This is the sixth and final post in a series about Display & Video 360 innovations.

Display & Video 360 is organized around five integrated modules that work together to simplify the end-to-end campaign process: Campaigns, Audiences, Creatives, Inventory and Insights. Today you’ll learn more about the Insights module, where you can get all the campaign metrics you need to understand how your marketing is performing so you can take action to improve results.

A single source of truth with holistic measurement

In Display & Video 360, the Insights module is where you go to audit your media spend, measure impact, and access the information you need to optimize media investment decisions. By consolidating your media buying in one place, you get reporting across all touchpoints for web, apps, TV and more, so you can accurately determine what’s driving performance and quickly act on insights.

The Insights module in Display & Video 360 includes:

• Fraud-prevention reporting: Invalid traffic reporting enables you to see the amount of invalid traffic detected in your campaigns to date, both pre-bid and post-serve, including breakdowns by categories like data center traffic, automated browsers and falsely represented inventory.
  
• Viewability and verification: Active View, Google’s viewability measurement technology, measures in real time whether or not an ad was viewable to a user on an impression-by-impression basis. Verification protects your brand and advertising budget with insights that help you understand where your ads are shown, along with details like video player size and page position.
  
• Reach and frequency measurement: Unique Reach measures the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user you get from video and display ads. Metrics are de-duplicated across devices, campaigns, inventory and formats, so you know how many people you reached and how often you reached them.
  
• Third-party accreditations: MRC-accredited measurement across display and video ads for clicks, served impressions, viewability metrics, and invalid traffic detection and filtration gives you confidence that the metrics you’re seeing are objective and accurate.  
  

Coming soon, data-driven attribution reports created in Campaign Manager will also be available in the Insights module in Display & Video 360. Using machine learning, data-driven attribution analyzes the actual converting and non-converting paths to automatically assign values to your marketing touchpoints. You’ll see a more complete and actionable view of which digital channels are performing best, so you can achieve a better return on your marketing investments.

To bring together measurement for your digital and TV ads, we've added a new dedicated "connected TV" device type for targeting and reporting across Display & Video 360. This means that connected TV can be segmented out alongside mobile, computer and tablet. For example, you can now see how many people viewed your ads on connected TV in Unique Reach reporting, and it will soon be added to our reach forecasting tools.

Actionable insights and experiments for brand and performance

Once a campaign is live, Display & Video 360 offers analytics and reporting capabilities that will help you to measure each impression in real time, understand whether the campaign is achieving its goals, and take steps to improve future results.

Instant Reporting in the Insights module helps uncover new insights quickly with a visual report builder. You can build tables and charts directly in the product without having to export data and analyze it in spreadsheets. Instant Reporting shows the last 30 days of report data, lets you quickly toggle between data tables and charts, and supports the most common types of spreadsheet analyses, like pivot tables for summarizing data. You can even combine multiple Instant Reports into a single dashboard that loads in seconds, right inside of Display & Video 360.

Brand Lift and experiments use best-in-class test and control methodology to help you understand the impact your campaigns are having and optimize in mid-flight.

• Brand Lift: Brand Lift allows you to easily measure the impact of your video ads on metrics like brand awareness, ad recall and consideration. You can also see how your video ads impact the number of searches for your brand on Google Search and YouTube, so you can assess their effect on brand interest. You can even segment reporting by audiences, creatives and publishers to better understand what’s working.

• Experiments: A/B experiments enables you to compare the performance of different advertising setups, including targeting, settings and creatives — and shows you whether or not there was significant performance uplift. The findings can be used to improve performance of campaign mid-flight, or influence the planning and decision-making for future campaigns. 
  

Integrations to connect data and deliver better results

In addition to the reporting available in the Insights module, Display & Video 360 natively integrates with other Google Marketing Platform solutions, allowing you to connect data and workflows — increasing efficiency and delivering better results. And, to help expand coverage and enable choice, Display & Video 360 has integrations with leading measurement providers to help you assess and understand marketing performance, covering areas such as viewability, brand safety, audience measurement and more.

With an ever-changing consumer journey, it is essential to respond quickly based on accurate insights to drive better campaign performance. The Insights module offers all the analytics and reporting capabilities necessary to measure each impression in real time, understand whether the campaign is achieving its goals and take steps to improve future results.

Missed the other posts in this series? Catch up now and read about the other modules in Display & Video 360:

• Campaigns

• Audiences

• Creatives

• Inventory

And, download our guide on the benefits of end-to-end campaign management. 

This is the fifth post in a series about Display & Video 360 innovations.

Display & Video 360 is organized around five integrated modules that work together to simplify the end-to-end campaign process: Campaigns, Audiences, Creatives, Inventory and Insights. Today you’ll learn more about new capabilities of the Inventory module, where media teams can browse a diverse marketplace of media across formats, devices, and screens, then easily negotiate and manage campaigns with a range of deal types—from open auction to Programmatic Guaranteed.

A diverse mix of inventory across all channels and devices—including connected TV

The Inventory module is home to an array of premium digital inventory across devices and screens, such as mobile web and app, and connected TV. It also includes high-quality TV inventory via over-the-top video streams and traditional linear TV.

With Display & Video 360, you can access YouTube, Gmail and Waze (both currently in beta), and Google Partner Inventory alongside cross-exchange display and video inventory in a single buying tool. YouTube inventory includes all TrueView formats and YouTube Reserve inventory, including Google Preferred. You can also access digital audio ad inventory from Google Play Music, Spotify, SoundCloud, TuneIn—and now, Pandora and AdsWizz. This offers brands the opportunity to bring audio, display, and video campaigns together in one place, and connect with audiences in various moments throughout the day.

To make sure you can reach people in all environments, Display & Video 360 gives you access to national, local, and addressable linear TV inventory through integrations with clypd, WideOrbit, and Google Fiber (all currently in beta). You can also access premium TV content on connected TVs, such as programming from CBS, AMC, A+E, MLB.TV, and many more.

Quality, brand-safe inventory

No matter what inventory they choose, media teams can be sure they are in control of the ads they're buying and where they're running. Display & Video 360 offers advanced fraud prevention, viewability, and verification to give media buying teams more confidence and control.

Display & Video 360’s fraud prevention uses over 180 sophisticated filters, a global team of experts, and manual reviews in an effort to prevent you from paying for invalid clicks, impressions, views, or interactions. In addition, buyers will receive refunds for invalid traffic that is detected by Google up to 30 days after monthly billing and meets other criteria.

To ensure you’re buying inventory only from the actual sites where you intended your ads to appear, the ads.txt authorized-only inventory control enables you to run campaigns on sites that support ads.txt authorized inventory—and exclude inventory from sites without the file. And, with built-in Active View viewability targeting and optimization, you can be confident that your ads are seen, not just served.

Display & Video 360 also includes brand suitability controls for pre- and post-bid blocking, and third-party verification capabilities so you can pinpoint where your ads ran.

Flexible access to inventory via all transaction types

By using the Inventory module, you can organize and align all of your media buys for a campaign—across transaction types and inventory sources—so you can spend your budget most efficiently and ensure you get the best outcomes from your investment.

For example, Marketplace is a shoppable storefront for your programmatic campaigns. It helps you discover great inventory, negotiate deals directly, and manage all of your deals in one place. Marketplace also now includes recommendations, which highlight sets of premium inventory to help you discover and execute on high-quality publishers and packaged deals. And, by using the new bulk Request for Proposal (RFP) feature and unified negotiations workflow, you can request and negotiate with all publishers directly in Display & Video 360, regardless of the monetization platform they use. This allows you to seamlessly move from RFP to negotiation to deal execution.

Programmatic Guaranteed in Marketplace enables reservation media to be bought in a more simple, efficient, and effective way than ever before. In addition to YouTube and premium publishers using Google Ad Manager, Programmatic Guaranteed is also available for third-party exchanges including Rubicon Project and SmartRTB, increasing the amount of premium reservation inventory available to be transacted programmatically. And you can manage reach and frequency together across all of your direct and open auction buys.

You can also build your own Guaranteed Packages in Marketplace, enabling you to bring together inventory by requesting certain publishers and specifying audience criteria and campaign details. Then, Display & Video 360 automates the sourcing and matching of inventory to suggest a packaged deal across multiple publishers, and offer a guaranteed CPM.

The Inventory module in Display & Video 360 helps you easily find and discover high-quality inventory from top broadcasters and publishers, Google media, and curated inventory packs. We’re continuing to invest in ways to help you provide more relevant and useful ads to consumers, no matter where they choose to engage.

Follow our blog to read the final post in this series on Display & Video 360. Next up: the Insights module.

This is the third post in a series about Display & Video 360 innovations.

Display & Video 360 is organized around five integrated modules that work together to simplify the end-to-end campaign process: Campaigns, Audiences, Creatives, Inventory and Insights. Today we’ll explore new features of the Creatives module, where you can design, produce and manage all of your ads.

Give creative a seat at the table

Great ads are born when the creative, data, and media teams align on what to say and how to say it. This is why we are so excited about Creative Workspace — the foundation of the Creatives module in Display & Video 360. For the first time, creative teams can work on custom rich media and data-driven creative in the same interface as media and data teams.

With the Creative Workspace, you can invite creative teams to collaborate with other teams in Display & Video 360 using two new roles. First, you can add a creative admin, which is usually a producer or creative agency lead. The admin can then invite other creative team members, such as producers, designers, developers, art directors, and copywriters, and manage their access as creative users.

The creative user role allows you to share relevant insights with creative agencies, while keeping some of the more sensitive data like fees and media prices for just those who need it. This allows creatives to build more tailored ad experiences as the media plan gets developed. At the same time, creative teams can easily preview formats, designs and strategies with media teams as they are being developed, so they can get early feedback and ensure there is alignment.

Build better data-driven creative in Display & Video 360

Designers and developers can build custom, data-driven creatives directly in the Creative Workspace using the new Ad Canvas — a visual workflow for dynamic ad creation.

Data-driven creatives are ads that tailor the look and feel of an ad based on specific signals such as time of day or audience — and research shows that programmatic campaigns using data-driven creative often perform better than those that do not. We recently expanded the types  of signals available to customize ads to also include Affinity and In Market audiences created by Google. With these options, your team can now reach consumers who are likely to have a particular interest with a more relevant message. Ad Canvas also integrates with Google Web Designer, which helps your creative team manage custom designs, speed up data-driven setups, and truly scale their creative development.

“Our experience with the new data-driven creatives in Display & Video 360 helped in our creative process by allowing our media, creative, and production teams to work together in a more streamlined way, bringing down in-campaign iterations from a few days to a question of hours.” 

- Brigitte Roberge, director of marketing, sponsorships and branding, Desjardins

Design beautiful ads at scale

First, we’ve recently introduced Flipbook, a video ad format that plays only when the ad is visible and the user is scrolling, which ensures the ad doesn't compromise other content and gives users full control. Flipbook piques the user’s interest by pairing the video playback with scrolling action, creating a sight and motion experience that works both forward and in reverse.

It’s incredibly fast to build a Flipbook ad — all your team needs is a video file, a brand logo and a call to action. Your creative team brings the idea along with a few simple assets, and we bring the technology to achieve this effect out of the box, complete with embedded measurement and ability to deploy at scale.

Second, we have also recently introduced Parallax, a scroll-based display experience built in Google Web Designer. Parallax creates a perception of depth, which comes from having multiple images move at slightly different speeds, all triggered by the user’s scroll. Parallax ads can be built with any number of layers to create simple background and foreground experiences or complex, rich experiences that appear as 3D views. Creative teams can easily customize these ads to work for their needs.

Over time, we’ll introduce more formats like these, to help you build beautiful, relevant ads that deliver a great experience for users, especially on mobile. And as we continue to expand the breadth of available formats on our platform, make sure to check out our updated Ad Format Gallery, where your team can get inspired about what’s possible when it comes to delivering great ad experiences.

Building creative into your digital campaign process

Creative is one of the most important aspects of any campaign. With the Creative module in Display & Video 360, your teams can work together to build and deliver ads that offer the best user experiences while driving results for your business.

Follow our blog to read the rest of this series on Display & Video 360. Next up: the Inventory module.

This is the third post in a series about Display & Video 360 innovations.

Display & Video 360 is organized around five integrated modules that work together to simplify the end-to-end campaign process: Campaigns, Audiences, Creatives, Inventory and Insights. Today you’ll learn more about new features of the Audiences module, the destination to consolidate, build and understand your audiences for advertising, so you can better connect with the consumers you want to reach.

Consolidate your audiences in Display & Video 360

The Audiences module is where you can get a single view of your audiences, including Google-powered audiences and the ones you provide. Your media and analytics teams can use the Audiences module to learn more about the users you want to reach, then create new audience segments to help you reach them with relevant campaigns. You can also choose to make the segments you create available across different accounts belonging to your company thanks to the ability to link accounts.

When it comes to helping advertisers reach specific audiences, we believe that user privacy and control come first. This is why we have strict policies in place to protect users.

Build your audiences the way you want

The Audiences module gives you the flexibility to create the most relevant segments for your campaigns. For example, let’s say that you’re an automotive brand planning a campaign for the launch of a new electric car. You know that a great starting point is to reach consumers who have already shown interest in your brand. This means being able to create a new audience that includes anonymous segments of consumers who interacted with an ad from a prior campaign. The activity audience builder feature lets you build audiences from a number of prior-campaign metrics, including aggregated conversions or clicks. 

Finding the right audience involves more than just looking at those who have responded to prior advertising campaigns. For example, the auto brand might also be interested in reaching people who used the car configurator on their website or app. This audience can be easily created in Analytics 360 and then shared with Display & Video 360 in just a few clicks.

The Audiences module also lets you combine multiple audiences to see the overlap. For example, the auto brand could see the overlap of segments of consumers who clicked on an ad and used the car configurator, allowing them to create a list of consumers who responded to their ads and demonstrated a higher interest in the brand through actions on their site. This ability to combine audiences from Analytics 360 or Display & Video 360 is one of the key advantages of using Google Marketing Platform, and it will help you reach the right consumers more efficiently.

Better understand your audiences

Your existing customers are a good starting point for determining who to reach with your campaigns, but one reason why you’re advertising is to find new customers. Display & Video 360 makes it easy to discover insights you can use to reach the consumers who are most likely to buy your products. One way is to understand which new audiences are the most similar to audiences you already care about.

For example, you might discover that the group of people that responded best to a previous campaign share similar interests, like a passion for camping, or share similar demographics. These are valuable insights that you can use to both create more relevant messages and reach additional consumers with these same interests.

Frequency cap across campaigns

You can also use the same audience segments to set a frequency cap that works across multiple campaigns. If you are running two campaigns at the same time and set a frequency cap of 5, we won’t serve more than 5 ads to consumers across both campaigns, even if there is an overlap in the audience segments. As a result you’ll reach more consumers who will be happy to see fewer, more relevant ads.

The audience frequency cap will work across your video and display campaigns, including Programmatic Guaranteed deals (currently available in beta) and open auction buys. If you use multiple Display & Video 360 accounts, frequency caps set at the audience level will work for all your campaigns across the accounts that you have linked.

Knowing your audiences has always led to better campaign performance, because you can connect with them in a useful and timely way. The Audiences module allows you and your teams to find meaningful insights at scale and immediately activate them in your campaigns. We’re continuing to invest in advancing the audience capabilities of Display & Video 360 so you can expect more features in the future to help you reach your goals.

Follow our blog to read the rest of this series on Display & Video 360. Next up: the Creatives module.

This is the second post in a series about Display & Video 360 innovations.

Display & Video 360 is organized around five integrated modules that work together to simplify the end-to-end campaign process: Campaigns, Audiences, Creatives, Inventory, and Insights. Today we’ll explore new features of the Campaigns module: your starting point to plan, execute, and optimize cross-channel media buys.

Streamline media planning

Every campaign requires a well-developed media plan. But with all the media environments available today, across video, display, audio, and more, finding the right placements can be challenging and time-consuming. This is why we introduced the Plan tool (currently in beta), a brand new workspace in the Campaigns module designed for media planners. It allows them to experiment with potential inventory and buying strategies, so they can explore different approaches before setting the campaigns live.

Planners start by specifying their campaign budget, goals, and dates. Based on this information, they can discover publishers with inventory and audiences that meet their objectives, accurately forecast reach, and easily send RFPs. Planners can also add private deals that they have previously negotiated or explore new open auction strategies.

To ensure that a media plan will actually deliver on campaign goals, planners also need a way to estimate performance, including reach, frequency, GRPs and more. Your team can quickly get these metrics, deduplicated across devices, with reach planning, built-in to the Plan tool. This information helps you make sure you’re correctly allocating budget across different tactics.

We’re working to expand the capabilities of the Campaigns module, including the Plan tool. For example, early next year we will make it easier for planners to collaborate and share media plans with other internal and external teams. Similarly, reach planning today offers estimates across different open auction video campaigns or across all YouTube buys (including Google Preferred, YouTube Reserve, TrueView and Bumpers). In the next few months, we’ll make these metrics even more useful by offering a consolidated view across both types of video buys.

Reach your goals with automated bidding and auction protections

Once your media team is ready to move from planning to execution, they can use Display & Video 360’s automated bidding suite, also accessed through the Campaigns module.  Automated bidding relies on Google’s machine learning to help marketers tailor the right bid to each and every auction. It factors in a wide range of auction-time signals—including device, location, time of day, remarketing list, language, operating system--as well as the dynamics of the auction to capture the unique context of every impression and bid the right value.

Automated bidding in Display & Video 360 also protects you from overpaying by analyzing auction dynamics (e.g., first, second price or hybrid auctions) and evaluating how they impact the likelihood of winning an impression.

Optimize performance with a single view and smart notifications

When you have multiple campaigns running at the same time, your media team can use the combined view in the Campaigns module to get a unified and actionable view of all of the components of each campaign.

The combined view allows your team to drill down and explore campaigns in great detail, from insertion orders to line items to individual creatives, so it’s easy to see which creative is associated to which line item. The combined view table also surfaces key stats and information for each entity in the table, helping troubleshoot campaigns and quickly identifying if anything requires your team’s attention.

While the combined view gives you a complete snapshot of all your campaigns, your media team doesn’t always have the time to go through every line to find out if a specific campaign is under performing. That’s why we built the Intelligence Panel, which automatically notifies your team about issues and provides optimization recommendations for campaigns without requiring any manual report pulls. And since the insights are paired with actionable next steps, your media team can quickly make the changes to improve performance before they miss the opportunity. To be even more useful, the alerts are ranked based on the predicted impact they’ll have. For example, an alert for a campaign that has no approved creatives--and therefore won't run--will rank higher than an alert for a campaign that is projected to slightly underspend.

Media planning has always been managed separately from the rest of the campaign management workflow. The Campaigns module in Display & Video 360 changes that, enabling your teams to build smarter media plans and execute more efficiently to drive better results.

Follow our blog to read the rest of this series on Display & Video 360. Next up: the Audiences module.

In July we introduced Display & Video 360, our end-to-end campaign management solution which allows marketing teams to collaborate and easily share insights. Today, we’re kicking off a series of posts to share more about how Display & Video 360 helps media, data and creative teams work together to deliver relevant ads to the right audiences. Each post will cover new innovations for each of Display & Video 360’s five modules: Campaigns, Audiences, Creatives, Inventory and Insights.

Display & Video 360 enables collaboration because it allows everyone involved in planning, executing, and measuring campaigns to work in the same interface. This helps teams stay aligned and deliver insight-driven creatives that resonate with consumers.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we post deep dives into each of the five modules—we’ll cover Campaigns first. Or if you want to dive right in, learn more about  Display & Video 360 and the benefits of end-to-end campaign management by reading this guide.

On average, users watch over 180 million hours of YouTube on TV screens every day¹. We know that marketers want in on this shift in viewing behavior, so we’ve been hard at work building a rich YouTube experience for set-top boxes, gaming consoles, streaming devices like Chromecasts and smart TVs of all stripes.

We’ve already seen that people react positively to ads on the TV screen – based on Ipsos Lab Experiments, YouTube ads shown on TV drove a significant lift in ad recall and purchase intent, with an average lift of 47 percent and 35 percent respectively². And customers like Pixability are voicing their excitement for the feature:

“Consumers are cutting the cord and this is a tremendous opportunity for advertisers to reach their audiences in the living room with digital video. With the launch of TV Screens device targeting and measurement on YouTube, our customers are better able to understand how their audiences are watching TV screens, and connect with those audiences as they're engaged in leaned-back viewing.” – David George, CEO, Pixability

Start reaching users on devices that stream TV content – such as smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming devices like Chromecast – today. To learn how, click here.

_{1 Google Internal Data, Global, June 2018. Based on 7 day average for TV watch time}

_{2 Google/Ipsos Lab Experiment, US, March 2018 (32 ads, 800 US residents 18-64 y/o)}

Today’s consumers are accessing media from a broader variety of devices and in more moments than ever before. To be successful, marketers need to know whether ads had a chance to be seen, how many people saw them, and if they changed perception or behavior along the consumer journey.

That’s why we’re announcing new capabilities in Display & Video 360 for measuring viewability, reach, and brand lift across media sources and properties.

Enabling custom metrics with Active View

Research has consistently shown that ads need an opportunity to be seen to drive impact. We support the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC) definition of viewability as the minimum threshold across all display and video ads to help make advertising measurement simpler and more effective. And we’ve completed third-party accreditation by the MRC for viewable impressions in Display & Video 360, as measured by Active View. But we know that many advertisers and agencies have different definitions of viewability based on their unique business requirements.

That’s why we recently launched custom metrics in Display & Video 360, measured by Active View. With these new controls, advertisers can select custom criteria such as the percentage of the ad that must be on screen and the amount of time an ad must be visible to count as an impression. Once set up, these metrics are reported for all video campaigns, within hours. Custom metrics are in addition to the MRC accredited reporting based on MRC viewable impressions, as well as advanced audibility and visibility metrics that are already available in Display & Video 360.

Bringing Unique Reach reporting to Display & Video 360

Reach and frequency remain hallmark metrics to plan and measure the scale of advertising campaigns today. But, you also need to be thoughtful about how often you connect with a single user to avoid overloading them.

This week, we launched Unique Reach reporting for all your display and video ads, no matter where they run. With Unique Reach in Display & Video 360, you can measure the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user you get from display and video ads. Metrics are de-duplicated across devices, campaigns, inventory, and formats so you can see how many people you reached and how often you reach them. You’ll also have an expanded lookback window of up to 3 months, and the ability to report at both the campaign and site level, so you know which campaigns and sites are driving the greatest reach.

Extending Brand Lift measurement to all of your video buys

Reach and frequency metrics tell you how many people you reach and how often, but you also need to understand the effectiveness of your video ads in changing perception — across all the places they’re viewed.

That’s why we’re expanding the brand perception insights that you get from Brand Lift beyond YouTube to all of your video advertising, across media properties. With Brand Lift in Display & Video 360, you can easily measure the impact of your video ads on metrics like brand awareness, ad recall, and consideration. You can also see how your video ads impact the number of searches for your brand on Google Search and YouTube, so you can assess their effect on brand interest. You can even segment reporting by audiences, creatives, and publishers to better understand what’s working. These insights enable you to optimize your campaign mid-flight to drive greater impact.

While Brand Lift studies in Display & Video 360 are currently available by working with your Google account team, in the coming months you’ll be able to set up Brand Lift studies self-service, and view Brand Lift reporting right in Display & Video 360 alongside metrics for all of your display and video ads.

With more intelligent metrics covering viewability, reach, and brand perception change across campaigns, marketers have the information they need to create more relevant, useful, and impactful experiences for consumers.