In the coming quarters, all major browsers, including Chrome, are phasing out the use of Flash technologies in favor of HTML5. HTML5 is not only available on more devices, but also offers improved security, reduced power consumption and faster page load times for users.
We began our transition to HTML5 with display ads across Google and DoubleClick back in 2015. We are now continuing that transition by shifting video ads in DoubleClick Digital Marketing, DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the Google Display Network to HTML5 over the next few quarters as follows:
Starting April 3rd, 2017, new Flash video ads will no longer be able to be uploaded into DoubleClick Studio, DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers or AdWords.
Starting July 3rd, 2017, Flash video ads will no longer be able to run through DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, DoubleClick for Publishers or AdWords. Additionally, our Active View and Verification tools for video will no longer use Flash.
Transition timeline for HTML5 Video
It’s important to begin updating your ads and websites to HTML5 technologies in preparation for these dates. We fully support HTML5 Video across DoubleClick and AdWords and provide the tools to ensure advertisers and publishers can easily migrate all video ads to HTML5.
For guidance and best practices to help your team with this transition, see Chrome one-sheeter, visit the DoubleClick help center or contact your DoubleClick sales representative.
Over a year has passed since the AMP Project first launched with the vision of making mobile web experiences faster and better for everybody. From the very beginning, we’ve maintained that the AMP project would support publishers’ existing business models while creating new monetization opportunities. With regards to advertising, this meant giving publishers the flexibility to use the current technology and systems they’re used to, and evolving user-first mobile web initiatives like AMP for Ads (A4A).
With a growing number of publishers embracing the speed of AMP, today we’re addressing some of the ways in which we’re helping you do more with ads on AMP.
Serve ads from more than 70+ ad tech providers
Keeping with the open source nature of the project, more than 70+ advertising technology providers have already integrated with AMP. And that list is only growing. Existing tags that are delivered via a supported ad server also work in AMP. So, you can serve ads from both directly-sold campaigns as well as third-party ad networks and exchanges so long as they have support for AMP.
Keep 100% of the ad revenue
AMP is an open source project. It does not take a revenue share. AMP is not an advertising service provider or intermediary, and publishers can monetize AMP pages the same way you monetize HTML pages, keeping 100% of the revenue you earn based on negotiated rates with ad providers.
Choose the advertising experience on your pages
You can choose to serve any number of ads per page to serve in locations that works best for your content, including the first viewport. Just remember that regular ads in AMP load after the primary content. So, unless you’re loading the lightning fast A4A ads, we recommend placing the first ad below the first viewpoint to optimize for viewability and user experience.
Take advantage of video ad support
AMP currently supports 13 different video players, ranging from Brightcove to Teads, all of which can serve video ads. If you want to use a video player that is not currently supported in AMP, place the video player inside amp-iframe. Learn more.
Differentiate yourself with rich and custom ad formats
AMP accommodates a large variety of ad formats by default, ranging from publisher custom ad units to IAB standard outstream video and in-feed native ads. We value publisher choice and support efforts to create proprietary ad formats. For example, with responsive layouts in AMP, you can offer advertisers custom ads that can dynamically span the entire width of the mobile device. Learn more about how you can adapt your ads strategy for AMP.
Maximize revenue with interchangeable ad slots
In September 2016, both YieldMo and DoubleClick announced support for multi-size ad requests on AMP pages. With this launch, you can optimize yield by allowing multiple ad creative sizes to compete for each ad slot, capturing the most advertiser demand possible on AMP pages while still protecting the user’s experience.
Plan ahead with a view into AMP’s roadmap
Transparency is important to the success of any open source project and is a key value for AMP. Accordingly, we started publishing the AMP roadmap publicly nearly 6 months ago, including milestones for ads. These roadmaps are accompanied with bi-quarterly status updates and you can also see all AMP releases .
Over 700,000 domains have published AMP pages and a good many are monetizing them with ads. Early studies suggest that ads on AMP are more viewable and engaging than ads on non-AMP mobile pages. That’s because with AMP, you don’t have to choose between good user experiences and monetization opportunities. When balanced and optimized, you can have both.
Reach out — we’re eager to hear your suggestions and feedback to make sure that AMP pays off for everyone.
Posted by Vamsee Jasti Product Manager, AMP Project
Last month we released a new study, "The need for mobile speed", highlighting the impact of mobile latency on publisher revenue. Simply having your site load on a mobile device is no longer enough: Mobile sites have to be fast and relevant. The study analyzed 10,000+ mobile web domains, and from the results we gained several insights about the impact of mobile latency on user experience.
Critically, the study also revealed strong correlations between page speed and the following key performance indicators:
Revenue
Bounce rate
Session duration
Viewability
It’s clear mobile speed matters to the success of publisher sites, but making mobile load times a priority doesn’t always make achieving speed easy. To help you build a faster mobile web experience, we’ve created a mobile web speed toolkit. It outlines a 4-step process to diagnose and fix mobile speed issues:
1. Measure your site’s performance. 2. Assess the different components impacting speed. 3. Prioritize the order your site loads. 4. Test, remeasure and repeat to improve your site speed.
The relationship between page speed and publisher revenue is clearer than ever before. Small improvements to your mobile site may yield big gains for your mobile revenue, so get your copy of the mobile web speed toolkit and start making changes today.
Today, we’re excited to share insights from a new study on how mobile speed can impact user engagement and publisher revenue. As people’s expectations for mobile experiences have grown, simply loading on a mobile device is no longer enough. Mobile sites must be fast and relevant.
Unfortunately, based on our analysis of 10,000+ mobile web domains, we found that most mobile sites don’t meet this bar: the average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections.1 That’s about as long as it takes to sing the entire alphabet song!2
Slow loading sites frustrate users and negatively impact publishers. While there are several factors that impact revenue, our model projects that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.3 The study also observed 25% higher ad viewability4 and 70% longer average sessions5 for sites that load in 5 seconds vs 19 seconds.
Never before has mobile speed been more important.
3...2...1… gone
Slow page load times are a big blocker:
53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load6
One out of two people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds7
46% of people say that waiting for pages to load is what they dislike the most when browsing the web on mobile devices8
We all know this first hand — if you’re looking for something on your phone, how long will you wait if the page takes more than a few seconds to load?
The three major factors that slow down mobile sites are file size, the number of server requests, and the order in which the different elements of the page are loaded. We found:
The average size of the content on mobile sites is 1.49 MB, which takes 7 seconds to load over 3G connections9
Mobile pages make an average of 214 server requests, and nearly half of all server requests are ad-related10
Getting up to speed
There are many tools out there to help diagnose the problem and fix it. We recommend a 3-step process to speed up mobile sites:
Execute changes that eliminate bulky content, reduce the number of server requests, and consolidate data and analytics tags. Switch up the element order and select the minimum number of pieces to show above the fold first — styling, javascript logic, and images accessed after the tap, scroll or swipe can be loaded later.
Monitor performance after making changes and run A/B tests to regularly audit the setup of your site, flagging and removing anything that adds latency.
To learn more about our study and the steps you can take to improve the experience on your mobile site, check out our guide, “The Need for Mobile Speed” [g.co/MobileSpeed]
Posted by Alex Shellhammer & Juliette Neel Publisher Marketing
1 Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016 2 NPR, “Keep Flu At Bay With A Song”, April 2009 3 Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics and DoubleClick AdExchange data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=4.5K, Global, June 2015 - May 2016 4 DoubleClick for Publishers, Google Active View ad viewability for 10.7K mWeb homepage domains with >70% measurable ad viewability, Global, February 2016 5 Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.5K, Global, March 2016 6 Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016 7 Akamai Technologies - 2014 Consumer Web Performance Expectations Survey 8 Google Webmaster Central Blog, "#MobileMadness: a campaign to help you go mobile-friendly", April, 2015 9 Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016 10 Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016
A few weeks back, Paul Muret, Google’s VP of Display, Video and Analytics, made several announcements about enhancements to the DoubleClick platform to support Programmatic Direct deals. Paul also shared that the number of Programmatic Direct deals transacted on DoubleClick Ad Exchange tripled in 20151 alone.
Everyone knows that programmatic is growing and is increasingly becoming the way we transact digital advertising. But what’s the deal with programmatic deals, or as we say, Programmatic Direct?
To answer that question, we dug into the data to analyze the key drivers of Programmatic Direct growth on our platforms. You can explore some of the data for yourself, with our interactive report: The State of Programmatic Direct.
Looking through Ad Exchange data from October 2014 to December 2015, one thing became incredibly clear: In every region, across every platform and publisher category, there are fascinating trends of adoption to be found.
It hasn’t taken as long for advertisers and publishers to use programmatic technologies to transact the deals they’d traditionally buy and sell directly. In reviewing the data from DoubleClick AdExchange, we found that:
90+ marketers on the Ad Age Top 100 Global Marketers list made Programmatic Direct deals in 20152.
More than half of the publishers in the US comScore top 50 list from December 2015 offered their inventory through Programmatic Direct deals3.
… On every screen
Programmatic may have been born on the desktop, but Programmatic Direct is taking off on mobile — probably not a surprise if you’re reading this article on your phone. Programmatic Direct impressions served on mobile and tablet grew 4x faster than desktop in the period surveyed4.
… In every region
The growth of Programmatic Direct isn’t limited to any specific country or region. So, where is it well adopted and where is it growing fast?
Programmatic Direct impressions in Ukraine, Turkey and Spain each more than doubled in just 12 months5.
Japan was the strongest adopter in APAC but Taiwan and Indonesia saw Programmatic Direct impressions grow more than 20% monthly6.
Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we dig through the data to share more insights. You can also explore our interactive research report to find additional trends, like how quickly Programmatic Direct impressions on mobile apps grew for game publishers in Japan. To get started, take a look at the infographic below.
Posted by Carlo Acenas Associate Product Marketing Manager Yamini Gupta Sr. Product Marketing Manager 1 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, year end 2014 to year end 2015. 2 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014-Dec 2015. Minimum $1K spend. 3 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014-Dec 2015. Cross-referenced with comScore 50 US list, December 2015. 4 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 - Dec 2015. 5 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 - Dec 2015. 6 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 - Dec 2015.
Delivering a better experience for users has been our top priority since Google was founded, from the products we develop and the ads that we show to how we do business with our partners and clients. This will be on full display at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit, our annual gathering of large advertiser, agency and publisher clients beginning today.
This year, our focus is on how we can work together to create better, faster ad experiences across every screen, starting with mobile.
You can join us for the livestream of my opening keynote, starting at 9 a.m. P.T. during which I’ll share updates about new innovations on the DoubleClick platform and how we’re helping advertisers and publishers adapt to today’s mobile world.
Making ads on the mobile web faster
Our research shows that the average mobile site takes 19 seconds to load. Think about that for a minute. That’s a long time! Not only is this frustrating for users but it’s also a huge missed opportunity for publishers -- we estimate mobile sites that load within 5 seconds can earn up to 2x more revenue than those at the 19 second average.
To help make the mobile web faster for users, Google joined a global community of publishers and other tech companies to launch the open sourced Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (also known as AMP). Early analysis shows that mobile web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data on average than non-AMP mobile web pages.
AMP is already making a difference for a variety of publishers such as the Washington Post, which is seeing first-hand how AMP pages deliver great mobile web experiences that build user loyalty.
But just speeding up the content is not enough - slow-loading ads are also a problem. We’re announcing two new features that will make ad experiences better on the mobile web:
AMP for Ads - With AMP for Ads, we're bringing everything that's good and fast about AMP to ads. Unfortunately, most advertisers’ campaign creative are not fully optimized for mobile experiences. AMP for Ads allows advertisers to build beautifully-designed ads in AMP HTML so that the entire AMP experience, both the publisher’s content and the advertiser’s creative, load simultaneously at AMP-speed.
AMP Landing Pages - AMP Landing Pages are fast, custom pages, built by advertisers so that when someone clicks on their AMP ad, they continue to have an AMP experience. AMP Landing Pages are also built with AMP HTML so that advertisers or their agencies use the same process to create these pages as they do with AMP content pages.
Building the next generation of ads with DoubleClick
Over the past year, Google has been working with publishers to help them adopt native ads - ads that match the look, feel and style of their surrounding content on a publisher’s website. Users find this type of ad format useful, particularly on mobile. However, in the advertising industry, the process of building and trafficking native ads is still largely manual.
Today, we are announcing significant updates for native ads across our platforms that will help to accelerate adoption of this user-friendly format with programmatic.
For the first time, advertisers will be able to buy native ads programmatically in DoubleClick Bid Manager, across all screens. Instead of providing fully-designed creatives, advertisers upload the components of the ad - headline, image, text, and so on - and DoubleClick automatically assembles them to fit the context and format of the site or app where they appear.
For publishers, we’re now offering a complete native ads solution in DoubleClick. Publishers can now make native ad inventory across web and apps available programmatically or through traditional direct sales.
Creating value with programmatic
Programmatic buying delivers results, so it’s no surprise that brands and agencies are continuing to invest. Today, we’re excited to announce a new global partnership with one of the world’s largest entertainment brands, Time Warner Inc.
DoubleClick will work with all of Time Warner’s businesses, networks and brands, such as, Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, Harry Potter and CNN, among others, as well as Time Warner’s agencies, for programmatic buying, ad serving, and measurement globally.
Time Warner is not alone in growing their investment in programmatic. We’ve seen tremendous momentum on our own platforms. In 2015 alone,
Programmatic video revenue for TV and media companies increased more than 6x on DoubleClick for Publishers.
Video spend by advertisers using Programmatic Direct on DoubleClick Bid Manager grew more than 7x.
The number of Programmatic Direct deals on DoubleClick AdExchange tripled.
Together with our advertiser and publisher partners, we've made huge strides in improving the digital ads experience for users. Digital ads can be lightning fast, engaging and as beautiful as the site and app where they appear.
We've come a long way from ads that just blink text in blocky boxes - and yet we know there is still work to do. Today’s announcements represent our continued commitment to help our clients and partners deliver better and faster ad experiences for users.
Posted by Paul Muret Vice President of Display, Video and Analytics, Google
Join me on Tuesday, July 19th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET for a livestream broadcast of my keynote address from the DoubleClick Leadership Summit (DLS). I’ll be sharing updates on the latest innovations on the DoubleClick platform and how we’re helping advertisers and publishers adapt to today’s mobile world.
At Google, one of our enduring principles is to “focus on the user and all else will follow.” This has been an important guidepost throughout our history, and it has never been more relevant than it is today. People are more ‘mobile’ now than ever before. We spend every waking hour connected to our devices. We expect to find what we want, when we want it. But with only a split second to engage and capture attention, user experience matters more than ever.
In my keynote, I’ll share an update on the technologies we’re developing to help advertisers, agencies and publishers create better experiences for people on the go. You can expect to hear more about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Native Ads, as well as new, more immersive experiences like 360 video. I’ll also be unveiling new product features to help our clients and partners more effectively reach, engage, monetize and measure audiences across screens.
I’m looking forward to the livestream on July 19th. Please register to watch here.
Posted by Paul Muret Vice President of Analytics, Display, and Video Products, Google
Tune in on July 19th for the DoubleClick Announcements Livestream. Watch live as Paul Muret, Vice President of Display, Video Ads and Analytics at Google, shares new product announcements and DoubleClick's vision for the future.
Register and get the link to the livestream in your inbox before the event.
The event will be streamed live on DoubleClick.com on July 19th, 2016 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET.
Native advertising is an increasingly popular ad monetization strategy for publishers. The New York Times is an early adopter, and recently we caught up with their Managing Director of Ad Innovation, Nicholas Van Amburg, on what they’ve learned from running native ads. Here’s what he shared.
The New York Times’ first issue was printed in 1851 as a penny paper, and now, we share news with over one million digital-only subscribers every day. In our 164-year history, we’ve seen our readers shift from print, to computers, to mobile. Despite all of this change, however, we’ve remained committed to delivering the highest-quality content to our readers—whether it’s news, features, opinions or ads. First and foremost, it makes our readers happy. But, it also serves as an important foundation for a sustainable monetization strategy. Whether readers are interacting with our articles, videos, podcasts, or apps, our ads needs to be just as engaging as our own content.
To create a strong user experience wherever people are reading news, we’ve experimented a lot with our native advertising strategy. Here’s what we’ve learned:
Create effective ad formats that scale
One of our early experimentations with native advertising was a solution we called ‘Flex Frames.’ To offer the best user experience possible, we ensured Flex Frame ads behaved like organic content by matching the look and feel of surrounding contexts, both in terms of editorial content and across different platforms and devices.
While Flex Frames successfully adapted to the look and feel of our content, we faced roadblocks when attempting to scale -- our team was dedicating countless hours to coding and compiling ads for review by advertisers. To overcome this challenge, we partnered with DoubleClick and have realized significant efficiencies since.
Use data to make smart decisions
The ability to leverage our first party audience data proved crucial to our native advertising strategy, allowing us to place the right ad in front of the right person at the right time, both in terms of content and format. For example, we will serve a video ad rather than a photo story if we know a reader is more likely to view video content than view photos in a carousel. These highly-relevant ads produce excellent results with 6X higher CTRs with 4X more viewable impressions.
Launch and iterate
Metrics are important, and you have to know what to measure in order to decide whether ads are working for you and your users. It’s important to identify KPIs at the start of a project, and measure them regularly. These KPIs may differ based on the company, but for us, after running a variety of focus groups through our Consumer Insights Group, we found user engagement to be one of our most important KPIs. We want to know the ad experience is a positive one for our users—that our ads aren’t just tolerated, but that people actually opt to spend time with them. We’re constantly testing ads to understand what’s working and what’s not.
Educate sales and advertisers to see the value of native ads
We’ve been working with native ads for over a year now, but for many people, these ads are still relatively new. Even a year in, the hardest thing about my job continues to be educating sales teams about native formats. And the same goes for advertisers—it’s our job at The New York Times to demystify component-based ads and explain why they're better for the whole ecosystem. With more education, sales teams can better sell native ads, and advertisers will start opting for more native formats.
The next generation of native ads
Taking what we’ve learned so far, I believe the next big leap for native ads is to deliver more meaningful, contextually-relevant experiences across an ever-broader spectrum of media formats and devices. This is important because The New York Times isn’t just a paper or a website anymore. It's a website. It's an app. It's a host of touchpoints and experiences where the user sits at the core. We're headed for a world that lives on an incredibly fractured series of screens and touch points -- and our challenge is to make sure that we are meeting and exceeding users’ expectations across all them.
We recently released Native Ads on DoubleClick across all screens — on the web and in apps — to all our partners. Watch the video below to learn more about The New York Times’ strategy and approach to native advertising or continue to DoubleClick.com to read the case study.
Posted by Nicholas Van Amburg Managing Director of Ad Innovation, The New York Times
When the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) team set out to help make mobile experiences great for everybody, the objective wasn’t just to improve a user’s engagement with content. We knew the experience people had with ads was equally important to help publishers fund the great content we all love to read.
The AMP team laid out four core principles that would guide the innovation on the AMP ads roadmap and get us to a world where ads are as fast and engaging as the content we value.
Faster is better
‘Beautiful’ matters
Security is a must
We’re better together
We recently took a moment to review the progress made and see how ads on AMP are doing. We compared ad performance on AMP and non-AMP mobile pages across 150 publishers (large corporations and small businesses in different geographic regions) on our programmatic platforms. The preliminary results are encouraging.
Compared to non-AMP pages, ads on AMP have led to:
80%+ of the publishers realizing higher viewability rates
90%+ of the publishers driving greater engagement with higher CTRs
The majority of the publishers seeing higher eCPMs(Impact and proportion of lift varies by region and how optimized the non-AMP sites are)
We have also received positive feedback from a number of publishers with varying mobile web advertising business models:
"So far, AMP has performed well against a number of metrics for advertising effectiveness and revenue. One encouraging stat is that we have seen an increase in viewability of ads within the AMP environment. As the industry moves more towards this as a measurement tool it is important we focus on optimizing for this metric. We are encouraged by the open approach to both publishers and our tech partners and look forward to what’s to come." — Noah Szubski, Chief Product Officer, DailyMail and EliteDaily
"It is still very early days, but AMP has performed well to date from both direct and indirect monetization sources. We've been able to extend all of our custom ad products to AMP and have enabled it within our premium ad marketplace, Concert. We see AMP as a perfect intersection of two core tenets of Vox Media - fast mobile web experiences and ads that perform. We are encouraged by all of the metrics and are looking forward to continuing to grow this important channel." — Joe Alicata, Vice President of Revenue Products & Operations, Vox Media
“We’ve seen a 90% decrease in page latency, 96% decrease in unfilled impressions, 65% increase in ad engagement and 32% increase in eCPM. Perceived load time improved from approximately 17 seconds to 2-3 seconds.” —Conor Beck, Director of political news network TownHall Media
While this makes for a promising start, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with ads in AMP. There’s much work ahead for us and the rest of the industry — including our third party ad tech partners — to make advertising experiences on the mobile web as great as content experiences with AMP. We’re both committed to and excited by that.
If you’re curious about what lies ahead for the broader AMP project, check out the AMP roadmap. Here’s a brief snapshot of what we are expecting to launch with ads this quarter and next:
“Beautiful” matters: Two new formats that are as beautiful as they are engaging.
Sticky Ads — greater viewability without sacrificing user experience
Flying Carpet Ad — a large canvas for immersive, fast ad experiences
