This year has taught us that it can be hard to predict what the future has in store. As we approach 2021, it’s a good time to think about how your business can prepare for whatever comes next. Here are five ways Google Marketing Platform can help you respond to changing consumer behavior and improve the ROI of your campaigns.

Prepare for the future of measurement with the new Google Analytics

Streamline workflows with Campaign Manager 360

Reach consumers wherever they are with Display & Video 360

Meet user privacy expectations with new data controls

Improve performance with flexible automation in Display & Video 360

We hear from our advertiser and agency partners that they continue to value ad serving as an integrated—but independent—solution alongside media buying. For example, Mondelez relies on Campaign Manager for centralized ad serving and measurement across their many brands and regions. This helps them to analyze campaign performance and make faster media and creative optimizations.

To address these needs, we’re increasing our investment in Campaign Manager as a standalone ad server and adding it to Google Marketing Platform as Campaign Manager 360. We're focusing investments in three areas: comprehensive measurement, streamlined workflows, and trusted ad management for video and emerging formats.

Comprehensive measurement for your paid media

One of the key benefits of an ad server is the ability to understand which ad placements and creative are driving conversions. But regulatory shifts and changes in tech platforms in response to the increased focus on how data is used online have led to gaps in conversion measurement. This is why we are launching conversion modeling in Campaign Manager 360. Conversion modeling enables accurate measurement with a complete, privacy-centric view of how people are responding to your ads. This ensures that you can still get insights about the effectiveness of your campaigns so that you can take actions to improve your results, even when direct measurement isn’t possible.

Increased fragmentation due to people spending their time across a wider array of media types and advertisers spreading their ad buys across a broader set of inventory, has also made it difficult to have one single source of ads measurement. Some publishers don’t allow client-side tags on their inventory. However, through our expanding server-to-server integrations with social and video platforms in Campaign Manager 360 you can measure more media and spend less time troubleshooting discrepancies. The integrations are managed on the backend and allow for reporting data to be shared seamlessly from the third-party to Google — so there’s no extra work for your team.

Built-in attribution, reporting, and verification tools in Campaign Manager 360 give you insight into how all your digital campaigns are performing across channels. However, advertisers often want more granular and customized insights into the impact of their ads along the path to purchase. In some cases, this can mean writing SQL queries with hundreds of lines of code, which is time consuming and limits your ability to optimize performance quickly.

To meet these needs we are making investments like the two recently launched attribution reports, Full Path and Path Attribution. These new reports give you an easy, readily-accessible way to get attribution insights directly in Campaign Manager 360 by using unsampled data and including both converting and non-converting paths. These reports also let you quickly identify common paths to conversion and conversion rates.

Streamlined workflows with integrations across Google and third-parties

Campaign Manager 360 helps you centralize your digital advertising workflows. Integrations with Google and third party products enable your teams to work more seamlessly across buying and measurement.

For example you can develop creative in Studio and use Campaign Manager 360 to activate assets across Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360 and Google Ads. An integration with Analytics 360 also makes it possible to connect your paid media cost and performance to your first-party audience insights in Analytics 360. This allows you to understand the connection between paid media and the activity of people visiting your sites and apps - helping you to get a full picture of the customer journey. Integrations with Display & Video 360 and Analytics 360 also allow you to see deduplicated conversions across your display and video buys. Partners like The Martin Agency have saved significant time for their clients because of these integrations.

In addition to extensive integrations with Google solutions, we're also investing in tighter connections with popular tools from different ecosystem partners. For example, to give you more choice and flexibility, we launched automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager 360 earlier this month. This makes it easier for you to use ecosystem partners for brand suitability and verification. We are planning more investments like this.

Trusted ad management for enhanced video and emerging channels

Today more people are using their phones and devices to consume video, audio and even TV. For advertisers this means having the ability to create and measure cross-channel, customer centric experiences across display, video and other emerging channels — at scale and in near real-time, is required.

To solve for this, Campaign Manager 360 gives you deep insights into your video performance using video verification and enhanced YouTube measurement. We also recently expanded our unique reach reporting in Campaign Manager 360 to include demographic data to give you a centralized view of performance across channels, including video and connected TV.

Ad serving capabilities for the future

As the digital ads ecosystem evolves with an increased focus on privacy, new regulations and changes in technology platforms have put pressure on traditional ad serving and measurement techniques. That’s why we are focused on making Campaign Manager 360 a durable solution for the future.

We will build on Campaign Manager 360’s foundation and enhance our ad serving capabilities to help you measure all your paid media activity and conversions. We will continue to invest in features like conversion modeling, to help you get the insights your business needs even as the industry landscape evolves.

We hear from our advertiser and agency partners that they continue to value ad serving as an integrated—but independent—solution alongside media buying. For example, Mondelez relies on Campaign Manager for centralized ad serving and measurement across their many brands and regions. This helps them to analyze campaign performance and make faster media and creative optimizations.

To address these needs, we’re increasing our investment in Campaign Manager as a standalone ad server and adding it to Google Marketing Platform as Campaign Manager 360. We're focusing investments in three areas: comprehensive measurement, streamlined workflows, and trusted ad management for video and emerging formats.

Comprehensive measurement for your paid media

One of the key benefits of an ad server is the ability to understand which ad placements and creative are driving conversions. But regulatory shifts and changes in tech platforms in response to the increased focus on how data is used online have led to gaps in conversion measurement. This is why we are launching conversion modeling in Campaign Manager 360. Conversion modeling enables accurate measurement with a complete, privacy-centric view of how people are responding to your ads. This ensures that you can still get insights about the effectiveness of your campaigns so that you can take actions to improve your results, even when direct measurement isn’t possible.

Increased fragmentation due to people spending their time across a wider array of media types and advertisers spreading their ad buys across a broader set of inventory, has also made it difficult to have one single source of ads measurement. Some publishers don’t allow client-side tags on their inventory. However, through our expanding server-to-server integrations with social and video platforms in Campaign Manager 360 you can measure more media and spend less time troubleshooting discrepancies. The integrations are managed on the backend and allow for reporting data to be shared seamlessly from the third-party to Google — so there’s no extra work for your team.

Built-in attribution, reporting, and verification tools in Campaign Manager 360 give you insight into how all your digital campaigns are performing across channels. However, advertisers often want more granular and customized insights into the impact of their ads along the path to purchase. In some cases, this can mean writing SQL queries with hundreds of lines of code, which is time consuming and limits your ability to optimize performance quickly.

To meet these needs we are making investments like the two recently launched attribution reports, Full Path and Path Attribution. These new reports give you an easy, readily-accessible way to get attribution insights directly in Campaign Manager 360 by using unsampled data and including both converting and non-converting paths. These reports also let you quickly identify common paths to conversion and conversion rates.

Streamlined workflows with integrations across Google and third-parties

Campaign Manager 360 helps you centralize your digital advertising workflows. Integrations with Google and third party products enable your teams to work more seamlessly across buying and measurement.

For example you can develop creative in Studio and use Campaign Manager 360 to activate assets across Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360 and Google Ads. An integration with Analytics 360 also makes it possible to connect your paid media cost and performance to your first-party audience insights in Analytics 360. This allows you to understand the connection between paid media and the activity of people visiting your sites and apps - helping you to get a full picture of the customer journey. Integrations with Display & Video 360 and Analytics 360 also allow you to see deduplicated conversions across your display and video buys. Partners like The Martin Agency have saved significant time for their clients because of these integrations.

In addition to extensive integrations with Google solutions, we're also investing in tighter connections with popular tools from different ecosystem partners. For example, to give you more choice and flexibility, we launched automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager 360 earlier this month. This makes it easier for you to use ecosystem partners for brand suitability and verification. We are planning more investments like this.

Trusted ad management for enhanced video and emerging channels

Today more people are using their phones and devices to consume video, audio and even TV. For advertisers this means having the ability to create and measure cross-channel, customer centric experiences across display, video and other emerging channels — at scale and in near real-time, is required.

To solve for this, Campaign Manager 360 gives you deep insights into your video performance using video verification and enhanced YouTube measurement. We also recently expanded our unique reach reporting in Campaign Manager 360 to include demographic data to give you a centralized view of performance across channels, including video and connected TV.

Ad serving capabilities for the future

As the digital ads ecosystem evolves with an increased focus on privacy, new regulations and changes in technology platforms have put pressure on traditional ad serving and measurement techniques. That’s why we are focused on making Campaign Manager 360 a durable solution for the future.

We will build on Campaign Manager 360’s foundation and enhance our ad serving capabilities to help you measure all your paid media activity and conversions. We will continue to invest in features like conversion modeling, to help you get the insights your business needs even as the industry landscape evolves.

We hear from our advertiser and agency partners that they continue to value ad serving as an integrated—but independent—solution alongside media buying. For example, Mondelez relies on Campaign Manager for centralized ad serving and measurement across their many brands and regions. This helps them to analyze campaign performance and make faster media and creative optimizations.

To address these needs, we’re increasing our investment in Campaign Manager as a standalone ad server and adding it to Google Marketing Platform as Campaign Manager 360. We're focusing investments in three areas: comprehensive measurement, streamlined workflows, and trusted ad management for video and emerging formats.

Comprehensive measurement for your paid media

One of the key benefits of an ad server is the ability to understand which ad placements and creative are driving conversions. But regulatory shifts and changes in tech platforms in response to the increased focus on how data is used online have led to gaps in conversion measurement. This is why we are launching conversion modeling in Campaign Manager 360. Conversion modeling enables accurate measurement with a complete, privacy-centric view of how people are responding to your ads. This ensures that you can still get insights about the effectiveness of your campaigns so that you can take actions to improve your results, even when direct measurement isn’t possible.

Increased fragmentation due to people spending their time across a wider array of media types and advertisers spreading their ad buys across a broader set of inventory, has also made it difficult to have one single source of ads measurement. Some publishers don’t allow client-side tags on their inventory. However, through our expanding server-to-server integrations with social and video platforms in Campaign Manager 360 you can measure more media and spend less time troubleshooting discrepancies. The integrations are managed on the backend and allow for reporting data to be shared seamlessly from the third-party to Google — so there’s no extra work for your team.

Built-in attribution, reporting, and verification tools in Campaign Manager 360 give you insight into how all your digital campaigns are performing across channels. However, advertisers often want more granular and customized insights into the impact of their ads along the path to purchase. In some cases, this can mean writing SQL queries with hundreds of lines of code, which is time consuming and limits your ability to optimize performance quickly.

To meet these needs we are making investments like the two recently launched attribution reports, Full Path and Path Attribution. These new reports give you an easy, readily-accessible way to get attribution insights directly in Campaign Manager 360 by using unsampled data and including both converting and non-converting paths. These reports also let you quickly identify common paths to conversion and conversion rates.

Streamlined workflows with integrations across Google and third-parties

Campaign Manager 360 helps you centralize your digital advertising workflows. Integrations with Google and third party products enable your teams to work more seamlessly across buying and measurement.

For example you can develop creative in Studio and use Campaign Manager 360 to activate assets across Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360 and Google Ads. An integration with Analytics 360 also makes it possible to connect your paid media cost and performance to your first-party audience insights in Analytics 360. This allows you to understand the connection between paid media and the activity of people visiting your sites and apps - helping you to get a full picture of the customer journey. Integrations with Display & Video 360 and Analytics 360 also allow you to see deduplicated conversions across your display and video buys. Partners like The Martin Agency have saved significant time for their clients because of these integrations.

In addition to extensive integrations with Google solutions, we're also investing in tighter connections with popular tools from different ecosystem partners. For example, to give you more choice and flexibility, we launched automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager 360 earlier this month. This makes it easier for you to use ecosystem partners for brand suitability and verification. We are planning more investments like this.

Trusted ad management for enhanced video and emerging channels

Today more people are using their phones and devices to consume video, audio and even TV. For advertisers this means having the ability to create and measure cross-channel, customer centric experiences across display, video and other emerging channels — at scale and in near real-time, is required.

To solve for this, Campaign Manager 360 gives you deep insights into your video performance using video verification and enhanced YouTube measurement. We also recently expanded our unique reach reporting in Campaign Manager 360 to include demographic data to give you a centralized view of performance across channels, including video and connected TV.

Ad serving capabilities for the future

As the digital ads ecosystem evolves with an increased focus on privacy, new regulations and changes in technology platforms have put pressure on traditional ad serving and measurement techniques. That’s why we are focused on making Campaign Manager 360 a durable solution for the future.

We will build on Campaign Manager 360’s foundation and enhance our ad serving capabilities to help you measure all your paid media activity and conversions. We will continue to invest in features like conversion modeling, to help you get the insights your business needs even as the industry landscape evolves.

Today, we’re announcing improvements to Ads Data Hub, our cloud-based solution that enables customized analysis of your Google ad campaigns while protecting user privacy. With these updates, we’re offering more ways to access the data you need, improved usability for key workflows, and new tools that give you more flexibility to run customized analysis.

Over 200 brands, agencies and measurement partners use Ads Data Hub to analyze campaign data so they can understand how people interact with ads. For example, Essence, a global data and measurement-driven media agency, uses Ads Data Hub to deliver a suite of privacy-centric, advanced measurement services for customers across verticals in order to help them make better media decisions, and ultimately get a better return on their ad spend.

Better ways to get access to the data you need

Earlier this year, we shared updates to Ads Data Hub to help you analyze your data faster and more easily. Since then, we introduced self-service account linking for Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, so you can more easily access Google ad campaign data across multiple products in a secure, privacy-centric environment.

We’ve also heard requests from customers to make it easier to export data to other tools they use for creating reports and dashboards. So we recently made it possible to export query results  for visualization and manipulation in Data Studio and Google Sheets, giving you the ability to  further explore your data in both tools. By connecting Ads Data Hub to Data Studio and Google Sheets, you can unlock the power of your data with interactive dashboards and engaging reports that inspire smarter business decisions. And—as always—there’s an aggregation requirement for output of any data from Ads Data Hub, ensuring user data is protected.

Enhanced usability and more holistic insights

We’re improving the user experience for privacy checks in Ads Data Hub. These changes include an enhanced user interface and faster query execution times, and give you a more complete view of your data in Ads Data Hub, without compromising end-user privacy. Over the coming months, Ads Data Hub will start notifying you when rows of data are suppressed from results due to privacy checks, helping you understand why certain data was not included.

We’ve also improved the algorithms we use to filter query results. Now, queries utilizing data joins are filtered with more precision, so you will have greater flexibility in designing your queries to address the insights you are looking to gain via Ads Data Hub - but in a way that continues to protect user privacy.

New tools to run customized analysis

Ads Data Hub provides tools to help you run analysis including consumer journey paths, launched earlier this year. But we've heard from some customers the need for additional ways to run customized analysis that aligns with unique business needs.

We're now offering Shapley value and Markov chain analysis methods as native Ads Data Hub functions to assign credit to touchpoints along the consumer journey. These functions can be used with Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 data as well as your own business data in Ads Data Hub. Shapley value and Markov chain functions are available in beta today and will roll out to all marketers using Ads Data Hub by the end of the year. We’re also exploring ways to offer more capabilities for customized analysis in Ads Data Hub.

Our mission with Ads Data Hub is to help you tailor your marketing measurement to your unique business needs, while protecting user privacy and upholding Google’s high standards of data security. And we’re investing in privacy research for Ads Data Hub to accelerate improvements to privacy protections, usability, and performance. As we invest in features that make Ads Data Hub faster, more secure, and easier to use, you'll be able to focus on what matters—the growth of your business.

With current events changing so quickly, advertisers constantly reassess if all of the creative elements for their various campaigns—tone, copy, visuals, placements—are appropriate. They also want to know if their ads are viewable and if they are running in environments that are suitable for their brand. Partners can help solve these brand suitability challenges.

To make it easier to work with these partners, we are introducing automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager and custom pre-bid filtering in Display & Video 360. 

Automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager

Now you can seamlessly add third-party brand verification measurement to the ads you serve with Campaign Manager. You can still use Campaign Manager’s built-in Verification suite, but can now add third-party verification to your campaigns faster.

The previous process required multiple teams working in spreadsheets to add third-party verification to each placement on your media plan. This required a lot of resources and often resulted in reporting discrepancies. Automated third-party verification is faster and less error-prone because it uses system-to-system API calls between Google and the third-party vendor.

Automated third-party verification also provides centralized tag management within Campaign Manager and streamlines your workflow across all your digital campaigns. For example, placements that are wrapped through automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager will automatically sync to Display & Video 360 with their wrapped states intact, reducing time required to get campaigns live. Enabling third-party verification or adjusting the partner settings will not require the re-trafficking of tags.

This new feature also allows you to see a new metric in reporting called “Vendor Blocked Ads”. Now you don’t need to log into a separate system to see what ads were blocked. Instead you will have a centralized view alongside all of your media and creative performance.

We are launching with Integral Ad Science (IAS) as our first partner for this new capability and are actively working to bring other partners onboard.

Campaign Manager customers can now directly integrate with IAS using their automated tag to add IAS brand verification measurement to all of their creatives. Beta partners like HP have already seen benefits.

Custom pre-bid filtering in Display & Video 360

Marketers using Display & Video 360 also work with partners to enforce their media quality standards. Pre-bid filtering helps ensure they are only purchasing inventory that meets brand safety and suitability requirements. Our current integrations with third-parties support standard categories like alcohol, violence, and other broadly risky content.

In today’s environment, advertisers need more than just standard categories, so we are expanding this feature to support custom pre-bid filtering in Display & Video 360. This expanded capability allows brands to maximize reach while remaining contextually relevant and avoid content that is deemed unsuitable for their brand based on context, language, sentiment and emotion. For example, a CPG advertiser may not want to run ads featuring chocolate chip cookies on a healthy cooking site but may want to include that site for their protein bars media buy.

Agencies like the Kepler Group found success with custom pre-bid filtering.

 IAS is our first partner for this capability with others to follow.

Visit the help center to learn more about automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager and custom pre-bid filtering in Display & Video 360.