.

Audience Explorer tab

The Audience Explorer tab in the dashboard features a collection of visual Insights Cards that provide new ways to think about, market and improve the performance of first-party audience segments. These interactive cards help publishers visualize things like what time of day different audiences are most active and which ad units are seen most often. For additional flexibility, the cards can also be toggled to visualize data by either the number of unique audience identifiers or the total number of ad impressions from users in a segment.

Segment comparison tool 

The comparison tool in the Audience Explorer dashboard enables publishers to compare two first-party segments side by side in a single Insight Card. This visualization helps publishers understand which audiences may fit an advertisers needs more closely, or how two different segments could be best used together in a single campaign.

Segment overlap tab 

The segment overlap tool helps publishers understand how distinct each audience segment is. With this tool, partners will be able to explore metrics like the number of unique cookies, cookie overlap, unique impressions and impression overlap. By understanding what percentage of members belong to multiple audience segments, publishers will have a clearer understanding of unique reach when packaging multiple segments together for their advertiser clients.

Investing in first-party solutions

Audience Explorer builds on our first-party data announcements from earlier this year, and reinforces our commitment to develop new identity and data solutions for our partners. We strongly encourage publishers to invest or continue their investments in privacy-secure, first-party audience signals for their advertiser clients as well. 

For publishers, constantly adapting to change is just part of the job. In a relatively short timespan, we’ve seen the industry make huge strides in building efficiencies and transforming the way it drives revenue. But even in an environment where change is the norm, some years bring more challenges than others. The pandemic has brought fundamental disruptions to publishers’ businesses, not to mention new regulations and a move to remote collaboration. 

1. Earn more with less effort

To help you uncover more value from your existing inventory, Ad Manager puts machine learning to work and automatically surfaces new opportunities to maximize revenue. Then our solutions let you quickly implement or easily run an experiment to test before you commit to the change. 

For example, the Opportunities & Experiments feature estimates the opportunity created if you were to change a certain pricing rule or setting, then helps you run an experiment to validate the estimate, and finally activate the opportunity — all in one place. As a result, you’ll better understand the effect it has on your business, and can run a real-time experiment to verify it.

2. Identify issues and opportunities

Today, it’s harder than ever to monitor performance and identify issues and opportunities in your ad business operations. To help, Ad Manager both automatically surfaces opportunities for you as well as provides the tools to access the data to power your own insights and learning.

The Ad Manager Home dashboards show proactive insights into your network’s revenue, performance and delivery, highlighting  which of your strategies have been the most effective and recommending additional opportunities for you to maximize revenue. We’re also working on new features that will allow you to customize the homepage into a personalized dashboard with the data and insights that are most relevant for you and your role.

Ad Manager also provides access to your historical insights via APIs and Reporting, to help you build automation solutions or even create custom dashboards via Data Studio. Features such as Bids Insights Card and Bid Data in Reporting can help you get a stronger understanding of the bid distribution for your inventory, along with data about how unified floors are affecting your revenue. The benefit? You can confidently make informed decisions about your pricing strategy.

3. Streamline workflows

With employees working from home, a streamlined workflow can help you manage your business more efficiently. Ad Manager automation can help by providing access to different demand sources more effectively and offering troubleshooting tools that make it easy to solve ads-related issues in your account. 

Ad Manager API, for instance, helps you unlock the power of automation for your Live Events workflow. You can schedule, create or pause Live Streaming events all through the API — without ever having to navigate through the Ad Manager user interface — and integrate with your existing internal workflow processes. This also makes it easier to scale as you increase the number of Live Events and schedule them in the future.

This is just a preview of what we’re working on. To learn more, read our new automation guide and get the entire picture of where we are. For years to come, the efficiency gains made possible by machine learning will continue to offer some of the greatest engines for online advertising success. We’re devoted to helping you make the most of your inventory so you can keep adapting to our ever-changing world. Understanding what technology can do today is the best way to anticipate what it will be able to do tomorrow.

What is the future of retail media? Earlier this month, Google hosted more than 100 leaders from nearly 50 global retailers to discuss how e-commerce platforms are transforming digital advertising. The two-day session featured inspiring talks from Google’s retail partners as well as industry experts from Forrester, Tinuiti, Merkle and eMarketer/Insider Intelligence. Here are nine of the most important lessons from the event:

1. Retail media has gone mainstream

2. Retail media benefits brands, merchants and consumers

3. Post-pandemic e-commerce and ad spend will continue to grow

4. Retail media is grabbing a bigger slice of the marketing pie

5. Non-endemic budgets are becoming increasingly important 

6. Display and video formats can help build brand loyalty

7. First-party data activation is critical

8. Agencies play a vital role

9. Retailers need to take action

• Stop: Watching and waiting. If you’re a retailer not yet involved in this space, it’s time to offer brands options for formats and personalization.
• Start: Developing audience insights. Understand which insights might be interesting to particular brands, both endemic and non-endemic.
• Continue: Focusing on ad experiences that are a win for advertisers and consumers. Consumer attitudes towards ads on retailer sites tend to be more positive, especially when they are helpful and relevant. Make sure your ads are appropriately targeted. 

Maintaining a successful ad sales business takes constant attention to how your ads are performing and an understanding of your data in order to make informed decisions. But in today’s dynamic environment, the best way to grow revenue and improve results over time is to test and experiment. That’s why, based on feedback and requests from our partners, we developed a new tool called Manual Experiments to help you run your own tests in Google Ad Manager.

New controls to make testing easy 

In the past, running a test on your inventory was often a complex process requiring a custom setup and time-consuming analysis to measure performance. Manual Experiments simplifies this process by providing you flexibility and control to quickly create and run experiments directly in the platform, and analyze the results. And because the tests are built into Google’s existing experiment framework in Ad Manager, the process is easy to implement. All you have to do is choose from one of the available experiment types, configure the amount of traffic to experiment with and set the test duration. Then, after the experiment is complete, you can review its performance and decide if you want to implement the change with one click. 

Partners like The Atlantic, STRÖER and UOL have seen success using Manual Experiments to improve how they test pricing rules and earn more revenue.

“We’ve been able to seamlessly run experiments using Manual Experiments - giving us insight into the impact of different floor prices and helping us determine how to effectively price floors to earn the most revenue. We’re excited to see how this feature evolves.” - Ryan McConaghy, The Atlantic 

“Because of things like seasonality and world events, advertising supply and demand is always changing. There is no perfect, everlasting Pricing Rule. Manual Experiments makes testing more manageable, more transparent and more valid for our decision making process.” - Stefan Schatt, STRÖER MEDIA SOLUTIONS

“With manual experiments, we now have an important tool to speed up and simplify the testing and optimization process in our unified price rules decisions.” - Fabricio Gomes, UOL

During the beta period, Manual experiments that were implemented by publishers achieved a 6.5% lift in revenue on average. Today, Manual Experiments are available to all publishers using Ad Manager with three experiment types,

• Category block experiments: Let publishers see the impact of allowing specific ad types to show on their sites which they are currently blocked. 

• Unified pricing rule experiments:  Let publishers see the impact of lowering or raising the floor price on specific inventory. 

• Native ad style experiments: Let publishers compare the results of two sets of native ad styles to determine which would perform better in their network.

We plan to roll out more experiment types in the future based on your feedback. 

Making better decisions with data

Manual Experiments builds on our existing Opportunities and Experiments tool that uses machine learning and Google’s experiment framework to automatically surface suggestions for publishers to improve their revenue. In fact, in 2020 publishers using Opportunities and Experiments have accepted over 2000 opportunities, generating over 3.5% more revenue on average from this inventory. In addition to these features, Ad Manager’s reporting, forecasting and insights features can help you access all the account data you need to create actionable insights and easily create, schedule and share business results to improve the performance of your ads business. 

This past year truly was the year of advanced TV video streaming. Viewers increasingly turned to over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms for entertainment, like new direct-to-consumer apps and free ad-supported streaming TV services. To help TV programmers and distributors adapt with this growth, we’ve been working on a more flexible approach on how they manage their content workflow and place ads into their streaming solutions.

We built Google Ad Manager’s Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) to provide TV partners an end to end solution to deliver broadcast-quality and personalized ad experiences for ad-supported video content. Today we’re reimagining our ad insertion technology for the next generation of video streaming with DAI Pod Serving, which helps simplify OTT streaming complexity by integrating with your existing first or third-party streaming workflow. This evolution of our DAI technology helps the broader streaming ecosystem by giving you and your video platforms more flexibility to manage your streaming workflow and deliver a customized viewing experience so that you can grow your business.

How DAI Pod Serving works

Ad Manager’s DAI has always been an integral part of ad-supported video streaming, helping TV partners power their live and on-demand video (VOD) content across screens. Historically, partners sent their video content through Ad Manager’s DAI, allowing it to decision the ads into an ad pod (or commercial break), transcode and condition creatives into the right format and then stitch the content and ads into a single video stream (also known as manifest manipulation). 

With DAI Pod Serving, partners no longer need to send their content to Ad Manager — they own their entire streaming workflow — and Ad Manager provides them with “ready-to-stitch” ad pods they can stitch into their content. TV programmers and distributors have many streaming solution providers to choose from, and with DAI Pod Serving they can integrate Google's ad decisioning technology into their first or third party video streaming solutions.

DAI Pod Serving offers all the same great benefits of DAI, including live scale capacity with prefetching and Early Break Notification, creative transcoding and conditioning, access to all programmatic demand and verification and measurement. Now let’s take a look at how DAI Pod Serving works with partners’ existing video workflows. 

Integrating with first-party video streaming solutions

Some TV programmers build their own first-party video streaming solutions, where they own the content management, manifest manipulation and distribution workflow from start to finish. In this example, DAI Pod Serving will decision and condition each commercial break into a ready-to-stitch ad pod that’s in the appropriate format, and then partners can insert the ad pod into their TV content using their own in-house manifest manipulation solution. This provides partners with greater control over their entire video streaming workflow, while DAI Pod Serving delivers high-quality, seamless ads so that partners can grow their video revenue.

“DAI Pod Serving gives us flexibility to continue to use both our in-house video streaming and encoding solutions alongside streams encoded by our partners, while allowing Ad Manager to deliver broadcast-quality ads within MLB.TV live streamed baseball games and other longform content,” says Dan Newberry, Sr. Director, Ad Tech and Operations, Major League Baseball. 

Powering ads in third-party video platforms

To help partners increase flexibility and operational efficiencies across their streaming and monetization solutions, DAI Pod Serving can integrate with third-party video streaming platforms. Our first integration is with Verizon Media Platform, a leading provider of OTT video streaming solutions. This meets the needs of partners who use Verizon Media to manage their streaming workflow and use Ad Manager as their video ad server.

This integration provides an additional layer of flexibility for Verizon Media Platform customers using Ad Manager for programmatic demand. For those partners, Verizon Media Platform will stitch the ad pod provided from Ad Manager directly into a unified stream, allowing partners to continue taking advantage of Verizon Media's Smartplay session management technology, and deliver personalized, broadcast-quality streams at scale.

“Our integration with Ad Manager's DAI Pod Serving unlocks value across streaming ecosystems by enabling customers to take advantage of Google's monetization in concert with Verizon Media's personalization, digital rights management and content targeting,” says Scott Goldman, Director, Product Management, Verizon Media Platform.

With this integration, we’re able to further support joint partners like Hearst Television, who use both the Verizon Media Platform for streaming and Ad Manager for ad serving and monetization. Hearst Television can now use Ad Manager to decision their ads for both reservation and programmatic while Verizon Media Platform stitches the ads into their content to provide a high-quality streaming experience to viewers everywhere. 

“The integration between Ad Manager and Verizon Media Platform benefits our business by allowing our streaming and monetization solutions to work together so that we can deliver a high-quality streaming experience while maximizing revenue,” says Michael Rosellini, Vice President, Digital Operations, Hearst Television. 

This integration allows the video ecosystem to work more closely together for the betterment of video streaming and we look forward to integrating with more partners and video platforms in the future. 

More integrations for the future of video streaming

We’ll continue to build more functionalities into DAI Pod Serving, so that we can meet the varying use cases of the evolving video industry. This includes extending DAI Pod Serving to support ad insertion for addressable TV use cases, as well as new iterations of HLS and DASH standards in the future. No matter how you plug into DAI Pod Serving, you’ll have the ability to customize your own video streaming workflow while leveraging Ad Manager for monetization. With added flexibility to integrate with partners’ video streaming solutions, we’ll continue to support more partners and the broader ecosystem. 

Advanced TV viewership, or the usage of digital technology to watch TV content, continues to accelerate with new direct-to-consumer apps and free ad-supported TV services. To help our partners gain insight into how 2020 impacted advanced TV monetization trends, we're publishing our second annual Google Ad Manager advanced TV inventory report. This data can help you understand how viewers are watching your advanced TV content, what opportunities exist to monetize this content, and where to focus your strategies to grow revenue.

To uncover these insights, we analyzed 35 global advanced TV partners who use Google Ad Manager. This year’s report focuses on 2020 and is a bit different from our 2019 report. We specifically focused on advanced TV partners who have long-form and episodic commercial break inventory to ensure we only analyzed TV-like content. The report analyzes both live and on-demand video (VOD) content, and covers date ranges from Q3 2019 to Q4 2020. 

The report’s four sections tell a story of how last year’s conditions drove transitions that point toward the industry’s future:

COVID-19 recovery

Viewership insights

Transaction trends

Livestreaming performance

Advanced TV viewership, CTV devices, in-app impressions, programmatic deal types and live events were the lead stories for advanced TV monetization trends this past year. If you’re interested in a deeper dive, our 2020 Advanced TV Inventory Report takes a closer look at these insights, and what they suggest for the future.