Today, marketers and agencies have countless opportunities to engage audiences with rich formats across channels and devices. And to help them capture the full opportunity, they have an abundance of ad technology solutions to choose from. In fact, the average number of ad tech platforms deployed by organizations grew from 4.3 to 4.7 this year.¹

But marketers also know the real opportunity lies in creating unified, cross-channel digital experiences that span multiple touchpoints. 75% of marketers and agencies believe that an integrated platform can meet all their marketing needs - a 23% increase from 2012. And they believe the benefits range from improved customer insights, better campaign performance, and more efficient use of marketing resources.

In our new collection of insights, “Exploring the Value of Integrated Platforms,” you can see how top marketers and agencies are approaching unified buying to transform their businesses and maximize the impact of their marketing. In this collection, you can see how marketers are investing in integrated ad technology platforms to unlock the full potential of digital marketing for their organizations. We look at the latest trends in adoption, case studies and perspectives from industry leaders to answer questions like: What do today’s organizations want from digital marketing platforms? What is the value of an integrated digital platform? How are marketers investing in newly available technologies? How are they measuring success?

In the coming weeks, we will add more research, best practices and perspectives to the collection. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

1 "Unraveling the Digital Display Industry: Understanding the Tools and Benefits of Digital Marketing", DoubleClick by Google, Dec. 2013

It was a great year for digital advertising. New technologies took off, helping brands, agencies and publishers reach today’s constantly connected consumers more easily and effectively than ever before. With budgets no longer being siloed, 20% of organizations incorporated digital into each marketing function, per a study by Adobe.

We compiled a few of the bigger changes in marketing and digital advertising in 2013, to see how far the industry has come along. View the full infographic here or see a brief summary below.

Redefining “creative”
New creative formats took center stage in 2013. Marketers invested more in social media and TrueView skippable video ad formats continued to grow on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Redefining “integrated”
The new 360 media plan cannot overlook digital and the sheer number of screens people interact with. In 2012, Google released some research indicating that people use 3 screen combinations a day. In 2013, this manifested itself in the form of increased investments in multi-screen campaigns.

Redefining “buying”
New(Up)fronts. Programmatic. 2013 changed the way digital media spend is committed.18 digital media companies presented at the Digital Content NewFronts. And programmatic buying gained significant traction with an expected ~74% growth, according to eMarketer. As brands took to programmatic and with the growth of programmatic video, CPMs on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange increased, and Preferred Deal impressions grew 250%. DoubleClick Bid Manager powered social media ads, joined FBX.

Redefining “success”
Earlier this year, AdAge released some research indicating that 50% of display ads are not viewed, making advertising viewability a hot industry topic. Google’s viewability measurement solution, ActiveView, got MRC-accredited. Last week, Google announced that it would enable viewability-based buys on the Google Display Network. Engagement Rate was another hot metric in 2013, with Cost per Engagement pay models enabled for ad formats like Engagement Ads on the Google Display Network.

View the full infographic here.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

In the motion picture industry, you live or die by your movie trailer and your pre-launch advertising. With all the action-packed creative and large-scale campaigns competing in the same space, it’s quite a task to make innovative and attention-grabbing advertisements. Yet creative agency Project C embraces the challenge.

For our third installment in our DoubleClick Rich Media Hangout Series, “Lessons from our Customers”, we’ll be interviewing Project C, next Wednesday, 12/18 @ 2pm ET.

Joey Barrus, Director of Ad Media, Matthew Jordan, Director of Strategy and Production, and Jennifer Christiano, Project C Producer, will chat with Jeff Sundheim, DoubleClick Creative Account Executive, to discuss how they come up with the next big idea for their entertainment clients.

They’ll walk us through how they built the ad creatives for the major motion picture releases Thor, Despicable Me 2, and Anna Karenina, and which tools they used to make the creative come to life. Plus, they may even divulge some stories of Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes antics.

Join us next Wednesday, Dec. 18th @ 2:30pm ET / 11:30am PT.
RSVP for the hangout here.

If, like the rest of us, you’re just counting down the hours until you can leave for Christmas break, here’s some fodder to help you pass the time: Part one and two of our hangout series.

We hope you’ll join us!

Last week we dove into the new audience capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager that enable you to define, reach, and more deeply understand your customers. Tags plays a critical role in this process, as they allow you to track and measure the impact of your advertising. Today, we’ll dive into how we’re making tagging a much easier and more streamlined part of your digital marketing campaign management.

As it stands today, tagging is one of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of digital campaign management. In fact, on average, marketers host 14 tags on their sites, 68% of which are third-party. Implementing these tags often involves back-and-forth emails, implementation that can take weeks or months, and a lack of transparency about which tags are installed where. And when tags are implemented incorrectly, it can cause further campaign delays and additional implementation cycles.

We recently introduced two features that will greatly reduce the inefficiencies involved in tagging your campaigns: DoubleClick’s integration with Google Tag Manager, and Tag Assistant.

Making conversion tagging easy with Google Tag Manager integration

To streamline the conversion tagging process, DoubleClick Campaign Manager is now integrated with Google Tag Manager, Google’s free tag management solution. With Google Tag Manager, rather than implementing many individual tags across your site, you can implement one site-wide container tag that uses rules to determine which Google and third-party tracking and measurement tags to dynamically fire. The integration allows you to easily push DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag - Floodlight - directly to Google Tag Manager, making tag deployment faster and and more efficient, while still respecting current campaign management roles.

Deploy tags more quickly: You can push Floodlight tags with one click to Google Tag Manager, reducing implementation time from weeks or even months to minutes. This means you’ll save time, and your campaigns can go live faster. Once your tags are implemented, you can update them in the Google Tag Manager interface in minutes, and you will see these tags deployed on your site within 15 minutes or less. The tags are fired asynchronously, which means they load without blocking other elements on the page from loading, enabling sites to load faster during high-traffic times.

Implement tags more efficiently: With Google Tag Manager, you can rest assured your conversion tags are implemented correctly, as there is only one site-wide contain tag to implement. This helps reduce human error and ensures accurate data is recorded, thanks to rules within Google Tag Manager that determine which tracking and measurement tags to dynamically fire. And you will be able to deploy Floodlight tags across both mobile and desktop pages, making the experience consistent across all devices.

Respect tagging roles: We recognize that different roles within your organization may be responsible for each step of the tagging process. Our goal with this integration was to respect these roles and give you tools to implement tags correctly as quickly as possible. Advertisers still have control over which conversion tags are pushed to Google Tag Manager, and webmasters still have control over which tags go on the page, as they can approve or reject tags within Google Tag Manager.

Simplifying ad tagging with Tag Assistant

Beyond simplifying conversion tagging, we’re also improving how you implement ad tags. One of these initiatives is Tag Assistant, which aims at simplifying the QA process.

Tag Assistant is a Chrome extension that automatically validates the implementation of Google tags on any of your pages. The tool is designed for you to checks tags on the fly and escalate more complex or in-depth issues to support teams.

How it works: Tag Assistant has a predefined list of implementation checks to perform for each tag. When the web page loads, Tag Assistant scans the page, compares your tag implementation against the correct/standard implementation, and cross-references the list of implementation checks. If your tag is implemented correctly, Tag Assistant returns a green status. When a problem is found, a red status is returned along with recommendations and support documentation. The tool not only supports DoubleClick ad tags, but Google Tag Manager, AdWords, and Google Analytics tags as well.

If you're an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Understanding your audience is key to delivering them relevant and compelling messages. In DoubleClick Campaign Manager - the upgraded version of DFA - there are a number of new capabilities to help you define, reach, and more deeply understand your audience, so you can engage them in even more powerful ways. We announced some of these audience features when DoubleClick Campaign Manager launched globally, and today we are going to deep dive into the capabilities.

Define your audience with powerful segmentation tools

With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, you can build segments to define your target audience based on specific actions your customers took, like viewing a certain product on your website, or adding items to their shopping cart. You can also build segments based on combinations of data available in Floodlight custom variables. For example, you can segment users with cart values over a certain amount but who did not check out. Best of all, we’ve enabled existing Floodlight tags to be compatible with building segments, so there’s no need to re-tag in order to take advantage of these features.

Reach your audience with powerful targeting tools

Once you’ve built your audience segments, you can leverage them in real time across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. Segments are shared and synced automatically with DoubleClick Bid Manager, allowing you to apply audience insights to engage your audience across your reserved and programmatic buys. For example, you can combine your first-party segments with powerful keyword-contextual and audience targeting capabilities available in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

And with Dynamic Creative pushed from DoubleClick Studio, a single ad template can support millions of iterations, rotating creative elements like background color, headlines, product images, product descriptions, calls-to-action, and pricing. We optimize to the best combination of variables for each audience segment over time, providing the “perfect ad” for each impression.

Understand your audience with deeper insights

Surfacing strategic insights is crucial for optimizing your campaigns. So we introduced new audience performance reporting that brings audience dimensions to all standard reports. This means all campaign metrics, such as clicks or impressions, can be aggregated or filtered by audience characteristics or specific first-party lists. These reports help you answer questions like, “Did my publisher deliver to the audience that we wanted to target?” and “How many impressions did I deliver to my first-party remarketing list versus everywhere else?” As a result, you can better understand the audience segments with which your message resonated most, and use that information to optimize your campaigns.

DoubleClick Bid Manager customers can also report on audience segments created as part of their reservations buy (and see how they overlap with their third-party lists) with the Audience Composition Report available in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

We are continuing to build powerful audience capabilities into DoubleClick Campaign Manager that enable marketers and agencies to deliver the right message to the right user, on any device.

Next week, join us for a deep dive on the tagging capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Adam Champy, Product Manager

A few months ago, we launched the new version of DFA - DoubleClick Campaign Manager - globally.

The launch coincided with DFA’s 15th anniversary, so we wanted to use this opportunity to hear from some of our longtime partners. Surely, the world has changed since the early days of DFA, 15 years ago. With new opportunities to reach consumers in more ways than ever, come many new challenges for digital marketers. And marketing platforms must continuously evolve to meet the demands of a shifting and ever-growing industry. 

We asked industry leaders Kurt Unkel, President of Product & Solutions at VivaKi, Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, and Angelina Eng, VP of Digital Media Ops at Carat what they value in a platform in this day and age, and how DoubleClick has evolved to address those needs. Here’s what they told us:

• Efficiency, reliability, and simplicity are crucial to helping marketers streamline the campaign management process. Kurt Unkel said, ”What we get with DoubleClick that we struggle to see anywhere else is simplicity - the ability to integrate a lot of disparate technologies into a common stack. That’s something that really makes a difference in our business, because it allows us to focus on the bigger, strategic things.”
• Marketers need integration across channels and screens, and to be able to track and execute across their efforts within one system. Angelina Eng notes, “When we talk about all of these different things that are coming out - verification, video, mobile - how do make that work all together? A company that’s embracing that is one that we want to work with.” 
• Platforms must help marketers gain more actionable insights and act on them in real-time. “We have almost too much data at our disposal,” Megan Moldovan tells us, “and it can sometimes be hard to sift through all of that information and understand what it really means, and particularly understand what everything means when you look at it together.”

With DoubleClick, we are investing in tools to help your digital teams work more efficiently to maximize your results across channels and screens. 

In the coming weeks and months we will deep dive into many of the new product features available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Stay tuned to the blog to learn about the new tools that will simplify digital, help you engage across channels, and enable better decisions.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

Studio Certified developers, do you want to tell the world that you can create engaging in-stream video ads? With the new Studio Certification VPAID badge, you can do just that.

VPAID (Video Player Ad Interface Definition) is a hybrid creative format that runs as a pre-, mid-, or post-roll with the publisher’s content video. When watching in-stream ads, users can pause and resume videos, pull up options to learn about products, and more. For example, you can watch a video about a car, pause it, and learn more about the car right from the ad – without leaving the player on the publisher’s website. Check out the VPAID format in action.

VPAID gives brands a way to create a micro-site experience directly within an ad unit. Users can interact with the brand and learn more about the products without ever having to navigate away from the original page they were on. So it's good for the user, it's good for the web publisher, and it's great for the brand.

VPAID badge certification gives you:

• A badge that identifies you as a Studio Certified user able to create interactive in-stream ads
• Exclusive access to DoubleClick hosted events and workshops
• Early access to betas and product features
• Promotion as a Studio Certified user with a VPAID badge via DoubleClick Rich Media properties and associated sites

• Listing with other Studio certified users on the Rich Media gallery
• We'll announce your achievement via our Twitter account
• Promotion via Rich Media Gallery and marketing materials
• A badge you can use for self-promotion

Pass the exam and get the badge to demonstrate your expertise in creating rich, in-stream ads to boost user engagement. Take the VPAID exam and get certified.

Note: You must be Studio Certified in Core Flash or HTML5 to take the VPAID certification exam.

Not Studio Certified? No worries! Get Certified today. We have these Studio Certification badges available:

• Core Studio Certification exam for Flash developers
• Core Studio Certification exam for HTML5 developers
• Integrated QA certification
• Advanced badge certification for Dynamic creatives and YouTube Mastheads

Learn more about Studio Certification in the Rich Media Gallery.

Posted by Arnold Sealey, Program Manager, DoubleClick Studio Certification

Search marketers managing multiple campaigns across multiple accounts have to visualize their data in many different ways and tailor reporting for each group of stakeholders. Often, this means spending time pulling and aggregating reports, building macro-enabled spreadsheets, and wrangling your data into a specific format for a specific presentation -- only to do it all over again in a slightly different way the next time around.

DoubleClick Search believes in making search marketing faster -- and over the past year we’ve invested in time-saving features like bulk editing enhancements, new scheduling options, and automated rules. Today, we’re excited to announce executive reporting, a fundamentally new way to report on and share your search campaign data.

With executive reporting, quickly get to the insights you need. Take the data from all your search campaigns, segment as needed, present it in an easily consumable visual format, and share with team members and stakeholders -- all within the UI, without spending hours downloading, reconciling, and updating spreadsheets.


As we designed executive reporting, we worked closely with our clients to ensure our solution was built to address the unique needs of search marketers, agency account managers, and executives. Matt Grebow, Sr. Manager, Search Marketing at TSA, who participated heavily in our feedback sessions, shared his needs for richer export fidelity with the engineering team.

“Most reporting platforms let you export data in a raw format, but this means extensive formatting in Excel and a lot of coding. DoubleClick Search Executive Reporting is flexible enough to use across clients with different goals. We can create templates on the fly and export reports in a client-ready format.” 

Three ways to get started with executive reporting

1. Daily account management and stakeholder communication: As an account manager, you can easily pick the subset of data and the visualizations you need for each set of stakeholders. The reports will stay up to date, and you can have them ready for meetings, or download and share through email at a moment’s notice -- saving you time for strategy.
2. High-level team management and oversight: As a business leader, you can see an overview of your entire business in one place. If you’re needed for an escalation, you can quickly pull reports to understand account health and spot issues -- so you’re never unprepared.
3. Market insights for competitive advantage: Another advantage of seeing your entire business at a glance: if you manage a large volume of accounts, you can quickly analyze market-level data and see which account or campaigns are underperforming. Then, dig in to understand why and get them back on track. 

Keep an eye on the blog next week for a follow up “Success with DS” post on how the get the most out of executive reporting. In the meantime, give the new reports a try and let your account team know what you think. If you don't see the 'Executive Reports' tab in the DoubleClick Search interface, ask your account team to enable it for you.

Over the coming months, we’ll continue to invest in easy, flexible reporting options for DoubleClick Search. If you have a data warehouse, business intelligence tool, or visualization software and you’re interested in seeing your search data alongside other metrics for reporting purposes, check out our reporting API, currently in open whitelist.

Running top-notch digital campaigns for the holidays can be a lot of work, and your to-do list can seem never-ending: on top of the festivities of the season, you’re juggling fleeting promotions, revising stale ads, and trying to balance your budget —all in hopes of reaching holiday shoppers at the moment they’re looking to buy. So how do you succeed online during one of the busiest times of the year, and reach the right people with the right message, at the drop of a (Santa) hat? 

This season, we wanted to share a few of our favorite digital marketing “stocking stuffers” to put the cheer back in your holiday and help you plan, build, manage, measure and optimize your campaigns with ease. We took our best time-saving features that you can apply across your search and display campaigns, so you can find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your toasty apple cider -- while we take care of the rest. 

Plan your media buys strategically:

Solve the cross-channel puzzle with display remarketing from search ads. It’s not a miracle on 34th Street: you can get your search and display campaigns connected and performing this holiday season, and beyond. Display remarketing from search ads will help you close the loop on those last minute shoppers who searched for your product or service but didn't convert. With this feature, set up search campaigns in DoubleClick Search and re-engage your audience with display ads across exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across Google Display Network - and do it all with an easy, tagless workflow.

Build your ad creative beautifully:

Schedule your asset swaps or make them on-the-fly with dynamic creative. Admit it: manually updating every ad unit with new logos or creative assets can leave you feeling like a Grinch. When you know you’ll have to change the assets for a campaign, use dynamic creative to schedule the updates in advance. The new assets will automatically replace all the old ones in your ads, and you’ll be singing fa-la-la-la-la all the way home.

Don’t get tangled up with your holiday designs. Google Web Designer lets you create beautiful HTML5 ads with ease, for free. Build cross-screen creative directly for DoubleClick Studio -- all the ad tags and rich media metrics are automatically built into the ad, so your designs can shine on every screen.

Manage your campaigns easily:

Do the work of a team of elves with automated rules from DoubleClick Search. Stay up 'til midnight waiting for Santa -- not your campaign updates -- with a little help from automated rules. Schedule changes to specific ads and keywords, based on criteria you specify, to ensure that your holiday search campaigns are in tip-top shape. That means you can spend less time on repetitive tasks, and more time setting up those reindeer traps.

Meet mobile under the mistletoe. As consumers turn to their devices to research and shop, you can turn to us to reach and engage them. Whether you’re running search or display, our system is device-aware. With DoubleClick Search support of AdWords enhanced campaigns, seamlessly reach your customers across locations and devices with custom mobile bid adjustments based on your Floodlight tag activities. With Bid Manager mobile-specific targeting and formats, we automatically detect if users are on a mobile device, so you can engage your audience on both mobile web and apps -- without any additional work. So cozy up with mobile this season!

Measure and optimize your campaigns successfully:

Get a new perspective on the year - and your performance - with data visualizations. While Santa eagerly awaits his midnight milk and cookies, you can treat yourself to “infosnacks” - data visualizations that give you a snapshot of your campaign performance - right from the DoubleClick Bid Manager UI. Infosnacks bring information that’s commonly viewed - like conversion and CPA - to your fingertips. In addition, you can see how these metrics are trending over time. So you’ll spend less time digging through data, and more time spreading the yuletide cheer.

Race to the top with real-time bid and campaign optimization. Looking for a solution that’ll help you go as fast as Rudolph? Put your best bid forward with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite and DoubleClick Bid Manager automatic campaign optimization. Both suites are designed to drive campaign performance through speedy, data-driven bid optimization. Our systems use instant conversion data to update bids in near real-time, and on DoubleClick Bid Manager, we automatically shift your budget to the best performing line items.

Do you have a DoubleClick tip or trick that gets you through the busy holiday season? Email it to us at dclk-holiday@googlegroups.com with your name and title. We’ll feature the best tips on this DoubleClick blog!

*Bonus* If you want even more product-specific tips, check out our DoubleClick Search and Rich Media Gallery blogs next week!

Posted by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

In October, we added the following feature to DoubleClick Search:

• Optimize to Google Analytics conversions: When you create a conversion-based bid strategy in DoubleClick Search (DS), you can now optimize to conversions based on Google Analytics goals. This feature extends the conversion options for DS bid strategies, which already support optimization to Floodlight activities and formula columns. We’re adding another layer of flexibility by allowing you to use the conversions you track on Google Analytics to get the most out of your keyword bidding in DS.

We also made the following feature updates:

• New Google Analytics columns: By linking your DS and Google Analytics accounts, you can add columns to your DS reports that display data from Google Analytics. With this update, DS added the following columns: GA bounce rate, GA pages / visit, GA avg visit duration, and GA new visits %. DS also renamed some of its existing columns to align with the column names in Google Analytics. Learn more.

• Updates to formula-column operators: The Days() and Months() operators in a formula column can now count backwards in addition to counting forwards. For example, if today is October 15, clicks.for_date_range(today(), days(-14)) returns the number of clicks from October 1 to October 14. Also, you no longer need to nest IF operators to evaluate multiple conditions and outcomes. For example, now you can write an IF operator like this: If(Impr / Num_days() < 10, "Very low run rate", Impr / Num_days() > 500, "Very high run rate", "").  Learn more.

• New macros: DS has added new macros that you can use to pass additional information to your landing pages. Specifically, you can now pass the name and ID of the ad group, campaign, and engine account containing the keyword that was responsible for a click. See the available DoubleClick Search macros.

• Download negative keywords and edit for upload: You can now download negative keywords and edit them for upload in DS. To help with creating negative keywords, we added templates specifically for negative keywords in the Help Center.

• Easier to upload offline conversions: When you upload offline conversions using bulksheets, you can attribute those conversions to visits by just specifying the click ID. To attribute the conversion to a keyword, you can specify just the keyword ID. Learn more.

• DoubleClick Natural Search now reports on HTTPS-encrypted searches: DoubleClick Natural Search now reports on encrypted natural searches in DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM), with the value Not provided. In addition, conversions can be attributed to encrypted natural searches, so you may see fewer paid search or display conversions. Learn more and see an example.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team