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.

You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

In November, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

• Report purchase details in DS: Learn which products in your inventory make up your sales with purchase detail reports. Enable this feature by configuring your Floodlight transaction tags to report on revenue, cost, and profit for individual products sold in each conversion. DS reports can also show which campaigns (including keyword and Shopping campaigns), ad groups, and keywords contributed to the sales of those products. Finally, you can segment your reports using any attributes from your inventory feed.

We also updated the following features:

• Executive Reports:
• Share reports: Share a link to your executive reports with clients, executives, non-DS users, or anyone that you want to see how you’re performing toward your advertising goals.
• Resize charts: DS has added chart resizing to the list of formatting options available in executive reports. With a single click, you can expand or contract a chart horizontally or vertically.

• Bid strategies: Set a minimum ROAS constraint: In addition to bid limit and position constraints, you can now set a minimum ROAS constraint. For bid strategies that are focused on maximizing revenue, set the minimum ROAS constraint to optimize bids and keep the marginal ROAS above a target threshold.

• Apply, remove, or change sitelinks for AdWords campaigns in the DS UI: If you need to apply sitelinks to several campaigns in your AdWords account, you can now use the DS UI in addition to bulksheets.

• Use the DS API to report on AdWords location extensions: If you've set up upgraded location extensions in DS, you can use the DoubleClick Search API’s Reporting Service to download adGroup, campaign, or feeditem performance metrics for location extensions.
  
  Note that reports downloaded from the DS API include only location extensions that have recorded at least one impression during the report's time range.

See these updates in action in the November New Features training video:

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

This post is part of the Evolution of TV series. In this series we identify the risks and opportunities around 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape as TV programming shifts to delivery over the Internet.

Viewers increasingly want to watch their favorite TV shows anytime, anywhere, and on any screen. There's lots of TV content online, but hitting all three of those checkboxes isn't yet possible for every piece of programming. To do so requires a greater shift to delivering TV programming over the Internet rather than just over the air, satellite, or cable. Sounds simple, right? It's not. It is a massive shift that has game-changing implications for everyone involved.

This shift isn’t just impacting TV programmers and distributors, but also the viewers watching their favorite TV shows and sports teams across every screen, and the advertisers telling their brand stories against that content.

Today we are introducing the first part in a series called the Evolution of TV. In this series, DoubleClick and Google have identified 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape as TV programming shifts to delivery over the Internet. These 7 dynamics fall into three key areas:

• Viewer engagement 
• Delivery over the Internet and cloud 
• Advertising 

Download the first part of the series now to learn the risks and opportunities associated with each of the 7 dynamics transforming the TV landscape and driving the shift of the $68 billion TV advertising industry.

-
Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing, DoubleClick Video & Brand Measurement

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.

You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

With 2014 drawing to a close, we’re getting excited about what’s ahead in the new year. We’ll be ringing in 2015 at the International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) the first week of January. If you’re planning to go too, we’d like to invite you to come by C Space, the new destination at CES for advertisers, publishers, agencies, and content creators.

On the first day of the event (Tuesday, January 6th), Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Display and Video Advertising Products, will be headlining C Space. In his keynote he’ll talk about how brands can make the most of video in a climate where consumers are easier to reach but harder to influence. He’ll discuss not only how to drive engagement but also how to measure the impact that it has on brand metrics.

Following his keynote, Neal will join Meredith Levien, EVP Advertising at The New York Times, in a fireside chat.

Learn more about C Space and check out the full agenda here.

Hope to see you there!
Tuesday, January 6th 2015
1 - 2 PM PT

2014: IAB’s “Open Letter to Marketers” advocated for the universal adoption of HTML5. “Programmatic” became the ANA’s marketing word of the year. The MRC lifted its advisory on transacting on viewability. 

These are just some of the moments that moved our industry forward in 2014. “Digital Advertising in 2014: An Industry in Motion” recaps the ideas we congregated around as an industry, the technology we evolved to realize them, and the impact we saw from executing on them. Together with you, we:

• Told stories through big, beautiful canvases everywhere
• Evolved media buying 
• Measured what matters with new metrics
• Made digital easier for all of us

As we raise a toast to the year that was and look forward to 2015, we thank you for partnering with us and ensuring that we never stay still, that as an industry, we’re always in motion.

Get DoubleClick’s full 2014 recap here.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing team

A lot has changed for marketers over the years. But one thing remains constant: the need to connect with and move an audience in the moments that matter. Brand marketers are beginning to truly embrace programmatic buying to do just that. The challenge is, many marketers don’t know where to start in order to successfully embrace programmatic for their brand campaigns.

To help address this challenge, we’re pleased to share our five-step guide: "Programmatic: A Brand Marketer’s Guide," to provide context and ideas for how marketers and their agencies can successfully embrace programmatic buying. It covers the essentials that brand marketers need to know in order to:

1. Organize audience insights
2. Design compelling creative
3. Execute with integrated technology
4. Reach audiences across screens
5. Measure the impact

Our guide includes seven case studies with brands including Nike, KLM, Talk Talk, Kia, GOL, Burberry, and Kellogg so that brand marketers new to programmatic can learn from their peers.

We hope this guide can help you realize the ultimate promise of advertising in the digital age: to effectively run highly relevant, creative, and measurable campaigns, at scale. To make the most of programmatic buying, we invite you to explore the five steps to programmatic success.

You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing Manager

Today, we are excited to announce a new local library and new grouping functionality in Google Web Designer, which make it easier to add, edit, manage and group creative assets. We’ve also spruced up many of the components in the gallery, which build on the updates we launched in August, to help designers and developers make interactive and engaging HTML5 ad units for cross-screen campaigns. 

Manage your assets with ease:

• Add, edit, and manage your assets in one place in the new local library: Add assets from the stage or within the library workflow, drag and drop from your desktop, or use the new import dialogue under File. Then, customize your folders and organize your assets to your liking. 

• Group elements together: Once you group elements together, they are stored in your local library. You can drag and drop groups onto the stage and edit them all at once. 
  

Create more engaging, interactive ads:

• Build ads that expand in all directions: The “view mode” will allow you to see the expanded state as an overlay, and move it to the desired expanded position. Learn more.

• New audio component: Provides functionality for autoplay, loop, mute, etc. for audio files. 

• YouTube autoplay feature: You can now use the YouTube component to build a masthead that automatically plays the embedded video.

• Other enhancements to the components gallery allow you to:
• Add “navigation” (the dots or thumbnails at the bottom of a gallery that show that multiple images exist.)
• Auto-scale images: stretch, resize or crop images to fit within the gallery 
• Snap to ‘n’ frames: advance by a specified number of frames in the swipeable or carousel gallery (i.e. 3 images show on the first page of gallery, swiping moves to the next 3). Learn more.

• SVG (scalable vector graphics) support: Google Web Designer now supports uploads of SVGs and provides a set of basic features, including 2D editing, cut, copy & paste, and selection tool support. 

Share your awesome Google Web Designer ad units with us! Submit them to the Rich Media Gallery and we’ll promote them to the ~35,000 people who view the site each month.

If you don't yet have Google Web Designer, you can download it for free here.

Posted by Tony Mowatt and Sean Kranzberg, Product Manager and Engineering Lead for Google Web Designer

P.S. It may take a couple hours for the updates to show up in your version of the product. 

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. 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

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.

Stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

*“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

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.

You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

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.

KLM, one of the world’s largest airlines, serves over 20 million passengers each year. With 70% of these passengers outside of their home market, the Netherlands, digital marketing has given KLM the opportunity to reach their audience at scale, while at the same time personalizing their communication.

One of KLM’s main goals was to bring new visitors to their website to purchase plane tickets. They began using DoubleClick for programmatic buying in order to reach these prospects efficiently. “From the beginning, the advantages of bringing programmatic buying in-house were clear: transparency in the costs, control over the costs, and a much more effective campaign setup,” says Arjan Grootveld, Display Marketing Manager at KLM.

And they saw real uplift in efficiency over media spend. Grootveld told us, “If we look at our prospecting campaigns, if we compare pre- and post-programmatic, we see really see a decrease in costs.” At the same time, they were able to decrease CPA by 50%, and increase ROI by 200%.

The team at KLM is confident that programmatic buying has paved the way for innovation, and they see it as a huge enabler for the future.

To learn more about KLM’s approach and results, watch the video below:

You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

Marketers know that building cross-screen campaigns is important to overall campaign success. But many have been slow to adopt the HTML5 standards and mobile-compatible formats that are needed to achieve that success. 

Today, more than 25% of pageviews occur on a mobile device (1) and more people consume content in HTML5-compatible environments than Flash-compatible ones (2), yet 83% of digital creative is still built in formats that don’t work on mobile devices. (3)

The “Make Mobile Work” Initiative

To help marketers make the transition to cross-screen campaigns, we have partnered with the IAB for the past year on the “Make Mobile Work” Initiative. Through an open letter signed by 22 publishers globally, a mobile check-list for marketers, and a quarterly webinar series, we increased awareness of the need for cross-screen campaigns and provided the steps to successfully create, target and measure these campaigns. 

Positive momentum:

Efforts like this one appear to be working. Marketers’ trepidation toward mobile is beginning to melt away, as evidenced by strong growth metrics this year for HTML5 adoption and mobile inventory (metrics pulled from internal DoubleClick data, Nov. 2014):

• 250% growth in HTML5 impressions in DoubleClick Studio 
• 130% growth in the percent of DoubleClick Campaign Manager impressions being served to mobile devices
• Almost half of the mobile inventory available in DoubleClick Bid Manager is now in-app inventory

Three easy-to-use tools for cross-screen campaigns

As marketers begin to incorporate cross-screen strategies into all of their campaigns, we want to make sure that every marketer has easy-to-use tools to help them scale. So we recently launched three new features in the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform that make cross-screen creative, targeting and measurement easy to incorporate into every campaign:

• Easy HTML5 creative: Our platform will automatically create an HTML5 version of every Flash banner you upload, with automatic Flash-to-HTML5 conversions for reservation campaigns (available in beta for programmatic campaigns). When your ads run on mobile devices, the interactive HTML5 ad will show up instead of a static backup image, helping expand your reach on mobile. You can also report on HTML5 impressions separate from Flash impressions. Learn More>>

• Precise mobile targeting: For users who opt-in to location-based targeting, marketers can use Geofence Targeting in DoubleClick Bid Manager to deliver highly relevant messages to people based on their proximity to a specified chain store, across a broad geographic area. You can easily target all your store locations with a single click, enabling you to reach the right consumer and drive foot-traffic into your stores. For example, if you’re a hotel company, you can reach people who are close to your hotel, and offer them a discount to get them to choose your business. Learn more>>

• Re-engage your app users: People are spending 86% of their time on mobile devices in applications. (4) DoubleClick now allows marketers to remarket to existing app customers inside other apps, for both reservations and programmatic buys. Using Floodlight tags, you can create audience lists around any engagement that takes place in-app (e.g. people who added an item to a shopping cart, top spenders in the last 30 days, or gold member app users). This lets you improve ROI by offering relevant ads to people who are already in the purchase funnel. Learn more>>

As 2015 approaches, we hope to see even more marketers incorporate cross-screen techniques, to successfully reach the right audiences on every device. 

Published by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

sources:

1. Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, Apr. 2014
2. StatCounter Sept. 2013 data
3. Internal DoubleClick Data, Nov. 2014
4. Flurry Analytics Report, Mar. 2014

This is our third post in a blog series on using real-time data to win in SEM. Today, we’re writing about the importance of real-time for product launches.

If you’re a marketer, a product launch can translate into a long list of to-dos - from updating your website with product, pricing, and promotional information, to setting up your campaigns for maximum exposure.

Then, you have to carefully monitor sales and respond to real-time changes in consumer demand. While some retailers receive and act on performance data after 24 hours, this lag can result in a significant lost opportunity for others. Real-time data helps you act in the first crucial minutes and hours of a launch.

Real-time data and the tools to act on it in DoubleClick Search can help make your launches a success. Automated bid strategies update bids multiple times per day to meet business goals. Up-to-the-minute conversion reporting means you can see sales as they come in, make adjustments, and ensure your changes are live across all engines as fast as you react.

Real-time becomes even more crucial in competitive markets when, for example, a single product is launching in numerous retail outlets at once. To illustrate this, we’ll use some examples from the mobile industry. With the release of the iPhone 6 and Moto 360 in September, and with pre-sales having opened for the Nexus 6 on October 29, autumn is a big launch season for mobile retailers. 

How important was real-time on these days? An example from the days following the iPhone 6 launch shows that DoubleClick Search responded to breaking trends throughout the day, and updated relevant advertisers’ bids an average of eight times, sometimes topping out at 13 bid changes per day during the highest-peak days. These frequent changes were made to drive incremental revenue or to push ads to the top of the page. Without DoubleClick Search’s real-time data and real-time bid strategies, these advertisers would have been left with their original bids for the whole day—missing out on opportunities for more sales.

But real-time is about more than just changing bids frequently. It is about knowing what is happening, like understanding what is and isn’t converting. During big events, the propensity for your keywords to convert can change dramatically. A big launch like one for the iPhone or Android generates many curiosity-seekers who - while not in-market - will be looking for information. Do these clicks matter for your business? Real-time conversion data shows you the answer, separating out keywords that drive revenue from those that just capture browsers, and distinguishing, in real-time, how they in relation to a big market event. With all of this real-time visibility available directly in your reporting, you can make quick decisions on whether you want to be in-market for non-converting keywords that may yet be important for your brand to stay out there. Automated bidding rules can make this even more responsive.

Jeffrey Mysel with Digitas LBi explains how real-time data was key for a successful launch and promotion of the Moto360 smart watch:

“Capturing demand for the Moto360 product launch was a crucial piece to our marketing program, and even more so for paid search. Having the benefit of real-time data gave us the flexibility to pulse our budget during important sales windows, as the team was able to monitor data and make adjustments on peak days. With DoubleClick Search, we were able to maximize our budget and make quick decisions to manage public demand, meet client needs, and keep our program in line with product inventory.” 

Real-time data can also be extremely useful for big seasonal events. As the holidays approach, our next post will highlight how DoubleClick Search clients used real-time data to take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year.

This is our third post in a blog series on using real-time data to win in SEM. Today, we’re writing about the importance of real-time for product launches.

If you’re a marketer, a product launch can translate into a long list of to-dos - from updating your website with product, pricing, and promotional information, to setting up your campaigns for maximum exposure.

Then, you have to carefully monitor sales and respond to real-time changes in consumer demand. While some retailers receive and act on performance data after 24 hours, this lag can result in a significant lost opportunity for others. Real-time data helps you act in the first crucial minutes and hours of a launch.

Real-time data and the tools to act on it in DoubleClick Search can help make your launches a success. Automated bid strategies update bids multiple times per day to meet business goals. Up-to-the-minute conversion reporting means you can see sales as they come in, make adjustments, and ensure your changes are live across all engines as fast as you react.

Real-time becomes even more crucial in competitive markets when, for example, a single product is launching in numerous retail outlets at once. To illustrate this, we’ll use some examples from the mobile industry. With the release of the iPhone 6 and Moto 360 in September, and with pre-sales having opened for the Nexus 6 on October 29, autumn is a big launch season for mobile retailers. 

How important was real-time on these days? An example from the days following the iPhone 6 launch shows that DoubleClick Search responded to breaking trends throughout the day, and updated relevant advertisers’ bids an average of eight times, sometimes topping out at 13 bid changes per day during the highest-peak days. These frequent changes were made to drive incremental revenue or to push ads to the top of the page. Without DoubleClick Search’s real-time data and real-time bid strategies, these advertisers would have been left with their original bids for the whole day—missing out on opportunities for more sales.

But real-time is about more than just changing bids frequently. It is about knowing what is happening, like understanding what is and isn’t converting. During big events, the propensity for your keywords to convert can change dramatically. A big launch like one for the iPhone or Android generates many curiosity-seekers who - while not in-market - will be looking for information. Do these clicks matter for your business? Real-time conversion data shows you the answer, separating out keywords that drive revenue from those that just capture browsers, and distinguishing, in real-time, how they in relation to a big market event. With all of this real-time visibility available directly in your reporting, you can make quick decisions on whether you want to be in-market for non-converting keywords that may yet be important for your brand to stay out there. Automated bidding rules can make this even more responsive.

Jeffrey Mysel with Digitas LBi explains how real-time data was key for a successful launch and promotion of the Moto360 smart watch:

“Capturing demand for the Moto360 product launch was a crucial piece to our marketing program, and even more so for paid search. Having the benefit of real-time data gave us the flexibility to pulse our budget during important sales windows, as the team was able to monitor data and make adjustments on peak days. With DoubleClick Search, we were able to maximize our budget and make quick decisions to manage public demand, meet client needs, and keep our program in line with product inventory.” 

Real-time data can also be extremely useful for big seasonal events. As the holidays approach, our next post will highlight how DoubleClick Search clients used real-time data to take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year.

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.

After more than a decade in the market, Kia has more than 200,000 cars on Australian roads. As the traditional path to purchasing cars has shifted toward digital, Kia needed a better way to understand its media mix and optimize its digital campaigns.

One of Kia’s main challenges was that its data was divided among multiple digital marketing platforms, each collecting different information about the same consumer. This made it difficult to understand the buyer’s behavior on the path to purchase. To tackle this problem, Kia and its media agency, Initiative, adopted DoubleClick Digital Marketing to manage all of Kia’s digital marketing efforts across search, display, video, and mobile.

Using one unified platform, the team was able to eliminate the multiple silos of data, remove reporting discrepancies, and develop a holistic view of the Kia customer. “The benefit of using DoubleClick is that we got a single reporting solution across all of our digital platforms,” says Simon Flaxman, Initiative commercial director.

With all data in one place, Kia and Initiative began taking advantage of the DoubleClick attribution tools to help them analyze every step of the customer journey, not just the last click. This allowed them to more accurately credit different publishers, channels, and screens. Using the Attribution Modeling Tool, they began testing various budget scenarios for individual publishers and channels, which was helpful for planning future sales cycles.

Since adopting the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, Kia has reduced its CPA by 30%. Today, Kia is focused on “winning in the middle” of the sales funnel, and doesn’t just look at the last click. It has the tools in place to accurately measure and gain insights into all of its digital activity, in real-time, on a single platform.

To learn more about Kia’s approach and results, watch the video below and check out the full case study here.

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In October, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

• Include data from IBM Digital Analytics in DS reports: You can now report on IBM Digital Analytics data directly in DoubleClick Search (DS). After your DS advertiser and Digital Analytics accounts are linked, you’ll be able to see conversion events—including revenue and item counts—from Digital Analytics in the DoubleClick Search UI. You can also download and schedule reports with this data, retrieve the data from the DoubleClick Search API’s Reporting Service, as well as use the data in formula columns. To get started, email your DS support contact and let them know that you want to link DS with Digital Analytics. See Link a DS advertiser with Digital Analytics for the information to include in your email.
• Manage AdWords location extensions in DS: Location extensions show your local business address, phone number, and a map marker in text ads served by AdWords. Now you can use DS to manage the location extensions that you've set up in AdWords.
• Report on the quantity of items in transactions: Now you can use DS to report the number of items in transactions recorded by Google Analytics and Floodlight activities. Just add the GA quantity, Action quantity, and Transaction quantity columns to a report, or to a formula column.

We also updated the following features:

• Bid strategies:
  • Choose an attribution model for distributing credit: By default, bid strategies attribute full credit for a conversion to the last paid click. In effect, bid strategies optimize bids to maximize the number of last click conversions in the funnel. If instead you prefer to optimize for paid search clicks throughout the funnel, you can select an alternate attribution model such as time-decay.
  • Set a maximum CPA: Bid strategies optimize bids across the whole portfolio to increase efficiency by bidding more for some keywords and less for others. This can mean that the average bid for some individual keywords drives a CPA that's over the target CPA, even though the overall strategy is profitable. To attempt to keep the average bid of each keyword in the profitable CPA range, you can now set a max CPA constraint.
• Executive Reporting: Customize the axes for bar and line charts
  • Start axis at zero: Now, if you want to show the scale of change between data points in your bar and line charts, you have the option to start the axis at zero. For close data ranges, starting at zero expands the scale of the range.
  • Combine the range for measurement on one axis: When comparing different metrics in bar and line charts, you can also combine metrics that use the same unit of measurement on one axis. For example, you can combine clicks and impressions on the same axis because they are measured the same way.
    
• Updated editor for text ads: To make it easier to create text ads, the ad editor now provides separate fields for each line along with a preview of the ad. As you enter text, you'll see the number of characters that you can type in each line. And for a shortcut, you can paste an entire ad into the Headline field. DS will automatically fill in the fields with text you pasted.
• DS API's Reporting Service:
  • Download sitelink reports: You can use the reporting API to download reports with metrics for AdWords sitelink extensions.
  • Report on custom Floodlight variables: In DS, you can use custom Floodlight variables to report conversion data that is unique to your business needs, such as the genre of a movie that a user purchases, the name of the store from which an item is purchased, shipping costs, and so on. The data can be uploaded by a Floodlight tag on the advertiser's site or by the DS conversions API, and now you can use the DS reporting API to download reports that contain the data. 

See these updates in action in the training video for October features:

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

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

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 leading specialists in SEM, Periscopix was looking to extend its digital marketing offering to include display. With core competencies in optimization and performance, the team saw the growth of programmatic buying as the perfect opportunity to begin optimizing their clients’ campaign across channels.

Periscopix adopted DoubleClick Digital Marketing for all of their digital efforts, from building creatives, to executing across reservations and programmatic, to measurement and optimization. By implementing the unified platform, Periscopix was able to efficiently expand into display, while staying true to its reputation for transparency and performance.

The results speak for themselves. In a 90-day period, the conversion rate among Periscopix clients increased 509%, and post-click conversions increased 330%. At the same time, they saw a 158% increase in site traffic across all clients.

To read more about how Periscopix is driving success across channels, read the full case study here.

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

You may have seen the research we shared with you last month that looks at how programmatic buying is changing advertising. Today’s with DoubleClick episode takes a personal spin on that study, focusing on a few of the people who are both seeing and driving those changes.

We talked to leaders from Universal McCann, VivaKi, MAGNA Global, and The McClatchy Company to find out how they’re thinking about the shift to programmatic. Reach and relevance were top of mind. With greater efficiency and richer audience insights, they’re achieving both goals across screens and formats. As Deborah Gaudette, SVP and Group Partner at UM, points out, this ultimately helps create advertising that consumers want to be part of. That’s a promise we can all get behind.

Check out this short video to hear more.

For ideas on how to adopt a programmatic strategy, take a look at last week’s webinar with Aaron Fetters, Director at the Kellogg Company.

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For the past week, we’ve discussed the ways that advertisers can pair smart creative with their media buying strategies, to produce successful digital campaigns. Today, we’ll talk about our fourth and final creative and media pairing around in-stream video -- advertisers should make sure they have the right video ad creative to run in their video ad placements. 

Did you know? In 2014, over a third of mobile phone users streamed or downloaded video on their mobile devices. In 2015, the percent of people watching video on their phones is expected to jump to 40%. (1)

Rather than simply reusing TV commercials for their digital campaigns, advertisers can make their video ads work better for digital by building in interactivity. Interactive in-stream video (VPAID) allows advertisers to add additional layers of information on top of their video assets. This functionality turns a linear video into an experience that resembles a micro-site -- consumers can interact and learn about the brand all within the single ad unit, without having to navigate away from the original page. 

Easy, automated in-stream video 

Our new VPAID Layout allows advertisers to take an existing video asset, upload it into the Studio Layouts tool, and create an interactive ad unit in minutes. Here’s a demo of the process:

Smart serving technology for mobile video ads

When you build ad units with video in them and then serve them to mobile devices, you have to remember that video files are large, and mobile devices have slower and often fluctuating bandwidth connectivity. DoubleClick Campaign Manager has smart serving technologies to allow you to provide the best quality video to consumers based on their available bandwidth.

DoubleClick will now transcode and segment your videos so they can be served in a file size that will load on the viewer’s mobile connection (3G, 4G or wifi). The video can even be altered on the fly, if the connection changes during playback. 

It’s important that advertisers pair smart creative with their media buying strategies. A campaign is only as good as the creative that shows up, so developing creative strategies that align with the media buy from the outset of the campaign is critical to campaign success. Advertisers that do this will benefit from more successful and engaging digital campaigns.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

(1) eMarketer Comparative Estimates, August 2014