Tag Archives: Google Marketing Platform

A new way to unify app and website measurement in Google Analytics

People expect to interact with businesses when and how they like, such as browsing a brand's website to research a product and then purchasing it later using the brand's app. Getting insight into these cross-platform journeys is critical for businesses to predict customer needs and provide great experiences—but it can be very challenging.

Currently, many businesses measure app engagement with Google Analytics for Firebase and website engagement with Google Analytics. While each of these products separately offer powerful insights, getting a more unified picture of engagement across your app and website can be a manual and painstaking process. 

To make this simpler, we’re announcing a new way to measure apps and websites together for the first time in Google Analytics.

Unified app and web analytics  

First, we’re introducing a new property type, App + Web, that allows you to combine app and web data for unified reporting and analysis.

Onboarding

 Measure your app and website together in Google Analytics

Reports for this new property use a single set of consistent metrics and dimensions, making it possible to see integrated reporting across app and web like never before. Now you can answer questions like: Which marketing channel is responsible for acquiring the most new users across your different platforms? How many total unique users do you have, regardless of which platform they use? How many conversions have occurred on your app and website in the last week—and which platform is driving most of these conversions?

User Overview

See combined metrics across your app and website

You can also go deeper to understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns across platforms. For example, you can see how many users started on your app then visited your website to make a purchase.

Flexible event measurement

Understanding how people engage with your app and website means that you need to measure a diverse range of user interactions like clicks, page views, app opens, and more. We’re making it easier to measure those actions on all of your platforms in a consistent way. The new property type utilizes a more flexible event-based model for collecting the unique interactions that users have with your content, allowing you to measure any custom event that you set up. 

This event-based model also allows you to automate the manual work of tagging some of the events on your site with no additional coding required. In addition to page views, enhanced measurement allows you to measure many common web events like scrolls, downloads, video views and more with the flip of a toggle in the admin settings for your property.

Enhanced measurement helps you measure events with the flip of a toggle

Enhanced measurement helps you measure events with the flip of a toggle

Cross-platform analysis

Given the many different ways people interact with your brand between app and web, you need flexible tools to make sense of your data and discover insights unique to your business. The new Analysis module enables you to examine your data in ways that are not limited by pre-defined reports.

There are a number of techniques you can use including: 

  • Exploration: Conduct ad-hoc analysis by dragging and dropping multiple variables—the different segments, dimensions, and metrics you use to measure your business—onto a canvas to see instant visualizations of yourdata.

The Exploration technique allows you to visualize your data with drag and drop ease

The Exploration technique allows you to visualize your data with drag and drop ease

  • Funnels: Identify important steps to conversion and understand how users navigate among them—where they enter the funnel, as well as where they drop off—with both open and closed funnel options. 

Understand how users engage with a sequences of key events on your app and website using the Funnels technique

Understand how users engage with a sequence of key events on your app and website using the Funnels technique

  • Path analysis: Understand the actions users take between the steps within a funnel to help explain why users did or did not convert.

Visualize actions taken on the users’ path to conversion with the Path analysis technique

Visualize actions taken on the users’ path to conversion with the Path analysis technique

Once you’ve surfaced insights from your analysis, you can use the results to create audiences and use those audiences to deliver more relevant marketing experiences to your customers. 

Start measuring across platforms

The first version of this new app and web experience—including the new event model and new analysis capabilities—will be available to all Analytics and Analytics 360 accounts in beta in the coming weeks. If you use Google Tag Manager or the global site tag for Google Analytics today, there’s no re-tagging required for your website. To include your app data, you’ll need the Firebase SDK implemented in your app. See how to get started in Google Analytics, or if you’re an existing Firebase customer, here’s how to upgrade.

If your business has both an app and website, and is looking for a more complete view of how your customers engage across both, we encourage you to participate in this beta and share your feedback. We are working to make Google Analytics the best possible solution for helping you understand the customer journey and create great customer experiences across platforms. Your partnership is essential to help us get there.

A new way to unify app and website measurement in Google Analytics

People expect to interact with businesses when and how they like, such as browsing a brand's website to research a product and then purchasing it later using the brand's app. Getting insight into these cross-platform journeys is critical for businesses to predict customer needs and provide great experiences—but it can be very challenging.

Currently, many businesses measure app engagement with Google Analytics for Firebase and website engagement with Google Analytics. While each of these products separately offer powerful insights, getting a more unified picture of engagement across your app and website can be a manual and painstaking process. 

To make this simpler, we’re announcing a new way to measure apps and websites together for the first time in Google Analytics.

Unified app and web analytics  

First, we’re introducing a new property type, App + Web, that allows you to combine app and web data for unified reporting and analysis.

Onboarding

 Measure your app and website together in Google Analytics

Reports for this new property use a single set of consistent metrics and dimensions, making it possible to see integrated reporting across app and web like never before. Now you can answer questions like: Which marketing channel is responsible for acquiring the most new users across your different platforms? How many total unique users do you have, regardless of which platform they use? How many conversions have occurred on your app and website in the last week—and which platform is driving most of these conversions?

User Overview

See combined metrics across your app and website

You can also go deeper to understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns across platforms. For example, you can see how many users started on your app then visited your website to make a purchase.

Flexible event measurement

Understanding how people engage with your app and website means that you need to measure a diverse range of user interactions like clicks, page views, app opens, and more. We’re making it easier to measure those actions on all of your platforms in a consistent way. The new property type utilizes a more flexible event-based model for collecting the unique interactions that users have with your content, allowing you to measure any custom event that you set up. 

This event-based model also allows you to automate the manual work of tagging some of the events on your site with no additional coding required. In addition to page views, enhanced measurement allows you to measure many common web events like scrolls, downloads, video views and more with the flip of a toggle in the admin settings for your property.

Enhanced measurement helps you measure events with the flip of a toggle

Enhanced measurement helps you measure events with the flip of a toggle

Cross-platform analysis

Given the many different ways people interact with your brand between app and web, you need flexible tools to make sense of your data and discover insights unique to your business. The new Analysis module enables you to examine your data in ways that are not limited by pre-defined reports.

There are a number of techniques you can use including: 

  • Exploration: Conduct ad-hoc analysis by dragging and dropping multiple variables—the different segments, dimensions, and metrics you use to measure your business—onto a canvas to see instant visualizations of yourdata.

The Exploration technique allows you to visualize your data with drag and drop ease

The Exploration technique allows you to visualize your data with drag and drop ease

  • Funnels: Identify important steps to conversion and understand how users navigate among them—where they enter the funnel, as well as where they drop off—with both open and closed funnel options. 

Understand how users engage with a sequences of key events on your app and website using the Funnels technique

Understand how users engage with a sequence of key events on your app and website using the Funnels technique

  • Path analysis: Understand the actions users take between the steps within a funnel to help explain why users did or did not convert.

Visualize actions taken on the users’ path to conversion with the Path analysis technique

Visualize actions taken on the users’ path to conversion with the Path analysis technique

Once you’ve surfaced insights from your analysis, you can use the results to create audiences and use those audiences to deliver more relevant marketing experiences to your customers. 

Start measuring across platforms

The first version of this new app and web experience—including the new event model and new analysis capabilities—will be available to all Analytics and Analytics 360 accounts in beta in the coming weeks. If you use Google Tag Manager or the global site tag for Google Analytics today, there’s no re-tagging required for your website. To include your app data, you’ll need the Firebase SDK implemented in your app. See how to get started in Google Analytics, or if you’re an existing Firebase customer, here’s how to upgrade.

If your business has both an app and website, and is looking for a more complete view of how your customers engage across both, we encourage you to participate in this beta and share your feedback. We are working to make Google Analytics the best possible solution for helping you understand the customer journey and create great customer experiences across platforms. Your partnership is essential to help us get there.

Capture the attention of sports fans with Display & Video 360

Watching sports brings friends and family together to cheer on their favorite teams and enjoy a shared experience. For decades, live sports have given marketers the opportunity to reach these engaged audiences at scale and associate their brand with the teams, players, and moments fans are excited about.

What makes sports so compelling for marketers hasn't changed, but the formula for capturing the attention of sports fans has. Historically, marketers could buy commercial airtime on live sports broadcasts and be sure that their message was reaching a passionate and broad audience. But as our viewing options have increased, brands have had to find new ways of engaging potential customers. Display & Video 360 helps brands reach these engaged audiences where and when they are watching.

Reach engaged fans on connected TV

I’m a die-hard Dodgers fan but live outside of Los Angeles so I only watch baseball games on the MLB.tv connected TV app. This means that connected TV is the best way to reach me in these moments. This is also true for an increasing number of sports fans who turn to connected TV to find exclusive sports content or to catch up with games they missed.

With Display & Video 360, you can use Programmatic Guaranteed deals to secure a wide variety of valuable connected TV sports inventory and build a deeper relationship with a fan base. For instance, as the excitement builds-up for the second half of the Major League Baseball season and the race to the postseason, you can tap into MLB.tv’s premium content on connected TVs. Sling TV’s always-on sports deal is another source of high-profile in-game spots as well as surrounding coverage on leading broadcast and cable networks. 

Be there during peak moments with real-time triggers

The game clock is winding down. The underdog scores to win as time expires. Wouldn’t it be impactful to capture this moment by boosting your reach and updating your ad message right away?

Now available to all advertisers and agencies, real-time triggers in Display & Video 360 is an automated tool that allows marketers and agencies to instantly activate specific display and video messages in response to live TV or real-world events. Ad delivery can be accelerated across devices as soon as these pre-defined “triggers” or moments happen. 

The real-time triggers workflow makes event-based campaigns scalable and easy to build. You simply define the triggers you care about in Display & Video 360 and then specify which ad creative you want to go live immediately following that event. For example, you could set-up a trigger that would serve a specific ad for fifteen minutes during halftime of any NFL game. Or you could be even more specific and run ads for two hours after the New England Patriots win a game or for twenty minutes whenever the Patriots or a specified player scores a touchdown. 

Sports trigger set-up in Display & Video 360

Sports trigger set-up in Display & Video 360

AirAsia used Display & Video 360’s real-time triggers to reach a massive audience of engaged fans in Southeast Asia during the most memorable moments of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Their #StillGotIt campaign featured soccer start Roberto Carlos showing off the skills he still has even after retiring, from his signature curling free kick to non-stop Samba dancing. AirAsia focused on reaching fans in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand — countries with avid soccer fan bases — and doubled the ads’ frequency during Brazil’s matches and the World Cup Final to ramp up engagement. By synching its ads with the most crucial moments and partnering with a world-renowned winner like Carlos, AirAsia’s campaign resonated with millions of fans. As a result, AirAsia built a strong positive connection between their brand and their ambassador, exceeding industry averages for celebrity association according to third party research.

In the past, it was a tedious and manual task to reach so many different markets in precisely the right moments with the right message Ravi Shankar
AirAsia’s Group Head of Digital Marketing

Real-time triggers in Display & Video 360 supports all English Premier League, Champions League, National Football League (NFL) and National Basketball Association (NBA) games and we’re adding more on a regular basis. In fact, a number of marketers used real-time triggers during the FIFA Women's World Cup this year.  


In addition to Display & Video 360’s automated sports triggers, we’ve added custom triggers to help you time your ads with any tentpole moment that may be relevant to your brand. For example, if your audience is passionate about the Oscars or a reality TV show like The Bachelor, you can now decide to trigger your campaigns to launch when the first award is given or when the rose ceremony begins. You can also set-up your trigger to accelerate the delivery of your ads right at the moment when you kick off a flash sale or announce a new product.


Building your brand with sports fans requires a smart game plan. To break through and ensure your message sticks, you need to connect with people at the right time and on the right device. Access to smart buying techniques and high-quality connected TV inventory in Display & Video 360 will help you stay ahead of the competition.

How Rituals used Google Marketing Platform to become a global brand

One year ago we introduced Google Marketing Platform to help marketers drive better results for their business. Google Marketing Platform brings together our advertising and analytics solutions, allowing you to create, buy, measure, and optimize your marketing in one single place. This enables a better understanding of the customer journey and more effective campaigns. 

We’ve seen companies around the world use this unified approach to deliver business growth. Rituals, a fast-growing European bath and body company, is one success story that stands out. Although popular across Europe, Rituals is thinking bigger—and is using Google Marketing Platform to achieve its goal of becoming a global brand.

Google Marketing Platform: Rituals Case Study

Google Marketing Platform: Rituals Case Study

Rituals accelerates growth with an automated audience strategy 

Rituals has a loyal customer base in Europe, but wanted to reach more people in other regions. To support this growth, Rituals needed a marketing strategy that could scale quickly.

Previously, in order to reach potential customers, the Rituals team would manually build audience lists that they would later use in their marketing campaigns. But as Rituals entered into more new countries, the amount of manual work that went into creating these audiences became excessive. Their team turned to Google Marketing Platform and its machine learning capabilities for help.

Today, Rituals uses Google Marketing Platform to predict which visitors to its website are most likely to purchase and then automatically create audiences of those people. This makes it easier for Rituals to quickly reach them across its marketing campaigns. 

The result? A faster and smarter approach to marketing, driving an 85 percent increase in sales and a 15 percent decrease in cost-per-acquisition.

The results are incredible. It actually helped us transform our whole vision. We want to be a global brand and Google Marketing Platform facilitates that growth. Martijn van der Zee
Digital Director at Rituals

To learn more about how Rituals automated its marketing strategy, read the full case study here.

As Google Marketing Platform enters its second year, we’re excited to continue to work with brands around the world and share their success stories.

Deliver more interactive ad experiences with Display & Video 360

Marketers have more opportunities than ever before to deliver engaging ad experiences through immersive creative. Many companies are investing in creating 3D assets to bring their products to life and allow consumers to interact with products as they would in real life. For example, a person can explore the interior and exterior of a car before taking it for a test drive, all from the comfort of their home. But it can be challenging to scale these experiences. Now you can extend the reach of these 3D assets to produce more captivating ads, with two new updates coming today.

Showcase your products with Immersive Display

Swirl is a new immersive display format designed for mobile web and available on Display & Video 360. People can explore every angle of your product by rotating the 3D object in all directions and zooming in and out, interacting from their device as if the product was in front of them. Customers like Guerlain, a leading perfume and cosmetics company, are using Swirl to deliver better ad experiences that draw people’s attention and let them interact with the perfume bottle directly and discover more about the scent.
Guerlain Swirl example
Swirl is opening up a whole new creative canvas for us. We're able to tell a more dynamic story about our products and give customers a powerful new way to interact with them. Jean-Denis Mariani
Chief Digital Officer of Guerlain

Brands that already have 3D assets can easily create a Swirl ad unit by using the 3D/Swirl component in Google Web Designer, our creative authoring tool. And with a new editor coming to Poly, Google’s 3D platform, it’s easier for brands and agencies to edit, configure, and publish high-quality, photorealistic models to use in immersive display ads. You can learn more in this post. If you’re interested in exploring Swirl but need help building 3D assets, we also have certified 3D production partners to help.

Expand the reach of your YouTube live streams

Increasingly, people are tuning in to live events like concerts, sports and shows through live streams. Brands are noticing this shift and are investing in live stream content through sponsorships and their own branded content. We know it takes a lot of time and resources to build these assets and we want to make it easier to get more out of your live stream investment.

The new live stream format in Display & Video 360 allows you to run your YouTube live stream content in display ads across screens and devices. You can quickly get started by using assets from your existing YouTube live stream campaigns with a new template in Google Web Designer.

With the live stream format people will be able to interact with the video using familiar YouTube player controls. People can preview your live stream, watch full screen, and exit when they’re done, giving them full control over how they interact with your content.

CBalm_Livestream

Building better ad experiences

Live stream and Swirl are just two examples of how we’re enabling brands to deliver more interactive ad experiences at scale with Display & Video 360. We want to make it easier for you to build ads that are engaging and valuable to consumers. We’ll continue to share creative solutions to help you build beautiful creative and deliver better ad experiences to users wherever they are online.

Both Swirl and the new live stream format are in a limited beta. To learn more about these new interactive formats, reach out to your Display & Video 360 account manager.

Immersive branded experiences in YouTube and display ads

As a three-dimensional, visual medium, augmented reality (AR) is a powerful tool for brands looking to tell richer, more engaging stories about their products to consumers. Recently, we brought AR to Google products like Search, and made updates to our developer platform, ARCore, to help creators build more immersive experiences. Starting this week, we’re also bringing AR to YouTube and interactive 3D assets to display ads.

Helping YouTube beauty fans pick their next lipstick

Many consumers look to YouTube creators for help when deciding on new products to purchase. And brands have long been teaming up with creators to connect with audiences. Now, brands and creators can make that experience even more personalized and useful for viewers in AR.

Today, we’re introducing AR Beauty Try-On, which lets viewers virtually try on makeup while following along with YouTube creators to get tips, product reviews, and more. Thanks to machine learning and AR technology, it offers realistic, virtual product samples that work on a full range of skin tones. Currently in alpha, AR Beauty Try-On is available through FameBit by YouTube, Google’s in-house branded content platform.

M·A·C Cosmetics is the first brand to partner with FameBit to launch an AR Beauty Try-On campaign. Using this new format, brands like M·A·C will be able to tap into YouTube’s vibrant creator community, deploy influencer campaigns to YouTube’s 2 billion monthly active users, and measure their results in real time.

Famebit_MAC_Shortened.gif

Viewers will be able to try on different shades of M·A·C lipstick as their favorite beauty creator tries on the same shades. After trying on a lipstick, they can click to visit M·A·C’s website to purchase it.

We tested this experience earlier this year with several beauty brands and found that 30 percent of viewers activated the AR experience in the YouTube iOS app, spending over 80 seconds on average trying on lipstick virtually.

Bringing three-dimensional assets to display ads

We're also offering brands a new canvas for creativity with Swirl, our first immersive display format. Swirl brings three-dimensional assets to display advertising on the mobile web, which can help educate consumers before making a purchase. They can directly zoom in and out, rotate a product, or play an animation. Swirl is available exclusively through Display and Video 360.
3D_Display.gif

In this example from New Balance, people can rotate to explore the Fresh Foam 1080 running shoe. Objects like a mobile phone (right) can expand to show additional layered content.

To help brands more easily edit, configure and publish high-quality, realistic models to use in Swirl display ads, we’re introducing a new editor on Poly, Google’s 3D platform. It provides more editorial control over 3D objects, including new ways to change animation settings, customize backgrounds, and add realistic reflections.

NB_BG (1).gif

The new Poly editor lets you easily edit photorealistic three-dimensional objects for use in Swirl display ads.

These new tools will be available to brands and advertisers this summer. We think they’ll help brands and advertisers make content more engaging, educational, and ultimately effective in driving purchase decisions. If you’re interested, check out our getting started guide for tips. We look forward to seeing you bring your products to life!

Google Marketing Platform Partners now available globally

Last year we announced Google Marketing Platform Partners, a new program designed to ensure you have access to the resources you need to do more effective marketing and grow your business with Google Marketing Platform. Whether you want to build out in-house skills or engage a service provider, we’ve developed a robust partner program that allows you to confidently find the expertise you need.

Starting today, Google Marketing Platform Partners is accepting applications globally. We have nearly 600 partners, and are accepting applications for new partners in most major markets around the world. If you’re a prospective partner, you can review the process and policies for product certifications and submit an application.

Trusted sources

From single projects to long-term partnerships, Google Marketing Platform Partners helps you find the right people with the right expertise to meet your business needs. Leading interactive agencies, system integrators, and top technology, data and media companies are available to support multiple areas of your business. And each partner is rigorously vetted by Google with a comprehensive certification process.

The partner program includes:

  • Certified Individuals who make up a broad global talent pool of advanced Google Marketing Platform practitioners who have successfully demonstrated expertise through successful completion of product exams.

  • Certified Companies that provide consulting, training, implementation, operations and technical support services for Google Marketing Platform. These companies not only have individuals certified in one or more products, but they have a high level of knowledge, practical and industry experience, as well as stellar customer references.

  • Sales Partners that are Google Marketing Platform experts in addition to being Certified Companies. They partner closely with Google to provide consulting and support services, in addition to selling the technology on our behalf.

Google Marketing Platform Partner certifications assess practitioner and corporate competency with regard to campaign setup, strategy, measurement, optimization, and troubleshooting for the following products: Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, Google Analytics, Campaign Manager, and Google Web Designer. Additionally, certifications for Data Studio, Tag Manager, and Optimize are offered to companies that have become certified on at least one of the core product certifications listed above.

Teaming up

Think of Google Marketing Platform Partners as a way to develop your extended marketing team, backed by Google. To get started, search for partners in your area that match your business needs.

Premiering new TV solutions in Display & Video 360

Whether it's their favorite YouTube channel, the latest news or that hot show everyone is talking about, connected TV lets people watch what they want anytime. This creates new opportunities for brands to engage with their audience, while bringing together the reach and familiarity of TV with the precision and measurability of digital video. In the last year, the number of connected TV ad slots available to advertisers using Display & Video 360 has increased 8X, which has helped more advertisers reach their audiences using this channel. In fact, the number of advertisers running connected TV campaigns on Display & Video 360 has increased 137 percent in the past year.

To help marketers build on this success, we’re continuing to invest in new TV capabilities for Display & Video 360. First, we’re implementing privacy-forward standards for connected TV that ensure responsible audience management practices by giving users transparency and choice over their ad settings. Second, we’re launching new linear TV capabilities so you can extend your reach to traditional TV viewers by purchasing ads on national broadcast networks and local TV stations. And finally, to help you deliver consistent TV strategies across delivery methods, we’re creating a consolidated TV workflow to buy connected TV together with linear TV.  

Putting people first with connected TV

In today's environment, privacy is top of mind for users, advertisers, and content providers—and connected TV is no exception. As people gain more control over what content they watch, they also want to be in control of how their data is used to inform the ads they see. It’s critical that the industry adopts user-first practices to help build a sustainable connected TV advertising ecosystem.

This is why we teamed up with the IAB Tech Lab’s OTT Technical Working Group to design shared industry guidelines for creating high-quality and privacy-safe connected TV advertising experiences. These guidelines formalize the Identifier for Advertising (IFA), which allows advertisers to reach audiences and measure their campaigns in a way that gives users more transparency and control than alternatives, such as solutions that use the IP address of a viewer's device.

IFA was designed to protect user privacy. It gives users the ability to choose how their data is used. This means they can reset the ID associated with their data or fully opt out of experiences like interest-based advertising. They can also be assured that their choices will remain unchanged if they move their device to a new location.

Display & Video 360 now supports the IAB Tech Lab guidelines, allowing marketers to manage frequency, measure reach, and begin developing responsible audience segmentation strategies while protecting user privacy. We’re also adding support for these guidelines in our publisher platform, Google Ad Manager.

These guidelines will direct stakeholders down the path of best practices to allow connected TV to grow and evolve as a significant advertising platform. Dennis Buchheim
Senior Vice President and GM, IAB Tech Lab

We’re seeing momentum across the industry with key players adopting the IAB Tech Lab guidelines. TV and device manufacturers like Roku and measurement vendors such as Nielsen are adopting IFA. Nielsen, for example, has built IFA-based audiences into Digital Ad Ratings to bring greater understanding of reach on mobile and connected TV audiences.

Adding linear TV to the picture

Connected TV is growing quickly, but traditional linear TV is still an important way people watch. There are some moments, such as sporting events or the big season finale, that just have to be enjoyed live. And many of us still tune in to watch programs from our favorite ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX local network stations. To help you reach people in those moments and on those channels, Display & Video 360 provides access to buy ad slots on national broadcast and cable networks and thousands of local TV stations. Today, U.S. network affiliates are accessible through a beta integration with WideOrbit. And soon, premium national broadcast and cable channels will be available through our partnership with clypd.

To help you easily execute these campaigns and give you more control over your linear TV investments, we’re introducing new buying functionality in Display & Video 360. For example, you can now set up detailed campaign parameters such as geography, daypart, program genre or TV network directly. And throughout the campaign, you can quickly manage budget allocation and optimize reach by adjusting these parameters.

Up next: Consolidated TV buying

At many brands, we’re already seeing stronger collaboration between TV and digital media buying teams to deliver better coordinated strategies across linear and connected TV—and in the future we believe this will be the norm. To help with this shift, we’re consolidating both workflows under a single TV insertion order (IO) in Display & Video 360. This new streamlined buying experience will allow brands and agencies to further simplify the execution of their TV buys by providing insights and setups designed specifically for TV campaigns. We’ll start rolling out this new workflow this fall.
Upcoming consolidated TV IO in Display & Video 360

Upcoming consolidated TV IO in Display & Video 360

With Display & Video 360, you can now expand your digital strategy to reach connected TV audiences in a privacy-safe way. You can also connect with viewers as they sink back on the couch and see what’s on network television thanks to self-service linear buying workflows. Stay tuned as we roll out new features and bring on new partners throughout the year.

Raising the bar on transparency, choice and control in digital advertising

Advertising has made possible open access to quality information and communication on the web—it’s changed the way people learn, play and earn, and it’s made the internet open for everyone.

But the ad-supported internet is at risk if digital advertising practices don’t evolve to reflect people’s changing expectations around how data is collected and used. Our experience shows that people prefer ads that are personalized to their needs and interests—but only if those ads offer transparency, choice and control. However, the digital advertising ecosystem can be complex and opaque, and many people don’t feel they have enough visibility into, or control over, their web experience.

New protections and controls in Chrome

As you may have seen, today Chrome announced its plans to improve cookie controls. To better protect user privacy and choice on the web, Chrome intends to make it easier for users to block or clear cookies used in a third-party context, with minimal disruption to cookies used in a first-party context. While Chrome has long enabled users to block cookies, these changes will let users continue to allow their online banking site, for example, to remember their login preferences—a function that first-party cookies enable.

Chrome also announced that it will more aggressively restrict fingerprinting across the web. When a user opts out of third-party tracking, that choice is not an invitation for companies to work around this preference using methods like fingerprinting, which is an opaque tracking technique. Google doesn’t use fingerprinting for ads personalization because it doesn't allow reasonable user control and transparency. Nor do we let others bring fingerprinting data into our advertising products.

The changes in Chrome will empower users to make informed decisions about how to control the use of their data for personalized advertising. They will also ensure users are able to continue accessing a broad range of quality ad-supported content, with confidence that their privacy and choices will be respected.


A new level of ads transparency

As the Chrome announcements demonstrate, transparency, choice and control form the foundation of Google’s commitment to users—and advertising is no different. With tools like My Activity, Ad Settings, Why this Ad and Mute this Ad, we make it easy for people to see how Google tailors ads for them, switch off individual factors we use to tailor ads, stop seeing ads from a specific company or simply opt out of personalized ads entirely.

But all of this is not enough. We believe you should also know what data is used for ads personalization and by whom.  

That’s why today we’re committing to a new level of ads transparency. We want to give users more visibility into the data used to personalize ads and the companies involved in the process.

As a first step, for the ads that Google shows on our own properties and those of our publishing partners, we will disclose new information through an open-source browser extension that will work across different browsers. The new information will include the names of other companies that we know were involved in the process that resulted in an ad—for example, ad tech companies that acted as intermediaries between the advertiser and publisher, and companies with ad trackers present in an ad. The browser extension will also surface the factors used to tailor an ad to a user, which we provide today.

The extension will display information for each ad we show a user, and will present an aggregated snapshot for all the ads Google has shown a user recently. In the future, we will look for additional ways to make it even easier for people to access this information.

In addition, we want to offer a simple means for others in the advertising industry to surface this kind of information. To that end, we will build APIs that enable other advertising companies, should they choose, to disclose this same type of information to users through the extension. We expect to begin rolling out both the browser extension and APIs in the coming months.

While offering more information privately to individual users is important, we also believe that making this type of information available publicly will help increase transparency at the ecosystem level. That’s why we plan to build tools that allow researchers and others to view and analyze aggregated and anonymized data from Google and other providers that elect to use these new APIs.

As we introduce these enhanced ads transparency measures, we’re eager to receive feedback from users, partners and other stakeholders so that, together, we can identify industry-wide best practices around data transparency and ads personalization, including ways that people can take action to shape their experiences.

All of the changes announced today represent an important step in ensuring that the ad supported web provides people with access to high-quality content, while protecting their privacy. We will continue to explore opportunities to evolve our tools and practices in ways that enhance user transparency, choice and control.


Protect your budget and your brand with Display & Video 360

We support efforts to increase transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem and we’re committed to making it easier for marketers to monitor their digital campaigns and protect their brand. That’s why we’re introducing new ways for Display & Video 360 to help you avoid buying unauthorized web and app ad inventory, and control where your digital ads are appearing.

New default setting to ads.txt-only web inventory

Since it was first conceived in May 2017, Google has supported and contributed to the IAB Tech Lab’s ads.txt standard. It’s a text file that lets publishers openly declare who is authorized to sell their inventory programmatically. Ads.txt increases transparency throughout the advertising supply chain: marketers know they're buying inventory from the actual property owner, or an authorized reseller, and legitimate publishers receive payment. Because of its simplicity and effectiveness, over 93 percent of the web inventory available in Display & Video 360 is authorized by ads.txt files. In fact, ads.txt is one of the most rapidly adopted standards that our industry has seen.

Starting in August, we’ll make ads.txt-only the default setting for all new campaigns created in Display & Video 360 and running on web inventory. This ensures that by default you only buy authorized inventory and is the next step in our ongoing support of the standard.

Support for IAB Tech Lab’s app-ads.txt

Ads.txt was created to reduce fraud for your campaigns running on the web by making it easier to avoid transacting unauthorized inventory. To give you the same level of protection against misrepresented app inventory, the IAB Tech Lab recently introduced the new app-ads.txt standard which supports apps running on mobile, connected TVs and other devices.

While it’s very early days for app-ads.txt adoption, we’re actively working to encourage app developers to publish app-ads.txt files. In the next few months, Display & Video 360 will stop buying unauthorized app inventory as identified by app-ads.txt files. When adoption of app-ads.txt reaches sufficient levels, we will allow marketers and agencies to choose to buy only app inventory that is authorized.

A new home for all brand protections

In addition to knowing that you’re buying inventory from authorized sellers, you also need to ensure your ads appear only in contexts that you define as suitable for your brand. Display & Video 360 offers a comprehensive set of controls to protect your brand, but we’ve heard feedback that it can be difficult to apply these controls consistently—especially if you are managing a large number of campaigns.

To help solve this challenge, we’ve introduced Brand Controls, a new resource available to all Display & Video 360 users that gives you a single view of the brand suitability settings, campaigns using ads.txt-only authorized sellers, and verification services across all of your campaigns. With the Brand Controls dashboard, you can also more easily see how your campaigns are using different controls including content labels, sensitive categories, and keyword exclusions.

The Brand Controls dashboard gives you a snapshot of all the brand protections used in all your campaigns.

The Brand Controls dashboard gives you a snapshot of all the brand protections used in all your campaigns.

Now you can manage and make changes to all of these settings across all the campaigns in your Display & Video 360 account at once--including display, video, apps and TrueView. For example, let’s say you realize that some of your campaigns are not using any digital content label exclusions. You can quickly make bulk edits with Structured Data Files and immediately change the settings across multiple campaigns, right from the Brand Controls dashboard.

With Brand Controls you can also get a report that shows you what percentage of traffic was filtered before a bid was placed using our built-in fraud detection and brand suitability safeguards, and the reasons why. This way you can get full transparency on how Display & Video 360 is protecting your media buys.

With Brand Controls you can get a detailed report of the invalid traffic filtered pre-bid for all your campaigns.

With Brand Controls you can get a detailed report of the invalid traffic filtered pre-bid for all your campaigns.

Finally, the Brand Controls dashboard makes it easy to track any edits that are made to your brand suitability, authorized sellers, and verification settings. This helps you ensure that your media team follows the guidelines you’ve setup to protect your campaigns.

By making ads.txt-only the default setting for new campaigns, supporting the new app-ads.txt standard, and creating the new Brand Controls center, we're making Display & Video 360 a more effective solution to help you protect your budget and your brand.