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E-commerce in Brazil has grown 20+% year over year for the last five years1. In this highly competitive environment, choosing the right advertising partner is a critical strategic decision for a retail brand to ensure their message breaks through.

Netshoes is the world's largest sports retailer, selling everything from basketball shoes to fitness gear across all of Latin America. Historically they have been deeply focused on performance advertising, and at times have used up to 8 different advertising platforms and retargeters at once in search of the best results.

But recently, Netshoes decided this approach wasn't giving them the best results. They found they were competing against themselves by bidding for the same audience with multiple ad providers, driving costs up and ROI down. When they consolidated their media buys across display and video with DoubleClick Bid Manager, the results speak for themselves:
  • 400% better conversion rate than with other channels.
  • 30% view rate on TrueView video ads, with CPVs lower than the market average.
  • 15% time savings across the Netshoes media buying team.

"The results we get from DoubleClick are simply much better than those from other partners in our past"
—Danilo Mangini, Marketing Manager, Netshoes

Learn more about Netshoes’ approach in the full case study.
Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, Google
1 Source: e-bit Webshoppers

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Year after year we've heard pundits announce that this is "The Year of Mobile," but we don't quite seem to get there. Still, the facts don't lie: eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for 72% of U.S. digital ad spend by 2019 and Google's tech-forward target audience spends more than 74% of its time on mobile.1

Because mobile devices are consumers' always-on, constant companions, Google Marketing wanted to deliver personalized, contextual creative programmatically via ads. To show how the Google app can add value in people’s lives, Google Marketing brought the app’s functionality into the ad units themselves. Combining aggregated search insights, geo-targeting, and dynamic creative, the ads proactively fed users with helpful, relevant information.

The Google Marketing team followed four key steps as it developed the creative for the Google app. To learn more about the approach, check out the full case study.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, Google
1 ComScore MobileMetrix, September 2015.

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As we've stated before, we're committed to keeping fraudsters out of the broader advertising ecosystem. Today we're looking at a specific aspect of this fight: the false representation of domains in ad inventory.

Deceptive ad inventory

Imagine ordering a designer handbag, only to receive a cheap imitation. Unfortunately, this type of misrepresentation happens all too often with ad inventory.
The false representation of domains in ad inventory occurs when publishers intentionally make it look like their traffic is coming from another website (usually a well-known, premium website) in order to charge higher rates for ads. This practice deceives advertisers who end up paying to appear on sites with which they may not want to be associated, and harms legitimate publishers, who aren't actually receiving the funds from ads sold in their name.
The two examples below illustrate how a branded ad can end up on a sketchy website through false representation of a domain.

Protecting against falsely represented inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager

As part of our commitment to strengthening the integrity of our digital marketing solutions, we've added a new feature to DoubleClick Bid Manager that blocks many cases of domain misrepresentation, one of the most severe types of falsely represented ad inventory.
When a source of fraudulently misrepresented domain information is identified in Bid Manager, a filter is used to exclude invalid inventory with a high degree of confidence before advertisers bid on it, regardless of exchange or reported domain. We’ve discovered that in some instances this type of activity has accounted for up to 40% of inventory for a particular exchange.

Percent of misrepresented ad domains by exchange1

As a recent example, we noticed a publisher attempting to sell ad inventory on a pirated movie sharing website that was falsely represented with the domain name of a well-known newspaper. Fortunately, our new filter prevented ads from being purchased and displayed, thereby safeguarding advertisers from fraud and preventing this copyright infringing publisher from receiving advertising revenue.

Publishers benefit as well

It’s not just advertisers who will benefit from this new feature. The filter ensures that high quality inventory from top publishers is correctly valued and better defended against misrepresentation. As a case in point, we found that 10% of inventory offered for sale claiming to come from two popular US newspapers was in fact from other publishers falsely representing themselves as the two newspapers.
We also recognize that there are valid use cases for selling inventory via alternate domains, which is why we have taken great care to ensure that our filter targets only cases where the false representation masks the real value of the inventory.

Available to all marketers on Bid Manager

We continually look for new ways to improve and defend our advertising platforms against ad fraud, and we’re proud to offer this new feature directly on Bid Manager, without the need for advertisers to maintain blacklists or configuration settings. We’re happy to further protect advertisers and legitimate publishers by giving the boot to pretenders offering bad inventory.
Posted by Andres Ferrate
Chief Advocate, Google Ad Traffic Quality
1 Includes only exchanges from which DoubleClick Bid Manager buys >1 million impressions per day

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year...for you to reach holiday shoppers with your brand and products. We know shoppers come in all shapes and forms, researching and buying across screens and in-stores. That’s why you need to ensure that you’re reaching your target audiences across all the premium publishers where consumers are already spending their time, both on the web and in apps.

Last week, we announced that native ads and mobile video interstitials are now available to buyers on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. These high-impact formats, coupled with the cleanest (fraud-free) inventory and the broadest reach of premium inventory, help you accomplish your campaign goals at scale.

Check out our holiday guide to learn more about how DoubleClick Ad Exchange can help you reach holiday shoppers this season.

Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

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You know your customers and their preferences better than anyone else, but reaching these users as they explore sites and content online can be challenging. That's why we're excited to bring additional audience targeting options to DoubleClick Bid Manager to help you connect with customers at the right moments with the right message.

Bid Manager now enables you to target your campaigns by demographic, affinity, in-market, and similar audience profiles to help you precisely reach users who are most likely to care about your brand or product. These targeting options complement any first and third-party data you may already be using in Bid Manager.

Reach customers throughout all stages of the purchase funnel

Bid Manager's new targeting options are designed to help you reach new and existing customers throughout all stages of the customer purchase funnel:

  • Demographic: Demographic targeting is what it sounds like-a way to find your target by age and gender. It can help you reach a specific target based on stage of life to continue to serve the most relevant messages to consumers.
  • Affinity: Affinity audiences can help you move beyond demographics and reach people who care about your brand. With over 80 unique personas based on lifestyle and interests, affinity audiences mimic the depth and breadth of TV-style audiences, so you can engage with precise audiences at scale.
  • In-market: Reach potential customers while they're actively browsing, researching or comparing the types of products you sell. Connect with those most interested in what you have to offer, using precise segments that classify users based on their demonstrated in-market behavior and purchase intent.
  • Similar audiences: Similar audiences looks at data about your existing remarketing audiences and finds new and qualified consumers who have shared interests with that audience. It's a powerful - but simple - way to reach a much larger audience and drive clicks and conversions among new prospects.

Audience solutions in action

Suppose you're a sporting goods retailer and have just secured sponsorship rights for a series of biking events. You want to maximize this opportunity by also reaching users who are interested in purchasing a new bicycle in order to drive sales. Users with this intent may browse sites or content online as they begin to consider purchasing a new bicycle. Other users may be actively browsing product listings and committed to purchasing a new bicycle.

Each user represents an opportunity, and Bid Manager's audience targeting can help you reach the right user at exactly the right moment. For example, affinity targeting can be used to reach biking enthusiasts who are currently considering purchasing a new bicycle. In-market targeting can then be used as the user begins evaluating different bicycles to purchase.

We've seen customers have success using these new targeting options for all phases of the purchase cycle. AMNET Spain, for example, helps clients increase the reach on their target audience across TV and online video media buys:

"For branding campaigns, it is essential that we reach as much of our target audience as possible. In one particular case, we were asked to reach women in Spain between ages 25-45. By using Google Demographic Targeting and Google Affinity Audiences, we were able to achieve an extra 20% reach when compared to using TV alone.”
Ramón de la Guardia, Country Manager, AMNET Spain and Portugal

When your message reaches the right audience, you'll see higher engagement and improved performance. Danone Italy has experienced:

“We worked with Mindshare to drive awareness of our yogurt brands in women of different age groups in Italy. Google Demographic Targeting in Bid Manager helped us achieve our target coverage against this demographic and increase engagement, with a 20% uplift in CTR."
Valeria Surico, Marketing Connection Manager, Danone

These new audience targeting options are available today in DoubleClick Bid Manager. Learn more.

Posted by Maithreyi Raman
Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager

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As the holiday season gets underway, you’re likely focused on reaching holiday shoppers as they browse for gifts for their family and friends. Dynamic creative strategies are key to getting the most relevant messages and products in front of these shoppers. But with consumers’ increased usage of mobile devices, you need to build your dynamic creative in HTML5, and this confluence of technologies can lead to complexity.

Streamlining production of dynamic creative in Google Web Designer

To make it easier for you to build relevant and engaging cross-screen creative, we’re excited to announce the launch of simplified workflows in Google Web Designer that make it even easier to build dynamic creative in HTML5. You can now easily choose which data signals/feed attributes to connect to each dynamic element, pulling directly from the dynamic profile you’ve set up in DoubleClick Studio.

We’ve already seen some teams find success with the new dynamic workflow. Kaymu, one of the largest online retail marketplaces for emerging markets, used Google Web Designer to build an HTML5 dynamic remarketing campaign and show relevant products to shoppers. This strategy drove a 580% increase in CTR compared to their previous, non-HTML5, non-dynamic campaign, and the team’s dynamic creative build time dropped from 3 days to 10 minutes.

CyberAgent, a media agency based in Japan, also used Google Web Designer for a recent dynamic remarketing campaign. To provide the time needed to focus on the creative strategy, the team first automated the bidding and targeting for the campaign. They then could build and test several dynamic templates, using advanced animations and multiple dynamic elements. Ultimately, these advanced creatives led to a 40% higher CTR and a 28% lower CPC compared to the previous dynamic remarketing campaign that didn’t use Google Web Designer.

In addition to the new dynamic support in Google Web Designer, we’re also excited to launch:

  • Animation improvements, which help you build smooth animations
  • Updates to our text authoring capabilities, which make editing and manipulating the text in your ad units much easier and more intuitive
  • Two new components in our components gallery: a Spritesheet component, so you can more easily build out your spritesheets, and a Streetview component, so you can add location-based imagery to your ads. (We’ve kept this component separate from the Google Maps component to help you keep your file sizes smaller.)

Upcoming Google Web Designer Hangout on Air

Want to learn more about the new features? Sign up for one of our Hangouts on Air. Sean Kranzberg, Engineering Manager for Google Web Designer, will walk through the new features and take your questions.

  • Wednesday, Dec. 9th @ 12pm ET / 9am PT. RSVP here
  • Thursday, Dec. 10th @ 5pm PT / Friday, Dec. 11th @ 12pm Sydney time (APAC Friendly time) RSVP here
Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

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When advertisers pay for an ad, the chance for it to be seen is a basic expectation. Advertisers shouldn’t have to pay extra to measure and ensure that it was viewable. These expectations drove the launch of Active View back in 2013, an effort to establish a neutral and common set of viewability metrics used by both advertisers and publishers. Since then we've continued to invest in this technology across DoubleClick, YouTube and the Google Display Network, and today we're happy to share two new updates that will help advertisers and publishers run more effective cross-screen campaigns.

Announcing Active View optimization in DoubleClick Bid Manager - A better way to programmatically buy viewable impressions

Today, we're introducing Active View bid optimization in DoubleClick Bid Manager for clients globally. This new bid optimization feature uses the collective intelligence from many signals (e.g. URL, time of day, page category) to predict, impression by impression, the probability that it will be viewable. It then dynamically adjusts bids higher or lower based on that probability to deliver the viewable CPM target that advertisers set for their video and display campaigns. Active View optimization delivers what advertisers actually care about - the total volume of viewable impressions - and doesn’t fixate on a viewable percentage.

This will help solve a common problem: when marketers buy viewable impressions programmatically using current viewability targeting, the decision to bid on a single impression is very basic. Buyers choose a target viewable percentage (e.g. 50%) and their programmatic buying system bids the same amount for any impressions with a likelihood of being viewed above that target - or nothing at all for impressions with a likelihood of being viewed below that target. This means that buyers are missing out on wide swaths of inventory that may actually be viewable and are driving up competition (and CPMs) for the inventory they are buying.

Announcing Active View for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange - Bringing holistic viewability measurement to publishers

We believe that viewability metrics should be a standard currency between buyers and sellers. To enable this, we've been investing in features that allow publishers to see and report on a holistic picture of viewability across their channels and content. We're continuing that momentum today by announcing Active View reporting for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers and on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. With the consumer shift to mobile reshaping how publishers engage with their audience and those interactions increasingly happening on mobile apps, this new measurement solution completes the picture for publishers helping them see how viewability plays out across all of their properties.

At Google, we remain committed to investing in a broad set of measurement solutions for brands and publishers through a combination of product innovation with our own solutions and partnerships with leading third parties. These announcements are two big steps in our ongoing effort to help our clients measure every moment that matters.

Posted by:

Ari Feldman
Product Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers Reporting and Active View
Deepti Bhatnagar
Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager Brand Measurement and Optimization

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Since its beginnings in 1999, digital marketing agency Jellyfish has been at the forefront of digital advertising, helping clients of all shapes and sizes succeed in digital.

Most recently, Jellyfish partnered with a leading international online university who wanted to attract prospective students using online search. To meet the challenge, Jellyfish turned to DoubleClick Search and its ability to respond in real-time to optimize performance as the best tool for the job.

Goals

  • Hit regional lead volume and cost-per-lead goals.
  • Maximize quality of leads.

Approach

  • Tailor bid strategies by region with the Performance Bidding Suite.
  • Use bid strategies to respond to real-time, data-driven feedback including online and offline conversions.
  • Deploy best practices with bid strategies.

Results

  • Increased lead volume by 29%.
  • Decreased cost per lead by 84%.
  • Effectively generated quality leads for the university's search program internationally.

To learn more about Jellyfish’s approach, read the full case study.

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

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Last week, the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) announced the “Verified by TAG” initiative to help increase transparency of digital advertising transactions across the industry. We’re fully supportive of both programs outlined in TAG’s announcement and we’re currently in the process of applying for TAG Registration. To support the adoption of Payment IDs across the ecosystem, starting today our version of Payment IDs is available in DoubleClick Ad Exchange to all buyers globally.

Currently, if a programmatic buyer finds they’ve bought fraudulent inventory, there is no way to directly identify the supply source responsible for the fraud. The Payment ID system we proposed to the TAG Anti-Fraud working group fixes this problem by asking all supply sources (e.g. ad exchanges, ad networks, supply side platforms) of advertising inventory to create and provide unique and persistent anonymous identifiers that link every impression to who is paid in their accounting systems. If a buyer finds invalid activity from any source in their supply chain, these Payment IDs will help the buyer to identify who is responsible and blacklist those suppliers from their campaigns.

We’ve always invested heavily to keep DoubleClick Ad Exchange free of invalid activity and ensure that money spent on our platform only goes to support legitimate publishers, app developers, and content creators. To show our commitment to a better ads ecosystem, accelerate the adoption of Payment IDs, and help DSPs start integrating them, we’ve implemented the standard as it exists today, and we’ll continue to work closely with TAG and others in the industry to formalize an industry-wide Payment ID program. When the TAG Anti-Fraud Working Group has finalized the broader industry standard, we’ll happily make any changes to ensure we are compliant with TAG’s efforts.

"Google has been at the forefront of the fight against digital ad fraud, and this announcement advances our work together to develop an industry-wide Payment ID system. We look forward to continued collaboration with Google and other programmatic leaders through the TAG Anti-Fraud Working Group to create a fully transparent digital ad supply chain that will expose the bad actors and cut off their financial support."
Mike Zaneis, CEO, TAG

Leading programmatic buyers, DoubleClick Bid Manager, Dstillery, Magnetic, MediaMath, Rocket Fuel, The Trade Desk, and Turn have all committed to integrating Payment IDs into their systems in the coming months.

Posted by:

Vegard Johnsen
Product Manager, Google Ads Traffic Quality
Chetna Bindra
Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

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Cross-posted from the Google Agency Blog

If you can’t measure it, how do you know it worked? With this simple principle in mind, we’ve been investing in a broad set of measurement solutions for brands through a combination of product innovation with our own solutions like Brand Lift and Active View and partnerships with leading third parties like comScore and Nielsen on GRPs.

Viewability has long been a focus for us. Built on the foundation of our Active View technology, we launched the ability to buy only viewable impressions on the Google Display Network back in December 2013 and recently completed moving over the last advertiser campaigns from CPMs to viewable CPMs. We’ve worked to ensure viewability rates on YouTube are amongst the industry’s highest. And Active View now works seamlessly across video, display, mobile web and mobile apps (on YouTube and for publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers), and has been adopted by over 80% of advertisers using the DoubleClick platform.

With the MRC-defined industry standard as a base-line for viewability, we are also helping advertisers and agencies go beyond transacting on the industry standard to also measure individual viewability objectives. In order to support this we have begun launching supplementary metrics in Active View, like the ability to see average viewable time and soon when an ad is 100% in view for any length in time. These are the first few in a lineup of supplementary metrics that will provide advertisers with additional data points relevant to their specific campaigns and needs.

Announcing 3rd party viewability reporting on YouTube - bringing you more choice

Today, we're continuing our approach of driving product innovation and supporting choice by announcing that we're broadening the options for advertisers measuring viewability on YouTube. Along with Active View, advertisers will also be able to choose from third party vendors.

Moat, Integral AdScience, comScore and DoubleVerify are a select set of third party vendors that have been approved to report ad viewability on YouTube, beginning with Moat in early 2016. Through these partnerships, we’ll continue to expand measurement options for marketers on YouTube, while maintaining the highest levels of security and privacy for users, advertisers and creators.

“Independent 3rd party verification is extremely important to ensuring that our clients’ media is running as effectively and efficiently as possible. As a long-time partner, IPG Mediabrands is pleased to see Google continue its work to move the industry forward on viewability by allowing independent verification of YouTube, and applaud this recent decision.”
Mitchell Weinstein, SVP Ad Operations, IPG Mediabrands

Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Unilever added:

"Having partners like Google address these challenges helps to push the entire industry forward. This move will generate better industry-wide standards across viewability and third party verification practices and continues the momentum in the right direction."
Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Unilever

Stay tuned for continued investments in the viewability space, including ongoing product innovation updates to Active View as well as additional partnerships. Together with our partners, our goal is to help our clients measure every moment that matters.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari
Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google

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The holidays are a critical time of year for search marketers, as consumers increasingly research and complete their holiday shopping online. To help you win the moments that matter this holiday season, we recently announced several new features and the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Today, we’ve got another special gift to continue the holiday spirit: Bing Shopping Campaigns are now part of the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite.

Bing Shopping Campaigns for Bing Ads make it easier and faster to advertise your products from your Bing Merchant Center store online. This streamlined way of getting Product Ads up and running on Bing is also driving meaningful impact for advertisers.

“According to a recent report, Merkle/RKG clients saw Bing Product Ads’ click volume increase by 332% year-on-year.”1
Brian Utter, General Manager of Network and Demand Management, Microsoft

With the addition of Bing Shopping Campaigns to the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, you can easily extend the reach of your product-focused advertising. You’ll be able to manage, automate, and measure Bing Shopping Campaigns using the full range of DoubleClick Search tools, the Performance Bidding Suite, Adaptive Shopping campaigns, and Purchase Detail reports.

Learn how to get started with Bing Shopping Campaigns in DoubleClick Search today.

Posted by Henry Tappen
Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

1 Merkle/RKG Digital Marketing Report for Q3 2015

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This is the fifth and final post of the DoubleClick Search Holiday Series. Today, we cover planning ahead, the last of five steps outlined in our new DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays. Your performance in 2015 should propel your performance next year. Here’s how to get ready for 2016.

  • Use executive reports: A DoubleClick Search executive report displays your metrics for revenue, costs, trends, and other high-level concepts, all presented in understandable charts and tables. Create your report once, or schedule a daily update throughout the holiday season.
  • Review your purchase details. For holiday planning, you want to be strategic about which items you highlight from your sales. So, look at your purchase detail reports to see which similar items were top sellers this year, and use that as a guide for where to put your effort in 2016.
  • Leave bid strategies running, but adjust for any changes to your goals: If your return on ad spend or cost-per-action requirements change, adjust your bid strategy goals and DoubleClick Search will bring your bids back into line.
  • Save your budget pacing reports: You can go back and see how you paced to get ready for 2016.

That’s it, the last of the five steps to holiday campaign success. We hope these posts will help you during the busy 2015 holiday period. To recap, here are all the steps again:

  1. Prepare: Unify your data for insights and action, add more data to maximize conversions, use labels to track your promotions, and integrate offline data.
  2. Automate: Use bulksheets, automated rules, and inventory-aware campaigns to make your life easier.
  3. Measure: Gain valuable insights by setting up scheduled reports, budget pacing reports, formula columns, and Floodlight activity columns, then analyze and monitor your performance.
  4. Optimize: Use real-time data to make adjustments with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite, Adaptive Shopping campaigns, and remarketing.
  5. Plan ahead: Create executive reports, review purchase details to see how well you did this year, and save your budget pacing reports.

Be sure to read the entire DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Don’t forget to register now for tomorrow’s webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Happy Holidays!

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

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In today's multi-device world, consumers increasingly move across screens when researching and shopping for goods and services. In a recent study conducted by Google and Ipsos Media CT, it was found that nearly 40% of online shoppers start their research on a smartphone and make their final purchase on a computer or tablet1.

Earlier this year, we introduced cross-device measurement across DoubleClick Digital Marketing, including DoubleClick Search, to help you see the total number of conversions influenced by a specific keyword, regardless of the device where the conversion occurred. For example, if a user who clicks on a search ad on one device goes on to complete a purchase on another device, we can measure that, enabling you to more accurately report on the full value of your search ads.

Now, bid strategies in the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite can use cross-device conversion estimates to automatically calculate the mobile bid adjustment that will help you achieve your campaign goals and maximize the impact of your mobile ads.

Using cross-device conversion estimates in the Performance Bidding Suite

If you enable a bid strategy in the Performance Bidding Suite to use cross-device conversion estimates, it can consider these cross-device conversions to determine how much to bid for your mobile ads. The bid strategy can then recommend or automatically apply the optimal mobile bid adjustment based on your conversion or revenue goals.

You can use this feature with a one-step opt in: when configuring the target of a bid strategy, check the box to use cross-device conversion estimates when setting the mobile bid adjustment.

Note: Currently, bid strategies use cross-device estimates only for mobile bid adjustments. Other enhancements, such as adjusting bids based on membership in an AdWords remarketing target, will follow in future updates.

Learn how to use cross-device estimates in bid strategies today.

Posted by Tris Southey
Product Manager, DoubleClick Search
1 The Role of Mobile Search on Store Purchases, Google/Ipsos Media CT, August 2015. Purchases were made within the past 3 months.

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Today, we cover optimization in post four of the DoubleClick Search Holiday Series. It’s one of the five steps outlined in our DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite

The DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite can automatically optimize bids to help you reach your goals.

During the busy shopping season, DoubleClick Search’s real-time conversion data and intra-day bidding factor current trends into your bids—things like special holiday promotions, sudden spikes in demand due to winter weather, and more. Our machine-learning-powered bid strategies will respond quickly to adjust bids that deliver results. Plus, cross-device conversion tracking helps the bid optimization system make the most of your mobile traffic.

Adaptive Shopping campaigns

Adaptive Shopping campaigns optimize the structure of your shopping campaigns in order to improve their performance. Outlier products are automatically separated into their own product group, giving them a bid tuned specially to that product ad's performance.

We've also improved the algorithm just in time for holidays. Adaptive Shopping campaigns can now take into account your performance goals and your customers' unique behavior. Adaptive Shopping campaigns will also automatically cleanup product groups that stop receiving clicks. All in all, these features help you improve returns by bidding higher on high-performing products, and save money by bidding lower on poor performers.

Remarketing

If you aren't already doing so, use remarketing to turn your site visitors into buyers. Engage those people who’ve left your site or clicked your ads without buying anything by showing them relevant ads on search or display. Here are two ways to remarket:

  • Reach high-value customers with remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs) — Modify your keyword bids, target search ads, or prevent ads from displaying based on inclusion in your AdWords remarketing list. You can track the performance of each remarketing list in any associated campaign.
  • Re-engage shoppers with display remarketing from search ads — remarket to users instantly with display ads on the Google Display Network or across exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager.

We want you to achieve the best possible results from your marketing efforts during this busy season. In our next post, we’ll talk about how to take your efforts this time round to plan ahead for your next peak period. Learn more about all five steps to success in the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Remember to register now for this weeks webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

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In this third post in the DoubleClick Search Holiday Series, we cover measurement, the third step in the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays to help you reach the right customers in the right moments this holiday season.

Automated reports

We’ve launched speed improvements to most reports in 2015. Have a last-minute shopping list? No problem—DoubleClick Search reports on Shopping campaigns activity much faster! But why wait—you can set up a scheduled report to receive your data whenever you want it. See how you’re trending year over year by adding “Compare to past” to the date range.

Budget pacing reports

These reports feature columns such as percentage of time elapsed, percentage of budget spent, days and budget remaining.

  • Easily visualize week-over-week, day-over-day, or month-over-month trends and changes.
  • See how each campaign contributes to your budget and KPIs.
  • Set up reports just for Black Friday through Cyber Monday, to make sure you’re hitting all your spend and efficiency targets.

Formula columns

Quickly create custom columns based on calculations you apply to metrics. Spend less time in spreadsheets, report only on what matters, and calculate using the freshest data. Calculate key statistics for the last 7, 14, and 30 days, or even special treatment for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday numbers. Create a countdown using rules+formula columns: "3 days left for free shipping!"

Floodlight segmentation and activity columns

You can use Floodlight columns to compare different conversions—phone calls versus online, or signups versus transactions, for example. DoubleClick Search Action groups contain Floodlight activities that count how many times users visit a webpage after seeing or clicking one of your ads. Transaction groups track the number of sales made or the number of items purchased. And, with cross-device conversion tracking, you can understand the true impact of your ads across multiple devices!

In our next post, we’ll talk about optimizing for success. Learn more about all five steps to holiday success in the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Register now for a webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

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This is the second in post our DoubleClick Search Holiday Series. In our first post, we talked about preparation. Today, we cover automation.

The holidays always roll around too quickly. But this year, with DoubleClick Search, you can “set it, not sweat it.” Set rules for sales, schedule edits, and determine your parameters, then let DoubleClick Search handle the automated, 24/7 campaign management. We’ve created the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays to help you succeed.

Bulksheets

DoubleClick Search scheduled uploads let you prepare and validate bulksheets for bulk campaign actions in advance, then have them uploaded at a scheduled time and date, giving you peace of mind during this busy time.

Automated rules

Automated rules and alerts let you schedule changes to specific campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords, based on your criteria. Use formula columns in rules to deliver everything on your wish list. You can even specify advanced logic for your changes using DoubleClick Search formula columns. Learn more.

For example:
  • Daily at 2 P.M., raise budget by 20% for campaigns that have more than 5 conversions and have exhausted more than 80% of your daily budget.
  • Every Friday, pause all keywords that have had more than 1,000 clicks but zero conversions during the previous week.
  • Every Monday, raise max CPC by 15% for keywords that met all of the following criteria from the previous week:
    • More than 50 conversions
    • Cost per conversion under $10
    • Trigger ads in positions worse than three

Inventory-aware campaigns

Inventory-aware campaigns automatically convert your product catalog to highly relevant, up-to-date search ads. Reach your customers with the right message, every time, with inventory-aware campaigns that automatically update your ads whenever your products change, such as when a product goes out of stock or the price changes.

To give you even greater control over your inventory-aware campaigns this holiday season, we’ve added new functionality. Inventory-aware campaigns now allow you to highlight the number of varieties of an item you have available, such as “Over 90 styles of men’s ski jackets”, so your customers will know you offer a wide selection to choose from. We also added new functions to make setting up inventory-aware campaigns easy, even if your feed isn't perfect, such as the ability to trim, clean or reduce words, automatically.

In our next post, we’ll talk about measurement. Learn more about all five steps to turn searchers into customers this holiday season with the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Register now for a webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

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This is our first post in the DoubleClick Search Holiday Series to help you get ready for the 2015 holiday shopping season—a critical time for online marketers and retailers. Last year, consumers spent $616.1 billion on retail purchases during November and December1. As you might know from Google’s 5 Holiday Shopping Trends to Watch in 2015, 40 percent of that spend was made online.

In fact, 2014 was the most-connected holiday shopping season we’ve ever seen. Shoppers spent an unprecedented amount of time researching and buying online:

  • 78% used the internet for holiday research vs. 29% relied on friends, relatives, or colleagues (down from 2013)2.
  • 40% of holiday shopping was online2.
  • 53% of those who shopped online used smartphones or tablets, up from 41% the previous year3.

For you, this represents a huge opportunity to reach shoppers, either while they're still researching or when they're actually ready to buy. To help you capture this opportunity, we’ve created the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays that walks through five key steps for holiday success. Today, we’ll address the first step: Preparation.

  • First, unify your data for insights and action. Effective tagging will help track your success during the holidays.
  • Your labels are important, too. Track your holiday promotions, and make them easy to identify in reports by assigning labels to your seasonal campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords.
  • Finally, don’t neglect offline data integration. Often, conversions start online and finish offline. Use the DoubleClick Search conversions API to report on and optimize conversions from external data, including call-tracking and in-store transactions.

In our next post, we’ll talk about automation. Learn more about all five steps in the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Register now for a webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search
1 National Retail Federation, “Retail Holiday Sales Increase 4 Percent,” January 14, 2015.
2 Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,500.
3 Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,167, January 2014, n = 1,077.

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For search marketers, the holiday season starts well before the holidays. You’re busy making preparations to help holiday shoppers check items off their list with you. To make your job easier, we’ve been working hard all summer to bring new campaign management, measurement, and workflow features to DoubleClick Search.

Manage mobile campaigns on Bing and Yahoo! Japan more easily

Mobile search will influence the 2015 holiday shopping season more than any other shopping season before it. The Inside AdWords blog shared in May that more Google searches now take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan. Google's Micro-Moments Guide indicates that mobile conversion rates have shot up by 29% in the last year alone. DoubleClick Search has two new features that will help you capture the mobile search opportunity.

First, we've added mobile and tablet bid adjustments for Bing Ads campaigns. This makes it easy for you to adjust to Unified Device Targeting (UDT) in DoubleClick Search with mobile and tablet bid adjustments for Bing Ads that work just like mobile bid adjustments for AdWords.

Second, we've made it easier to optimize mobile bid adjustments on Yahoo! Japan. You can now set adjustments at the ad group level that will trump adjustments at the campaign level.

Improve the relevance of inventory keyword campaigns

On mobile and desktop, relevance is a key component of search marketing success. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in higher positions, and bring you the most success.

DoubleClick Search retail advertisers use inventory-aware campaigns to build highly relevant campaigns at scale by creating templates that automatically build keywords and ads based on their product feeds. We've made these templates even more powerful with new functions to let you fine-tune and customize your keywords and ad content.

Stay abreast of campaign performance

New DoubleClick Search features for measuring results will help you stay on top of campaign performance throughout the season and beyond.

You can now use bulksheets or the DoubleClick Search API to attribute a conversion in a shopping campaign to a specific product in your inventory feed. To help you analyze and optimize at scale, we've added three reports to the DoubleClick Search reporting API.

We've also made it a cinch to analyze what's happening in the Black Friday to Cyber Monday stretch, or any other period of time, with more flexible date functions for formula columns. For example, you can use Date subtraction to calculate the number of days between two dates, or use weeknum to return the week number for a specified date.

Enjoy improvements to usability and visibility

In order to help you get campaign work done fast, we've enhanced the usability and visibility of some DoubleClick Search features based on your feedback. You can now apply labels when you create new keywords or customize and rename report views.

If you're looking to use DoubleClick attribution models to better understand what's driving conversions, we now automatically pre-populate the time decay model so you can start using it immediately.

Let the holiday season begin

Today's announcement is the culmination of many months of work to help make your holiday campaigns as streamlined and rewarding as possible.

Visit the DoubleClick Search Help Center for a complete overview of what's new and view trainings to help you get started.

Posted by Anthony Chavez
Product Management Director, DoubleClick Search

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Just a few weeks ago we announced the release of comScore vCE in DoubleClick, the first completely tagless GRP measurement solution integrated directly into an ad server. With comScore vCE in DoubleClick, Brand Marketers in the US get the trusted comScore audience measurement solution for both video and display ads that delivers 100% coverage.

Register now for a webinar on October 21st at 11am PST / 2pm EST, where you’ll be joined by Anne Hunter, SVP Global Marketing Strategy at comScore, Inc. and Paul Trieu, Product Manager at Google, to learn about:

  • How reach, demographics and GRPs can help enhance campaign success
  • Share practical tips for enabling comScore vCE in DoubleClick in DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Campaign Manager
  • Unveil best practices on using comScore vCE in DoubleClick to measure campaigns
  • Perform a demo of the new simple and easy to read reports
  • Host Q&A
Posted by Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing, Video Platforms & Brand Measurement, Google

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Mobile has forever changed the way we live, and it’s forever changed the way we engage with brands. It has fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments -- the moments in time when consumers' preferences are shaped and decisions are made. Each one is a critical opportunity for brands, and increasingly we are seeing advertisers turn to programmatic to reach and engage audiences everywhere and win these moments.

As the industry gears up for Advertising Week next week, I want to reflect on the momentum we’re seeing in programmatic buying across our platforms, especially in mobile. At DoubleClick, the number of advertisers using our programmatic solutions has grown nearly 2x in the last 18 months, and now includes over 80% of the AdAge top 100 advertisers. More broadly, IDC estimates that programmatic spending on mobile display and video advertising in the U.S. will grow from $4.7 billion in 2015 to $22.8 billion in 2019 (a CAGR of 65%.)1

With people switching between multiple devices throughout their day and increasing their consumption of mobile video, advertisers have changed how and where they buy programmatically in order to connect with people in micro-moments. Both mobile and video impressions served on DoubleClick Bid Manager have grown more than 3.5x since last year, and impressions served via direct deals that are transacted programmatically have nearly tripled. To provide you with the largest pool of inventory, DoubleClick Bid Manager has access to 70 exchanges and API partners, and we prioritize mobile and video inventory sources when identifying new integrations to pursue.

Ultimately, our engineers spend each day thinking about how to build innovative products that help you win these micro-moments by connecting with the people you want to reach, across screens and at scale. The growth in usage of our platforms shows that we are making progress, but we are even more excited for what's to come. Google has a great line-up of talks set for next week in New York - we hope to see you there.

Posted by Neal Mohan
VP, Display & Video Advertising, Google
1. IDC Report #256782, June 2015 “WW and US Programmatic growth forecasts, 2015-2019”

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Every day, your audience is filling their days with hundreds if not thousands of micro-moments—intent-rich moments when preferences are shaped and decisions are made. As consumers spread their attention across more and more screens and channels, those moments can happen almost anywhere, anytime. People search on their smartphones while in front of the TV. They watch YouTube videos on their tablets while texting their friends. They open a mobile app to shop for the perfect gift, then head to the store to buy it. With mobile devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find and buy anything, anytime.

For marketers, this means the purchase funnel is wildly more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

“Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent.”

It’s hard to plan for nonlinear purchase paths, but programmatic advertising can help, enabling brands to reach the right person with the right message in the moment of opportunity. Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent. That’s a powerful proposition, and it’s why programmatic advertising spend is projected to grow by more than 77% this year.1

In this article, we share four tips for using programmatic to win these micro-moments and examples of brands that are doing it right.

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.

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For the last few months, we’ve been raising awareness of the ad injection economy, showing how unwanted ad injectors can hurt user experience, jeopardize user security, and generate significant volumes of unwanted ads. We’ve used learnings from our research to prevent and remove unwanted ad injectors from Google services and improve our policies and technologies to make it more difficult to spread this unwanted software.

Today, we’re announcing a new measure to remove injected ads from the advertising ecosystem, including an automated filter in DoubleClick Bid Manager that removes impressions generated by ad injectors before any bid is made.

Unwanted ad injectors: disliked by users, advertisers, and publishers

Unwanted ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, in the pages users visit while browsing the web. Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

We’ve received almost 300,000 user complaints about them in Chrome since the beginning of 2015—more than any other issue, and it’s no wonder. Ad injectors affect all sites equally. You wouldn’t be happy if you tried to get the morning news and saw this:

Not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing them in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

Ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.

Removing injected inventory from advertising

Earlier this quarter, we launched an automated filter on DoubleClick Bid Manager to prevent advertisers from buying injected ads across the web. This new system detects ad injection and proactively creates a blacklist that prevents our systems from bidding on injected inventory. Advertisers and agencies using our platforms are already protected. No adjustments are needed. No settings to change.

We currently blacklist 1.4% 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:

We’ve always enforced policies against the sale of injected inventory on our ads platforms, including the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Now advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager can avoid injected inventory across the web.

No more injected ads?

We don’t expect the steps we’ve outlined above to solve the problem overnight, but we hope others across the industry take action to cut ad injectors out of advertising. With the tangle of different businesses involved—knowingly, or unknowingly—in the ad injector ecosystem, progress will only be made if we all work together. We strongly encourage all members of the ads ecosystem to review their policies and practices and take actions to tackle this issue.

Posted by Vegard Johnsen
Product Manager, Google Ads Traffic Quality

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Mobile has forever changed the way we live, and it’s forever changed what we expect of brands. It’s fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments. Each one is a critical opportunity for brands to shape our decisions and preferences. In these I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go consumer moments, people are turning to mobile apps, in addition to websites, to find what they need.

Given this consumer shift, companies from industries as diverse as Finance, Retail and Travel have jumped into the game, building branded app experiences to engage with their customers. So it’s important that marketers be able to measure and attribute their app-related activities, whether installs, engagement, or purchases, back to their advertising campaigns.

That’s why, today, we’re excited to announce the ability to integrate app install and event data from key third party measurement partners into DoubleClick. Working with third parties (starting with TUNE) we are able to increase the measurement accuracy between different app attribution trackers and DoubleClick, ensuring your data is accurate and reliable.

With this launch, marketers can now use supported third party measurement partners to attribute in-app activities back to the in-app ads they have run through DoubleClick, enabling them to reach their performance goals as they acquire new app customers.

This launch provides customers with:

  • Choice: Use one of several (supported*) app tracking tools, while still accurately attributing installs to your DoubleClick ad campaigns.
  • Accuracy: Get reliable and accurate metrics so you can report on your results with confidence, while getting the benefits of a unified view of all your programmatic or reservation app attribution data inside DoubleClick reporting.
  • Better performance: Minimize cost-per-acquisition to get the best performance for your budget. You can optimize your bids in DoubleClick Bid Manager against your post-view and post-click conversions. You can also create targetable audience lists based on these in-app activities (e.g. customers who’ve installed your app or customers who’ve logged in).

By allowing more choice to advertisers using their preferred third party app measurement tools, we are able to provide more robust and actionable metrics for marketers running mobile app install campaigns on DoubleClick.

To get started with this feature, please follow the directions here for DoubleClick Bid Manager, and here for DoubleClick Campaign Manager (accessible by customers only.)

Posted by Steve Chang
Product Manager, DoubleClick Digital Marketing

*At launch, this feature supports a verified integration with TUNE. Verified support for other third party app trackers is expected to launch later this year.

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Earlier this summer we held #HTML5Week to introduce you to resources that can help you develop engaging and relevant HTML5 creative. Now that Chrome has rolled out updates to Flash support, we're heading back to the virtual classroom to provide you with the latest information you need to make the transition to HTML5.

In this vein, we’re kicking off an HTML5 Hangout series, where over five weeks we’ll set aside an hour to explore topics ranging from how to QA HTML5 ads to building dynamic creative (See the complete Hangout schedule).

Our first hangout on September 10th (3pm - 4pm EST) will introduce you to HTML5 development tools and best practices. Register here.

Note: If you’re new to HTML5, we recommend walking through our Rich Media Fundamentals training before attending the HTML5 Hangout series.

We hope to see you in the classroom!

Posted by Hemmy Edge
DoubleClick Rich Media Product Trainer

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As browsers change the way they support Flash, HTML5 is becoming the de facto language for building display ads. In fact, the IAB just launched their updated Display Creative Guidelines to fully embrace HTML5.

To support this transition, we’ve been pivoting our products to better serve an HTML5-first world. In July, we announced file size increases and bidding updates to DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. (These changes will begin rolling out in September.) And today, we’re excited to announce a series of new features for Google Web Designer that help make it easier to build HTML5 ads.

Build content that adapts to different screen sizes:

Instead of laying out your assets using pixel-based values for a specific sized ad (e.g. width = 250 pixels and height = 300 pixels), percent-based authoring lets you build the ad using relative values (e.g. width = 20% of the screen size and height = 10% of the screen size.) Asset size/position is then determined by the screen or viewport size, so that you can build an ad that works on varying screen sizes. Additionally, full-screen support lets ads expand to the full size of the screen. Learn More.

Publish in-app ads to the AdMob Network:

You can now create content in Google Web Designer and publish to the AdMob network. When you choose the AdMob environment from the “New File” dialog, you can select from all the default sizes that AdMob supports. Learn More.

Design better creative:

  • When you build an ad with the new “tilt” event, a viewer can trigger animations or events by simply tilting their mobile device. This is a great way to build ad units that take advantage of the inherent interaction modes of a mobile device. Learn more about events.
  • Users can now create ads that send text messages by using the updated Tap-to-Call component.
  • Find that perfect color and make sure you don’t forget it! The color panel has been updated with a larger color mixer and the ability for users to save color swatches.

More HTML5 resources:

Earlier this summer, we hosted #HTML5Week to provide educational resources for creative developers looking to make the transition to HTML5. View the recordings of our high-level and step-by-step hangouts for more information.

We’re also partnering with the IAB to launch the second wave of the Make Mobile Work Initiative, aimed at educating marketers on how to build successful mobile campaigns. Check out our first webinar from last week, which focused on mobile video and featured speakers from Google, Snapchat, and Tremor Video.
Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

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As a brand trying to reach consumers in today’s increasingly fragmented media landscape, it is critical that you understand the impact of your ads on brand metrics such as awareness and consideration.

Viewability is the starting point, an initial understanding of whether the ad had a chance to be seen. We have talked before about why measuring the viewability of advertising matters.

In December 2014, we shared insights on the state of display ad viewability across the web. As a continuation of that effort, in May we released new insights from our video ad platforms, including YouTube, to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.


We wanted to take this research a step further, by analyzing the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

To do so, we took our Brand Lift solution, which gives you insights into what impact your ads have on the consumer journey - from awareness, to ad recall, to brand interest - and tied the data to viewability metrics from our Active View technology for a set of YouTube TrueView ads. By connecting these two solutions, we were able to draw out some insights about the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

Sight, sound and motion combined drive higher lift

When it comes to brand metrics, ad recall is a foundation for measuring the impact of your ad. As a brand advertiser, knowing if your ad breaks through with users is a key first step to understanding the overall impact of an ad on a suite of brand metrics. In this analysis, we were able to analyze how being able to hear and see your ad affected a user’s ability to recall your ad.

Our data shows that users exposed to even one aspect of your video ad (audio or video only), exhibit significant lift in ad recall. However, the full immersive experience of sight, sound and motion delivers more ad recall than either audio or video alone. In fact, the impact on ad recall was 23% higher when users were exposed to ads with audio and video together versus ads with just audio alone.

The longer in view, the better you do (on brand metrics)

Time in view also plays a large role when it comes to moving the needle on brand awareness and consideration. We recently introduced the ability for Active View users to measure average viewable time - the average time, in seconds, a given ad appeared on screen - in Doubleclick Bid Manager. By connecting these measurements, we can see the relationship between viewable time and brand metrics.

We found that there is a consistent relationship between how long an ad is viewable and increases in brand awareness and consideration. The longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in these two important brand metrics:


What the results mean for your brand

These results prompt you to think about your brand advertising in a few important ways:
  • Are users viewing your creative for longer periods of time? Brand metrics continue to get higher the longer a user views your ad.
  • Are you buying the right media to have an impact on brand metrics? YouTube’s opt-in TrueView ads are uniquely suited to deliver long-form video content at scale for brand advertisers.
  • Finally, are you thinking beyond viewability to capture effectiveness metrics? You want your ads to move consumers at the moments that matter, and measuring the impact on brand metrics will make for more effective ad spend.
This is just the beginning of understanding what impacts brand metrics for video ads. As brands look to measure the effectiveness of their digital video advertising, a continued understanding of what factors drive brand metrics will be crucial to more effective brand spend.

Read further research on the impact of online video.

To read all of our research on viewability, check out thinkwithgoogle.com/viewability.

To see how viewability is measured, visit our interactive Active View demo.
Posted by Sanaz Ahari
Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google

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At YouTube, over the past few years we’ve heard from clients that they want to access our marquee formats, such as TrueView, through programmatic channels. We’ve been investing to make that happen and recently made TrueView ads, which represent 85% of YouTube in-stream ads, available programmatically in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM). Clients have been pleased with the performance: those buying TrueView this way are already seeing higher engagement and view-through rates than with other video ad formats.

To continue improving the YouTube advertising experience for as many of our clients as possible, we’ll be focusing our future development efforts on the formats and channels used by most of our partners. To enable that, as of the end of the year, we’ll no longer support the small amount of YouTube buying happening on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

With this change, we’ll be able to invest even more in creating the best and most effective YouTube advertising and buying experiences possible, continuing our efforts in TrueView and offerings like Google Preferred. Video advertising and programmatic buying are growing rapidly and being focused in our investments will help us drive them forward at an even faster rate.
Posted by Neal Mohan
VP, Display & Video Advertising, Google

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Over the past few years we’ve been committed to investing in a suite of new metrics that would be as actionable for brand marketers as the click has become for performance advertising. In that spirit, today we are announcing a new GRP solution, comScore vCE in DoubleClick, and updates to our Active View viewability solution.

Our goal is to enable brand marketers to answer some essential questions about the success of their campaigns:

Announcing an update to Active View - Ensuring your ads are seen

If a human being never has a chance to see your ad, then nothing else matters - the campaign will not succeed. That’s why we’ve been steadily introducing Active View technology across our product suite: the ability to buy based on viewability in AdWords, and reporting on viewability in our DoubleClick advertiser and publisher platforms. In a recent study that we published we found that 46% of all video ads on the web did not even have a chance to be seen. This contextualized the importance of video viewability and the launch of Active View for Video a few months ago.

We are firm believers in the IAB / MRC standard as the minimum viable definition for a viewable impression. We also recognize that there is a need for secondary metrics that complement the single standard and support individual advertisers’ objectives. In light of this, we are announcing that starting today, Active View users will be able to measure average viewable time - the average time, in seconds, a given ad appeared on screen - in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Since introducing Active View, we’ve seen tremendous momentum with over 80% of clients having adopted our viewability technology. These advertiser and publisher clients have told us time and again that they would like to use Active View to measure viewability across all their media buys. So we are working with these clients to expand Active View beyond Google’s media and platforms.

Announcing comScore vCE in DoubleClick: Ensuring you reach the right audience faster

Last year we announced our partnership with comScore to bring to market a completely tagless and digitally actionable metric that would make real-time GRP measurement a reality for advertisers and publishers. Today we are announcing the culmination of that partnership: comScore vCE in DoubleClick.

comScore vCE in DoubleClick is the first independent, completely tagless, audience delivery measurement service to be directly integrated into an ad server and will give advertisers and publishers a trusted comScore audience measurement solution for both video and display that is effortless to set up and actionable.
This new GRP measurement solution is now widely available for all of our DoubleClick customers across DoubleClick Digital Marketing and DoubleClick for Publishers. This means advertisers can now see if they’re reaching their target audience as it happens. And publishers will be able to make adjustments during the course of a campaign to meet their advertisers’ needs -- no more after the fact reporting and make-goods.

With this tagless and single-click workflow, advertiser and publisher clients will have 100% coverage. Publishers will have the ability to forecast their audience availability to ensure they meet advertiser commitments. For advertisers, in addition to scheduled reports we are introducing new audience cards that surface reports with simple and easy to read visuals.



Measurement Matters

We will continue to look for opportunities to raise the bar on measurement through a combination of product innovation and partnership with industry leaders.

We’re excited about the progress we’ve made in enabling advertisers to ensure that their ads reached the right audience and were actually seen. But our biggest investments in measurement still lie ahead as we work to help advertisers understand what their audiences thought and ultimately did as a result of seeing their ads.
Posted by Sanaz Ahari
Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google

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While global sales of L'Oréal Luxe makeup brand Shu Uemura were booming, reaching its target audience across North America proved challenging. By collaborating with Karl Lagerfeld (and his cat, Choupette) and using DoubleClick Bid Manager and Google Analytics Premium, the campaign delivered nearly double the anticipated revenue.
Goals
  • Re-introduce and raise awareness of the Shu Uemura cosmetics brand in North America
  • Drive North American sales of Karl Lagerfeld’s Shupette collection for Shu Uemura
  • Grow the Shu Uemura email subscriber list
  • Approach
  • Organized website audiences with Google Analytics Premium
  • Used programmatic buying to lead prospects down the path to purchase
  • Leveraged a range of audience data in DoubleClick Bid Manager to buy paid media in display and social channels
  • Results
  • Drove almost 2X the anticipated revenue
  • Exceeded CPA targets and achieved a 2,200% return on ad spend (ROAS)
  • Increased web traffic and email subscriber
  • To learn more about Shu Uemura’s approach, check out the full case study.

    Posted by Kelly Cox
    Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick