Tag Archives: Measurement

Turner Sports reaches fans across screens for March Madness


Consumers’ constant connectivity means that people can now satisfy their desire for information and entertainment at any moment during their day. This “in-the-moment” behavior requires marketers to focus on building cross-screen advertising strategies to capture the moments that matter.

With March Madness upon us, today we will shine a light on how one marketer, Turner Sports, developed smart cross-screen advertising strategies to play to the needs of sports fans. We will then explore five new mobile features we are launching in DoubleClick Digital Marketing that enable advertisers to more easily develop and run cross-screen campaigns.

How Turner engaged fans across screens
Turner knows that at the outset of the tournament, consumers watch the games via the March Madness Live desktop stream and mobile app. So driving traffic to the video stream and driving app downloads at the outset of the Tournament are the brand’s most important metrics. 

As the tournament progresses, the focus shifts from the app to live TV tune-ins, to capture the excitement around the final match-ups. By understanding how and where consumers interact with March Madness content, Turner can build a better digital strategy and reach their users more effectively throughout the Tournament.

Turner used Google’s Lightbox format to create an expandable ad that drives people to the March Madness Live mobile app:


Five new features to help marketers run cross-screen campaigns
To help marketers like Turner accomplish their cross-screen advertising strategies, we’re excited to announce five new features across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. 

Build cross-screen creative more easily: 
  • For basic Flash ads: DoubleClick Bid Manager now supports automatic Flash-to-HTML5 conversion. HTML5 ads can run across mobile inventory where Flash ads cannot, expanding your mobile reach while offering a richer, higher performing creative. Initial results from our beta show that converting Flash assets to HTML5 increases mobile reach by 400% and drives a 2-3x increase in average click-through rate (CTR).
  • For interactive HTML5 ads: In the next few weeks, Google Web Designer will be launching starter templates to help advertisers quickly build mobile ad units from a pre-set format. Over 80 ad templates will be available, including 29 in-app templates, and all of them will be certified to work on DoubleClick Bid Manager. We’ll be adding additional templates for responsive GDN Lightbox formats next quarter. Google Web Designer will also integrate with the Asset Library in DoubleClick Studio, meaning users can access the same library of assets from Google Web Designer and DoubleClick Studio. 
Reach your audiences across screens more effectively: 
  • Based on geography: Last November, we announced that for users who opt in to location-based targeting, marketers can use geofence targeting in DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people based on their proximity to a specified chain store. We are now expanding geographic coverage to over 100 countries, increasing the types of business chains available for your campaigns, and improving the workflow for the feature, including building better forecasting and reporting. 
  • Based on brand safety: We are making app buying on brand-safe placements much easier. With app brand safety targeting, we have expanded our Digital Content Label algorithm to include even more Play Store and App Store apps, widening your mobile in-app reach while ensuring your ads only run on brand-appropriate apps.
Track and optimize app install campaign performance: 
  • DoubleClick Digital Marketing will support third-party app tracking solutions in early Q2. This means advertisers can track their in-app installs (app downloads from an in-app ad) using supported third-party app trackers and attribute them back to impressions and clicks for in-app ads run on DoubleClick Bid Manager and Doubleclick Campaign Manager. Contact your DoubleClick rep to learn more. 

Whether you’re reaching sports fans during the March Madness tournament, or more generally trying to reach your consumers in the moments that matter, these tools can help you build successful advertising campaigns that will run seamlessly across screens.

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Marketing

Protect your brand and budget with Video Verification

With increasing video spend in digital and the higher media cost of in-stream video ads, it’s crucial for marketers to understand where their video ads are running and whether they were actually seen by their intended audience. As a first step to address this need, we announced the availability of Active View, Google’s viewability metric, for Video in January. Today, we are excited to build on this with the launch of Video Verification, now available to customers on the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, globally. Video Verification enables advertisers to gain insights unique to video to help ensure they’re getting what they planned and paid for.

Advertisers can now confirm not only that their ads are viewable, but that every view is as prominent as possible. This means you’ll know whether your video ads are mostly displayed in large players, front and center, or in little players off to the side. With these insights, advertisers can take steps to ensure that every video dollar spent goes toward high-quality, relevant inventory.

With DoubleClick Verification, here’s what advertisers will be able to measure for video ads, including those that run on YouTube:
  • Average player size
  • Average player position
  • Measurable impressions for player size and position
  • Viewable video impressions
  • A graphical illustration of player size
  • Number of impressions that were muted at start
  • Prominence score (low, medium, or high), which is calculated by combining the above metrics
    Video Verification UI. Player size: red = small, blue = large, green = HD

MEC uses DoubleClick Verification to ensure brands are safe, smart, and cutting edge online
As one of the world’s leading media agencies, MEC is committed to getting the highest-quality, most relevant and cost-effective buys for its clients. To ensure their clients’ messages only appear next to brand appropriate content and that their marketing dollars are well spent, MEC started using DoubleClick Verification.

With DoubleClick Verification built right into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, the team has access to unified data, which helps them make better decisions across search and display.
The team also found that they save 48 hours of turnaround time on every campaign since DoubleClick Verification requires no extra work, such as tagging. This makes the team more efficient and ensures campaigns launch on time.

Beyond peace of mind and time savings, MEC has moved from a reactive to a proactive approach to protect their clients’ brands. Tools like ad blocking guarantee that ads only appear next to brand safe content. For example, MEC recently implemented ad blocking for a major healthcare client to ensure their ads don’t appear on websites containing adult content, which could damage the healthcare firm’s brand.

To learn more about the team’s approach and results, read the full case study here.

Below are upcoming events and available resources to help you learn more about DoubleClick Verification:
  • Join Oren Mor, Product Manager for DoubleClick Verification, in a Hangout on Air at 12pm EST / 9am PST on Tuesday, February 24th. Register here.
  • Download the whitepaper, “5 Keys to Protecting Brand and Budget,” which guides advertisers through the process of evaluating a winning verification solution.
  • Visit the Help Center.
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“with DoubleClick” 2014 wrap-up

Increasingly, marketers are looking to integrate their digital marketing efforts in order to get better campaign performance, while also benefiting from workflow efficiencies for their teams. To celebrate and learn from the successes these teams are seeing, we launched with DoubleClick, highlighting stories and perspectives from marketers and agencies about how integrated platforms are changing how they work, creating bigger impact, and fueling better decisions.

We kicked off the series with a recent study, “Adding Data, Boosting Impact,” where the Boston Consulting Group found that marketers who use an integrated platform to power their programmatic buying are seeing major uplifts in performance and engagement. The study, now published on Think with Google, identifies five steps marketers should take to achieve these uplifts.

And throughout the series, we highlighted specific marketers and agencies who realized similar gains. Like Neo@Ogilvy, and how they freed up 40 hours per week with more streamlined workflows, and how Kia improved their CPA by 30% with powerful attribution tools. We saw how T-Mobile eliminated static backup images by 85% with HTML5, and how the Kellogg Company increased their ad viewability rate to over 70%. Dive in to learn about these and many more success stories.
Today we wrap up the series, but stay tuned for more with DoubleClick customer spotlights in 2015.

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with DoubleClick: Kellogg dishes up offline sales and increases viewability with programmatic buying

This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

Kellogg Company is a century-old marketer with some of the world’s most trusted brands. Kellogg’s vision is to enrich and delight the world through foods and brands that matter, and digital marketing plays a key role in helping them move consumers through the path to purchase. The cereal powerhouse adopted DoubleClick Digital Marketing for programmatic buying. Using the unified platform, they were able to gain a holistic view of the consumer, deliver the right message to the right person, and ensure that their digital marketing efforts delivered maximum effectiveness.
Kellogg recognized that traditional marketing channels often aren’t enough to reach consumers in today’s digital age. To help solve for this, Kellogg embraced programmatic buying as a key part of their digital strategy to stay at the forefront of changing consumer behavior. “Programmatic buying has played a significant role in our digital marketing strategy,” said Aaron Fetters, director of Kellogg’s Insight and Analytics Solution Center. “It’s an opportunity to drive further success in our core metrics for digital advertising, and to use data and technology to deliver our message to the target audience.”

Formulating the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for their digital marketing campaigns was vital in reaching Kellogg’s goal of driving offline sales. And for this, the right digital measurement tools were critical. One of Kellogg’s main KPIs was ad viewability, and with programmatic buying and measurement solutions from DoubleClick, Kellogg’s viewability rate increased to over 70%. “It's amazing the impact you can have on a measurement like viewability, when you focus on it, plan for it, and optimize for it,” Fetters said.

DoubleClick solutions have helped Kellogg refine the targeting and frequency of their digital campaigns, and the team is confident that with DoubleClick they’re reaching the right consumer and managing their campaigns more effectively. The food company is now two to three times better at ensuring their impressions go directly to the consumers they most want to reach.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, watch the video below and check out the full case study here.
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How many ads are actually seen? New benchmarks for viewability

Yesterday, we revamped DoubleClick Verification to provide marketers a robust solution to understand and control where their campaigns appear, including if they were viewable. Today, we’re releasing new data from our ad platforms to shed light on the state of ad viewability.

With the advancement of new technologies we now know that many display ads that are served never actually have the opportunity to be seen by a user. In fact in a recent study of Active View data by Google, we found that 56.1% of all ads served were not measured viewable.(footnote) Yet, the average publisher’s viewability is 50.2%. This means a small number of publishers are serving the majority of non-viewable impressions and dragging down the served impression viewability average by almost 6%.

As advertisers shift to paying for viewable, rather than served impressions, it’s more important than ever to understand what drives the viewability of ads. To see all “5 factors of viewability” check out the full infographic and study at thinkwithgoogle.com.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager

How many ads are actually seen? New benchmarks for viewability

With the advancement of new technologies we now know that many display ads that are served never actually have the opportunity to be seen by a user. In fact in a recent study of Active View data by Google, we found that 56.1% of all ads served were not measured viewable.(footnote) Yet, the average publisher’s viewability is 50.2%. This means a small number of publishers are serving the majority of non-viewable impressions and dragging down the served impression viewability average by almost 6%.
As advertisers shift to paying for viewable, rather than served impressions, it’s more important than ever to understand what drives the viewability of ads. To see all “5 factors of viewability” check out the full infographic and study at thinkwithgoogle.com.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager

Protect your brand and budget: 8 major updates to DoubleClick Verification

Today we’re excited to announce a complete revamp of DoubleClick Verification to help marketers protect their brand and budget, and empower them with confidence to invest in digital.

As a digital marketer today, you can deliver the right message to the right user at the right time and place. But with the rich options in formats, inventory sources, and types of buys, it’s crucial that your messages reach your audience as intended, and that you're getting what you planned and paid for.

We launched DoubleClick Verification in 2012 to ensure just this. Seamlessly integrated into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, DoubleClick Verification was built to give advertisers more confidence with their digital investment. It’s designed to be a natural extension of campaign workflow, to be a part of every campaign to ensure that brands and budgets are protected. Today we’re excited to share with you 8 major new features in DoubleClick Verification.

Robust insights: Verification covers all the potential brand safety and waste issues that can hamper a digital campaign. This means you get insights about contextual and geographic issues, viewability, and spam and fraud.
  • Custom classifiers allow you to create custom categories based on what’s suitable for your brand. DoubleClick Verification has always reported on a rich set of predefined, industry-standard categories that give you contextual insight into where your ads served - like adult, violence, alcohol, politics, etc. Custom categories go beyond this by allowing you to specify more granular categories. For example, an airline may want to avoid advertising next to content about plane crashes specifically.
  • Digital Content Labels: Just as movies are given ratings such as PG, PG-13, and R, websites, videos, and mobile apps are classified according to the brand safety of the content. You can now target inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager with labels that range from "DL-G", which corresponds to content that's suitable for general audiences, to "DL-MA", which corresponds to content suitable only for mature audiences. Digital Content Labels provide a consistent definition for brand safety across all Google advertising products - including DoubleClick, YouTube, GDN & AdMob.
  • Viewability and Report Builder integration: Active View, Google’s solution for measuring and buying viewable impressions, is now built directly into DoubleClick Verification, as an important part of the solution to analyze and eliminate all potential waste. In addition, you can now add Verification data to Report Builder reports, allowing for more customization and the ability to schedule reports.
Coverage across formats, screens, and channels: DoubleClick Verification works in all the ways your campaigns work - protecting your brand in all scenarios across formats, screens, and channels.
  • Video verification (coming soon): With double-digit growth predicted for digital video advertising for the next four years*, video verification is critical for marketers. You will now have access to insights unique to video like player size and location. This means you’ll know whether your video ads are mostly displayed in large players, front and center, or in little players off to the side.
Objectivity and transparency: We’ve built DoubleClick Verification to ensure utmost objectivity and transparency.
  • Updated spam filtering & fraud detection: At Google, we take fraud protection very seriously. With over 100 engineers committed to this effort, we removed more than 350 million bad ads from our system last year**, and in February, we acquired spider.io, a company that has built a world-class ad fraud fighting operation. DoubleClick Verification draws from Google’s extensive spam and fraud expertise, and we’ve recently updated spam filtering with pre- and post-bid filtering capabilities. With a growing set of sophisticated filters, pre-bid blocking avoids buying fraudulent impressions in the first place, and post-bid filtering automatically purges fraudulent impressions from reporting and billing, so you get accurate reporting and don’t have to pay for these impressions.
Action in real-time: DoubleClick Verification empowers action in real-time through automation.
  • Ad blocking automatically prevents ads from serving in unwanted locations and contexts across display, mobile web, and video inventory. Serve-time blocking protects your reservation-based campaigns in real-time. Pre-bid blocking protects your programmatic buys by blocking the bids on impressions that would serve in undesired contexts. And your settings are synced between your reservation and programmatic buys.
  • Custom alerts and notifications deliver straight to your inbox exactly the information you need to know to ensure that your campaigns are running as expected and that you're getting what you paid for. For example, you can set a preference to receive an alert if more than 5% of your ads appear on violent content, or if more than 3% of your campaign is serving in off-target geographies.
MEC, one of the world’s leading media agencies, has been testing many of these features - including ad blocking - and has already seen great success. Nick Foord, Analytics Consultant, told us, "Buying digital media is much more complex today than it used to be. Transparency into where ads are serving is critical to ensuring our ads are being served in the right place, and next to the right content.” Steve Richards, Digital Technology Manager added, “Appearing in an inappropriate place online could really damage a brand’s reputation. Ad blocking has removed a huge amount of risk for us, and allowed us to take a proactive approach to protecting our clients’ brands.” Look for more details on MEC's success story in the coming weeks.

To learn more about DoubleClick Verification:
  • Download the new whitepaper, “5 Keys to Protecting Brand and Budget,” which guides marketers through the process of evaluating a winning verification solution.
  • Watch the training videos on Ad Blocking and Active View in Verification, and look out for additional deep dives on the blog in the coming weeks.
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*“US TV Ad Market Still Growing More than Digital Video,” eMarketer, June 12, 2014. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-TV-Ad-Market-Still-Growing-More-than-Digital-Video/1010923
**“Busting Bad Advertising Practices — 2013 Year in Review,” Google, January 2014. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/01/busting-bad-advertising-practices-2013.html

with DoubleClick: Matalan boosts conversion rate 28%

This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

As one of the UK's leading family clothing retailers, Matalan must be nimble -- faster decisions mean better customer engagement and more sales. So they worked with Morpheus Media to implement Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Campaign Manager to provide Matalan with more powerful insights and help them make better business decisions, faster.

Matalan was already using DoubleClick Campaign Manager to centralize their digital marketing and reports. Adding Google Analytics Premium side-by-side showed them campaign effectiveness even more clearly, allowing them to uncover the hidden value of their digital marketing efforts, like transactions where digital advertising had assisted a conversion on another channel.

“It’s really helpful to be able to see one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel,” says Lee Pinnington, Matalan's Multi-Channel Marketing Director.
With a complete view of their digital marketing ROI thanks to the integration of DoubleClick Campaign Manager and Google Analytics Premium, Matalan was able to put their marketing dollars where they would truly be most effective. And the results were dramatic: a 28% rise in conversion rate and significant growth in both site visits and revenue.

To learn more about Matalan's approach, check out the full case study.

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Fighting Fraud: Protecting advertisers from buying hidden ads with DoubleClick Bid Manager

Ad fraud is a serious threat to the advertising ecosystem. It’s one we’ve been deeply committed to solving over the years, investing significantly in technology and expertise to keep bad ads and bad traffic out of our ads systems. Today we’re adding to those investments with a new feature in DoubleClick Bid Manager that automatically prevents advertisers from buying hidden ad slots, built from our spider.io technology.

What is a hidden ad?
Many in the industry are familiar with ad viewability, which is a measure of whether an ad was actually shown on a screen. The vast majority of non-viewable ad impressions are legitimate ads that are intended to be seen by a user, but were not viewed due to various ways people interact with content on the web. Products like Active View help advertisers and publishers address this by giving actionable reporting on ad viewability.

However, some bad actors deliberately hide ads to boost their ad impression numbers, resulting in advertisers paying for ads that have no chance of ever being seen. Below are some of many different methods employed by bad actors who create these “hidden” ads, one type of fraud identified in the IAB’s Anti-Fraud Principles and Proposed Taxonomy:

Bad actors often create sites and stack multiple ads in a single ad slot (like a pile of magazines), where only the top ad is visible. Or, they may adjust the styling of page content to make ads completely invisible. The typical approach, however, is to create a very small iframe to serve ads into that’s impossible for a user to see.


Even worse, some bad actors create adware that can inject hidden ads into a web page, without the publisher even realizing it:


What we’re doing
Practices like these have always been against our policies on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Thanks to the technology we’ve been investing in, we can detect this practice across the web. Our systems proactively blacklist suppliers of hidden ads, filtering them before they’re ever bid on, so advertisers won’t buy hidden ads.

Customers of DoubleClick Bid Manager don't have to make any changes to benefit from these new defenses against hidden ad slots. We currently blacklist 2.6% of the inventory accessed by DoubleClick Bid Manager across exchanges. However, we’ve found this percentage varies widely by provider. Below is a breakdown showing the filtered percentages across some of the largest exchanges:

It doesn’t stop here. Ad fraud is perpetrated by organized groups that constantly change tactics to defraud the industry for their own gains. That’s why we’re always researching and updating our defenses to ensure advertisers are getting the media they intend to purchase. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue refining our tools to promote a healthy, safe advertising ecosystem.


Posted by Payam Shodjai, Group Product Manager