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.