I love everything about the Big Game — the suspense, the halftime performances and, of course, the commercials. Watching the much-anticipated ads on my living room’s connected TV (CTV), with buffalo wings in hand, has become a family tradition. But as much as I like the ads, seeing them over and over again after the game can ruin the fun.

At Google, we’re helping advertisers deliver a better CTV viewing experience. As part of that, we’re launching new CTV frequency management solutions in Display & Video 360 that allow marketers to control the number of times people see their ads across YouTube and other CTV apps. This gives CTV streamers a smoother viewing experience and limits the risk of brand backlash because of ad overexposure.

Early results show that this new functionality also significantly improves media performance for advertisers. On average, brands see a 5% reach per dollar increase when managing CTV ad frequency across YouTube and other CTV apps rather than separately.[561496]In other words, if your Big Game campaign is scheduled to reach five million CTV viewers, you can now reach a few football stadiums worth of new streamers at no extra cost.

Better viewer experience and use of your CTV media dollars

With Display & Video 360, you can already control how many ads CTV viewers see across YouTube and YouTube TV apps. Separately, you can also set a frequency goal for ads running across other CTV apps. Now, for the first time, you can manage CTV ad frequency across both.

Let’s say you set a frequency goal of five ads per week for your CTV campaign. Instead of showing up to five CTV ads on YouTube and five ads on other CTV apps, Display & Video 360 will now aim to show your ad no more than five times total. Viewers won’t see your ad more than they should as they navigate across YouTube, Hulu or any of their other favorite CTV apps. This more user-centric approach lowers your risk of triggering ad fatigue.

It can also help you get more bang for your buck. By more evenly distributing CTV ad budgets across viewers, you can get more reach for the same budget. But don’t just take our word for it — to determine the reach benefit of this new feature on your next CTV campaign, you can run a Unique Reach report or use the cross-channel frequency quantification tools in Display & Video 360.

Display & Video 360’s cross-channel CTV frequency management solution works for all formats, exchanges, CTV devices and deal types. This includes content on the YouTube and YouTube TV apps watched on CTV devices. For example, you can set a single ad frequency goal across an ESPN Programmatic Guaranteed deal and your YouTube sports campaign.

Cross-channel management that puts
privacy first

To determine the number of times a CTV ad is shown, Display & Video 360 uses Google data on YouTube and the IAB standard Identifier for Advertising on other CTV inventory.

To identify overlaps of people who watch both YouTube CTV and shows on other CTV apps, we use Google’s Unique Reach model. This method — which uses a combination of data sources like census data, panels and surveys — is based on over a decade of understanding deduplication across devices and environments, and is designed to work in a post-cookie world. Once we’ve modeled that duplication of viewers across YouTube and other CTV apps, we can determine the appropriate budget placement to control average ad frequency.

To start using this new feature, just combine YouTube CTV and other CTV strategies under the same campaign or insertion order, and set your frequency goal at that level.

As 2022 kicks off, it’s a good time to review your digital marketing strategy and ensure you’re ready for the year ahead. Here are five ways Google Marketing Platform can help you better understand your customers and get stronger marketing results.

Get insights while respecting user consent choices

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Deliver consistent experiences across channels

Get creative with interactive ads

With online video growing, it’s imperative for brands to deliver relevant video campaigns at scale. In fact, eMarketer predicts that U.S. programmatic Connected TV ad spend will reach $8.67B in 2022.

We recently shared how you can reach streaming audiences on Connected TV using Display & Video 360. Today, we're launching new features in Campaign Manager 360 to help you take further advantage of this massive shift to video.

We’re making it easier for you to set up and measure video campaigns across your entire media plan by automating workflows and offering video-centric trafficking capabilities. We’re also introducing new video measurement capabilities, so you can get the insights you need to make smarter decisions and optimize performance.

Work faster with the new publisher eligibility tool and publisher spec library

One of the most frustrating and time-consuming issues for ad operations teams is receiving a creative asset that doesn’t meet the minimum required specs or creative standards for a particular publisher. For example, the file size might be too low quality to generate necessary transcodes, requiring an entirely new creative. These challenges lead to inefficient workflows and delays in campaign launches.

To automate this process, we’re launching the publisher eligibility tool and publisher spec library in Campaign Manager 360.

The publisher eligibility tool validates the uploaded creative to ensure its attributes meet the minimum requirements for specific publishers. Now you can identify issues before they happen and see exactly what needs to be changed.

The new publisher spec library reduces the manual work needed to convert file formats to align to specific publisher specs. Instead, Campaign Manager 360 will automatically set video transcodes for each placement on your media buy and convert your video files to match each publisher’s creative specifications.

Advertisers and agencies like PMG have been streamlining their QA and video trafficking process with these tools.

New placement level video duration settings ensure that the length of a video meets the publisher’s duration requirements. In addition, video default ads now support multiple video creatives with different lengths and orientations, making it possible to use default video ads across any video campaign. If the existing video assigned to a placement or publisher can’t run, instead of missing the opportunity, you’ll automatically deliver a default video ad in its place.

Measure video inventory with engaged views and engaged view conversions

Impressions and view-through conversions are key metrics for video campaign performance, but without insights into watch time and viewability, it can be difficult to know exactly how your video ads are driving conversions.

Engaged views and engaged view conversions allow you to define what constitutes a high-quality video impression and measure its impact on both third-party inventory sources and on YouTube.

This helps you determine which video impressions and inventory sources are the most valuable, understand how users engage with your video ads across your media plan, and get deeper insights to drive your business objectives and campaign goals. Please reach out to your account team if you’re interested in these new metrics.

Get consistent measurement with custom viewability metrics for YouTube inventory

Finally, you’ve been asking for a way to get an apples-to-apples comparison of campaign performance for YouTube and other video sources. We’re adding the ability to set custom viewability metrics on YouTube inventory in Campaign Manager 360 so you can consistently measure viewability across different inventory.

With a simplified video campaign setup and more comprehensive video measurement, Campaign Manager 360 helps you to better reach your audience with relevant video ads at scale.

Automated bidding in Display & Video 360 helps advertisers improve performance by adjusting bids in real time to achieve the results they care about. Using Google’s advanced machine learning, it evaluates and tailors your bids for every auction to help predict the likelihood of a conversion.

Today we’re introducing improvements to the automated bidding solutions in Display & Video 360. First, we’re introducing a new interface where you can set Custom Bidding multipliers without writing any code. Second, we’re adding support for pay for viewable impressions to outcome based buying. Lastly, we’re introducing a new report to give you more insights into how automated bidding places bids to hit your goals.

Simplified setup for Custom Bidding

Custom Bidding is an automated bidding strategy that allows you to assign values to different events, such as a conversion or a purchase. Marketers told us that Custom Bidding delivers great results because it helps tailor their bidding to their unique goals, but we also learned that they can’t always use it because they might lack the technical resources to build the required scripts. In addition to uploading a custom script, you now have the option to select Floodlight activities and assign them the value you want in an easy-to-use interface. For example, you can assign a higher value to high-value purchases, so that your ads are tuned to specifically increase revenue instead of driving more transactions. In the future, you will also be able to use Analytics 360 goals in the same way.

Outcome based buying for branding campaigns

Up until now, outcome based buying only supported performance campaigns by allowing marketers to pay per click for campaigns that use target cost per acquisition (CPA) or maximize conversions strategies. To make better use of your branding budgets, we’ve introduced pay per viewable impressions (as measured by Active View) for your display and video campaigns. This allows you to optimize for maximize active view. So you’ll reduce budget waste and achieve better performance by only paying for impressions that are viewable instead of each impression.

Learn how automated bidding works for your campaigns

We’ve heard that you’d like to learn more about how the automated bidding algorithm places your bids. We’re introducing a new report, Bidding Insights, that will give you more visibility into how automated bidding is working. First, you will be able to monitor what the average cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) bid is based on the likelihood of an impression to lead to a conversion or a click. This way you’ll see that automated bidding is increasing your bids for impressions that generate better returns for you.

In addition, Bidding Insights will show you how many impressions you won based on their likelihood to lead to the outcome you selected for automated bidding. Bidding insights will become available after seven days of activity and after there is sufficient data to provide meaningful insights in all campaigns that are using automated bidding.

These new bidding features allow you to quickly adapt to consumer behavior by giving you more flexibility and customization for your bidding strategies across both brand and performance campaigns.

This post closes our Display & Video 360 product announcements series covering new features to support your business recovery and growth. Stay tuned for additional updates on Campaign Manager 360 soon.

Marketers and agencies sign annual deals with top publishers to simplify purchasing and negotiating inventory across multiple brands and campaigns. This includes annual upfronts and newfronts deals. Increasingly, marketers rely on Programmatic Guaranteed and other non-guaranteed deals to fulfill these commitments with Display & Video 360, because its frequency management capabilities improve performance while delivering consistent user experiences across channels.

To help media agency professionals more efficiently manage publisher deals, we’re introducing new tools to package, prioritize and monitor deals across partners and advertisers in Display & Video 360.

Let’s say you’ve negotiated a deal with a publisher and you’d like to use it across different partner accounts. Instead of going into each of Display & Video 360’s partner accounts and creating separate deals, you can now create one deal and then distribute impressions across partners and advertisers. You can also easily edit the deal and the changes will propagate to all Display & Video 360’s accounts you shared the deal with.

Package and prioritize deals across partner accounts

In addition to saving time creating and editing deals, you can also package the inventory to fit the needs of the brands you work with. You can take inventory from different deals, bundle them together and give access across partners and advertisers. For example, you can create a package for a special time of year (like Black Friday or major sporting event), a marketing objective or for always-on campaigns and share it across multiple partners. This way you don’t have to recreate the same package in multiple accounts. In addition, for preferred deals, you can prioritize access to the deal across partners and advertisers, giving you additional control in how you distribute impressions from the deal among your various campaigns.

Monitor publisher commitments in one place

When you commit to buying a fixed amount of ad inventory through a Programmatic Guaranteed or a non-guaranteed deal, you have to closely monitor its delivery so that you don’t waste your budgets. The ability to keep track of your spend at the publisher level is particularly relevant for your upfront deals that span across various properties and cover different advertisers and campaigns. So if these deals are running behind, it’s important to quickly reallocate impressions across campaigns. Now, you can easily monitor pacing for each publisher and deal in one place, identify delivery issues and reallocate impressions across accounts and campaigns before the deal expires.

To access these new tools, please contact your account team. In the future, we’re planning to add more controls and flexibility in how you manage your deals across partners.