From buying a TV to planning a holiday vacation, it takes consumers, on average, four clicks before completing a transaction online.¹ Some of these clicks matter more than the others, yet 40% of businesses still use first-touch or last-touch attribution when measuring ad performance.²

In order to understand the true value of each of those clicks, you need an attribution model that better reflects the new fragmented mobile-first consumer journey. Data-driven attribution (DDA) in DoubleClick Search solves this by helping you better understand the value of each ad click throughout your customer’s journey.

Create a model that fits your needs

Machine learning sets DDA in DoubleClick Search apart from rules-based attribution models. Unlike those models, DDA calculates the value of each ad click using your Floodlight conversion data, including conversions that happen across devices and browsers. By looking at all the clicks that happen across all those conversions, DDA can assign more value to the clicks that are driving conversions, and less value to those that don't.

Over time, your model will become more accurate as more data becomes available to inform your bids with. You can also customize your DDA model to fit your business goals.

DDA gets results

Here’s how DDA has already created value for advertisers around the world:

“Data-driven attribution has taken our campaign performance to the next level. By creating tailored attribution models for both new and existing customer journeys, we’re able to easily see which campaigns are contributing to our chosen business objective,” says Matt Darbon, Online Marketing at Waitrose. The British supermarket chain decreased its cost-per-order by nearly 40% while significantly increasing sales volume.

Walks of Italy provides immersive tour experiences around Italy's major cities and attractions. Using DDA and Smart Bidding, the brand saw a 31% increase in ticket sales, compared to 11% for other non-brand campaigns not running on DDA bid strategies. It also saw 25% growth in overall return on investment (ROI).

Volkswagen Group, one of the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers, saw sales leads increase by nearly 6% and cost-per-lead decrease by 17% in Brazil with DDA.

TalkTalk, the UK’s leading value-for-money telecoms provider, partnered with mSix to implement DDA for its campaigns. As a result, the brand saw its total volume of sales increase by 9% while maintaining its cost-per-acquisition.

Make DDA work for your business

Here are some best practices to help ensure your data-driven attribution models are customized to meet your business goals:

• Apply your customer and market knowledge. Create and apply DDA specific labels to your campaigns based on the role that Search activity plays in the customer journey. Learn more
• Check the accuracy of your model with Floodlight columns. Once you’ve created your custom DDA model, create Floodlight columns for DDA conversions to ensure your model is set up correctly. Learn more
• Track your performance against other models. For easier monitoring, add your DDA model to your favorite reports. Create a custom column that shows the percentage difference in conversion value assigned to keywords, campaigns and labels between your attribution models. Learn more
• Re-evaluate keywords, campaigns and labels for performance. Now that you’re measuring the value of every click, you may discover that some of your campaigns are performing better than before. Make sure your budget and bids are updated based on the insights provided by DDA. Learn more
• Automate your bids based on your new model. To get the full benefits of DDA, use Smart Bidding with your DDA model to automatically set optimal bids across your campaigns. Learn more

Learn more about data-driven attribution in the DoubleClick Search Help Center.

^¹ Google Analytics MCF data for single device measurement, Feb. 2017
^² Google/Forrester, "Cross Channel Attribution is Needed to Drive Marketing Effectiveness," May 2014, U.S.

Posted by Michel van Luijtelaar
Measurement & Attribution Specialist, DoubleClick Search

Advertising should be free of invalid activity – including unauthorized, misrepresented, and fake ad inventory – which diverts revenue from legitimate publishers and tricks marketers into wasting their money. Earlier this year we worked with the IAB Tech Lab to create the ads.txt standard, a simple solution to help stop bad actors from selling unauthorized inventory across the industry. Since then, we’ve shared our plans to integrate the standard into our advertiser and publisher advertising platforms.

As of November 8th, Google’s advertising platforms filter all unauthorized ad inventory identified by published ads.txt files:

• Marketers and agencies using DoubleClick Bid Manager and AdWords will not buy unauthorized impressions as identified by publishers’ ads.txt files.
• DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense publishers that use ads.txt are protected against unauthorized inventory being sold in our auctions.

Preventing the sale of unauthorized inventory depends on having complete and accurate ads.txt information. So, to make sure our systems are filtering traffic as accurately as possible, we built an ads.txt crawler based on concepts used in our search index technology. It scans all active sites across our network daily, over 30m domains, for ads.txt files, to prevent unauthorized inventory from entering our systems.

The adoption of ads.txt has been growing quickly and the standard is reaching scale across publishers:

• Over 100,000 ads.txt files have been published
• 750 of the comScore 2,000 have ads.txt files
• Over 50% of inventory seen by DBM comes from domains with ads.txt files

We believe ads.txt is a significant step in cleaning up bad inventory and it's great to have the broad support of our partners like L’Oreal, Omnicom Media Group, and the Financial Times.

“Consumers place enormous value on the ability to trust brands, which is why transparency in advertising is a top priority at L’Oreal. We look forward to collaborating with Google on this initiative as we continue to encourage the industry to follow suit.”
- Marie Gulin-Merle, CMO L’Oreal USA

"Removing counterfeit inventory from the ecosystem is critical to maintaining trust in digital. The simple act of publishing an ads.txt file helps provide the transparency we need to quickly reduce counterfeit inventory from harming our clients."
- Steve Katelman, EVP Global Strategic Partnerships, Omnicom Media Group

“It's great to see adoption of ads.txt across the industry and we're happy to see Google put their support behind this initiative. By eliminating counterfeit inventory from the ecosystem, marketers' budgets will work that much harder and revenue will reach real working media to fund the independent, high-quality journalism which society depends upon."
- Anthony Hitchings, Digital Advertising Operations Director, Financial Times

It’s amazing to see how fast the industry is adopting ads.txt, but there is still more to be done. Supporting industry initiatives like ads.txt is critical to maintaining the health of the digital advertising ecosystem. That’s why we’ll continue to invest and innovate to make the ecosystem more valuable, transparent, and trusted for everyone.

Posted by Per Bjorke
Product Manager, Google Ad Traffic Quality

With the all important holiday shopping season about to begin, you can’t afford to miss any revenue opportunity. But you also need to be careful about how much you push your already stretched team. This is why we recently introduced three new tools, available to all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts, that will help you reach more consumers while reducing manual work.

Expand your reach

First, as part of the new planning workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager, we recently launched a new campaign object that lets you group Insertion Orders (IOs), so you can more efficiently manage your ad buys. For example, this will help you improve the reach of your campaign by allowing you to set up frequency capping across Programmatic Direct deals and open auction IOs, so you can be sure that your open auction campaigns reach consumers who haven’t been already exposed to your ads. You can create a new campaign in just a few simple steps*.

Second, we have introduced a slider that lets you expand your similar audience lists* so you can choose if you want maximum reach, higher similarity or a balance of the two. For example if you’re a toy retailer, your sales during the holiday season are likely going to be critical in determining your success for the entire year. To capture the increased holiday demand, you can use the slider to choose to reach the most possible consumers who look like your frequent purchasers. Once the sales peak has passed, you can scale your similar audience campaigns back to focus on more similarity.

You can find the new expansion slider in the Audience lists targeting tab of your line item level settings.

Optimize campaigns faster

By following the steps above, you can improve the setup of your campaigns and give them the best chance of success, but once your campaigns are up and running, you need a fast way to spot if things are not going according to plan. To help you with this, we recently introduced a new optimization view that allows you to quickly focus on campaigns that are not on track to achieve their spend and performance goals.

Once you know where you should focus your attention, you’ll be able to quickly determine what is driving the poor performance. By segmenting the data along dimensions (site, time of day, day of week, environment and more), you can easily see what is impacting performance.

In addition to surfacing key insights, the optimization view also provides suggestions on how you could optimize Line Item budgets within an IO. This way you can spend time making strategic decisions and not calculating how you should re-allocate budget across different Line Items.


Since using the new optimization view, our partner OMD Australia has been getting more granular insights faster:

"The optimization view has been helping us get quick insights, such as top performing placements and times of day. With this information we can immediately change our strategies to boost campaign performance without having to manually pull reports."
- Jiff Kumar, Programmatic Trader at OMD Sydney

You can access the new optimization view* at the IO or Line Item level by selecting Optimization from the drop down menu next to the New Insertion Order or New Line Item buttons in the DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Posted by Deirdre Athaide and Rod Lopez
Product Managers, DoubleClick Bid Manager

*A DoubleClick Bid Manager account is required to visualize the article.

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics blog

We often hear from marketers how challenging it is to piece together online and offline customer interactions in order to see a complete view of a customer’s journey. That’s why we’re excited to share that Google and Salesforce are working together to seamlessly connect sales, marketing and advertising data for the first time, giving you the full view of what’s working and what isn’t as customers engage with your ads, websites, apps, emails, call centers, field sales teams and more.

Today at Dreamforce, Google and Salesforce are announcing a strategic partnership to deliver four new, turnkey integrations between Google Analytics 360, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

• Sales data from Sales Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in attribution, bid optimization and audience creation
• Data from Analytics 360 will be visible in the Marketing Cloud reporting UI for a more complete understanding of campaign performance
• Audiences created in Analytics 360 will be available in Marketing Cloud for activation via direct marketing channels, including email and SMS
• Customer interactions from Marketing Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in creating audience lists

These new connections between our market-leading digital analytics solution and Salesforce’s market-leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform will change the game for how our clients understand and reach their customers — and how they measure the impact of their marketing. These integrations are fully consistent with our privacy policies and have settings that offer privacy controls and choice on how data is used.

By integrating your customer data, you can see a customer’s path from awareness all the way through to conversion and retention. And with connections to Google’s ad platforms and Salesforce’s marketing platform, you can quickly take action, engaging them at the right moment. You'll see these new integrations begin to arrive in the first half of 2018.

Example of a complete customer journey funnel in Google Analytics 360 joining website data (pageviews, leads submitted) with pipeline data from Sales Cloud (lead and opportunity stages); example also shows a prompt to create a new audience segment to take action

New insights

Until now, businesses have not been able to connect offline interactions, such as an estimate provided by a call center rep or an order closed by a field sales rep, with insights on how customers use digital channels. With the connection between Sales Cloud and Analytics 360, soon you’ll be able to include offline conversions in your attribution modeling when using Google Attribution 360, so you’ll have a more complete view of ROI for each of your marketing channels and even more reason to move away from a last-click attribution method. This integration will also let you see how your most valuable customers engage with your digital properties, answering some important questions like, what are they looking for and are they actually finding what they need?

With the integration allowing data from Analytics 360 to be visible in Marketing Cloud, you’ll gain a more complete understanding of how your marketing campaigns perform. For example, if you send an email campaign to frequent shoppers to promote your fall fashion line, you’ll be able to see right in Marketing Cloud information such as how many pages people visited when they came to your site, the number of times people clicked on product details to learn more, and how many people added items to their shopping cart and converted.

Easy to take action

Today, Google Analytics allows you to create audience lists and goals that you can easily send to AdWords and DoubleClick for digital remarketing and to optimize bids. With the new connection from Sales Cloud to Analytics 360, in addition to unlocking new insights and more data for attribution modeling, you’ll be able to combine Salesforce data (such as sales milestones or conversions) with behavioral data from your digital properties to create richer audiences and for smarter bidding.

For example, if you’re a residential solar panel company and want to find new customers, you can create an audience in Analytics 360 of qualified leads from Sales Cloud and use AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people with similar characteristics. Or, create a goal in Analytics 360 based on leads marked as closed in Sales Cloud, and automatically send that goal to AdWords or DoubleClick Search to optimize your bidding and drive more conversions.

With the Analytics 360 connection to Marketing Cloud, you’ll be able to use customer insights to take action in marketing channels beyond Google’s ad platforms, such as email, SMS or push notification. For example, you can create an audience in Analytics 360 of customers who bought a TV on your site and came back later to browse for home theater accessories, and use that list in Salesforce to promote new speakers with a timely and relevant email.

Powerful combination

Every day, Google Analytics processes hundreds of billions of customer moments, Salesforce Marketing Cloud sends 1.4 billion emails, and there are over 5 million leads and opportunities created in Salesforce Sales Cloud. These new integrations represent a powerful combination, and we believe they will help marketers take a big step closer to the ultimate dream: providing every customer with a highly relevant experience at each step of their journey.

You’ll see these new joint capabilities become available beginning in 2018, and we'll be sure to keep you updated along the way. Contact us here if you would like to learn more about Analytics 360. We hope you’re as excited as we are!

Posted by Babak Pahlavan Senior Director of Product Management, Measurement & Analytics

The Google Analytics 360 + Salesforce integrations are just one part of a broader strategic alliance announced today between Google and Salesforce. Read about new integrations between G Suite and Salesforce and a new partnership between Google Cloud and Salesforce here.

Measurement is foundational to digital marketing. Heading into the holidays, it’s more important than ever to make sure all of your online sales, reservations and leads are measured accurately. To that end, we wanted to bring an important update to your attention: the recent introduction of Intelligent Tracking Prevention affects conversion measurement on Safari. It’s important to update your website tags as soon as possible to support measurement of conversions from Safari. This is in line with Apple's recommendations for ad attribution. Without updating your tags, it will be difficult to measure the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.

Site-wide tagging preserves your visibility

There are multiple ways to measure the performance of your online advertising. The best options rely on site-wide tagging—tagging that’s applied to every page on your site. Applying the tag to every page of your site keeps your measurement updated and helps to measure conversions more accurately, including in Safari's ITP environment.

There are two options for complete measurement of conversions from Safari in DoubleClick Search:

Option 1: Install the global site tag (gtag.js) on your entire site

The global site tag (gtag.js) is a new web tagging library that works across Google's site and conversion measurement products–giving you better control while making implementation easier. The new tag will now serve as the single tag for both AdWords and Google Analytics, with support for DoubleClick Search coming mid-November. By setting it on every page of your site, and including event snippets on your active conversion pages, the global site tag will send conversion data whenever event calls are made.

Stay tuned to learn more about DoubleClick Search support for the new global site tag in November.

Option 2: Use Google Tag Manager

For customers who are already using Google Tag Manager, there's no need to make any changes to your page—simply add the Conversion Linker tag in the Tag Manager interface, and set it to fire on all pages.

If you're not using Google Tag Manager, you can get started today. Alternatively, you can start with the global site tag (option 1 above) and then easily upgrade to Tag Manager in the future.

If you’re using a non-Google tool for website measurement, check with your vendor to make sure your solution allows you to measure conversions in Safari's ITP environment.

Estimating untracked conversions in DoubleClick Search

To help you accurately measure and take action on your conversion data, DoubleClick Search uses statistical modeling. Statistical modeling gathers website conversions for traffic that can’t be measured from Safari and includes them in your DoubleClick Search reporting.

We’ll continue to use statistical modeling in Doubleclick Search where site-wide measurement isn’t applied. However, using site-wide tagging will let you better understand your marketing performance across all DoubleClick products.

Measurement in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager

The two options outlined above also provide more complete measurement of conversions in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. You can use Google Tag Manager today and the new global site tag in mid-November. Campaign Manager and Bid Manager customers using these two measurement solutions will start to see improvements in measurement coverage over the next few months.

Posted by Sriram Parameswar
Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Advertising fraud is a complex challenge, but one that we are working to simplify for our partners. That’s why we’ve developed sophisticated systems, including over 180 automated filters and detection algorithms, to prevent invalid traffic from impacting our clients. For years, we’ve used these technologies to protect Google-owned media properties from invalid traffic and now we’re working to expand them to help the rest of the ecosystem.

Today we’d like to highlight three areas we are investing in, for DoubleClick Bid Manager, to help our partners build trust in the advertising supply chain.

Automating refunds for invalid traffic

In the coming months, we’ll be implementing new infrastructure to further automate the refund process for invalid traffic. Supply partners like AppNexus, Index Exchange, OpenX, Pubmatic, SpotX, Teads, Telaria and DoubleClick Ad Exchange have been very supportive of these changes and have committed to provide advertisers with refunds for invalid traffic detected up to 30-days after monthly billing.

“At OpenX, we believe it is the responsibility of every participant in the market to commit to providing a high quality, transparent and fraud free advertising marketplace. The industry must work together to advance a clean, well-lit ecosystem to be successful in eliminating the scourge of fraud from the market. We are pleased to partner with DoubleClick on this important effort to cut off funding for criminal actors and advance trust for our entire industry.”
- Ian Davidson, OpenX

These commitments, along with others, cover over 90% of the available inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager. Soon, we’ll identify in Bid Manager which supply partners provide refunds for invalid traffic and offer advertisers the option to buy only from those sources. This will make it easier for our customers to collect refunds for invalid activity.

Increasing transparency on invalid traffic we’ve filtered

It’s hard to prevent invalid activity if you don’t know how you’re being impacted. That’s why we’re investing in reporting features to give advertisers and supply partners greater visibility into what our invalid traffic defenses detect.

With these new features, advertisers will be able to see and understand the amount of invalid traffic detected in their campaigns both pre-bid and post-serve, including breakdowns by categories like data center traffic, automated browsers, and falsely represented inventory. Supply partners will receive reporting on the sources and amounts of invalid traffic that our systems are post-serve filtering from their platforms. By providing our customers and supply partners with access to this data we hope to provide more transparency into the sources of invalid traffic, facilitate conversations with third parties, and make sure our clients’ media spend does not enrich bad actors.

Example of an upcoming change to our user interface showing the sources of invalid traffic.

Support for ads.txt

Beyond our own platforms, we are fully supportive of industry initiatives to improve the health of the advertising ecosystem and combat ad fraud. Recently, the IAB Tech Lab released the ads.txt standard to increase supply chain transparency and make it more difficult to sell counterfeit inventory. It defines a simple method for publishers to publicly declare who is authorized to sell or resell their digital advertising inventory.

We believe the ads.txt standard is a significant step forward in the fight against ad fraud, and by the end of October, DoubleClick Bid Manager will only buy a publisher’s inventory from sources identified as authorized sellers in its ads.txt file when a file is available.

The success of ads.txt will be defined by the extent of its adoption, and it’s great to see healthy adoption by publishers since the standard was finalized.

These changes are just some of the things we’re doing to help combat ad fraud and increase transparency in the advertising supply chain, and it’s been great working with partners like Nissan Motor Corporation, Omnicom Media Group and GroupM as we developed these solutions.

“Google has been a proactive partner helping us fight ad fraud. At Nissan, we look to Google, all publishers, as well as media agencies, to take their responsibility to clean up the inventory supply chain. It is therefore good to see that we’re gaining momentum to address this issue. We all need to embrace and demand new solutions to further accelerate this clean-up. That’s why we strongly urge all publishers we work with to adopt ads.txt to help keep the supply chain accountable and ensure marketer dollars are driving real results.”
- Roel de Vries, Nissan Motor Corporation

“We've always taken proactive steps to protect our clients from advertising fraud and we're glad Google is driving forward on this. These changes will help simplify the process of keeping invalid traffic out of our media buys and help clean up the ecosystem.”
- Steve Katelman, Omnicom Media Group

"We're extremely supportive of the steps Google is taking to bring transparency and accountability to the digital supply chain. It's critical that we have partners who are as dedicated as we are to protecting brands from ad fraud and we look forward to working together solve this issue for our clients."
-Rob Norman, GroupM

There’s no doubt that this is a complex problem, but if we continue to work together, we’re confident that we can address this challenge.

Posted by Payam Shodjai
Director, Product Management

For an ad to have impact, being seen isn’t just important, it’s fundamental. That’s why measuring the viewability of advertising matters so much. Today, we’re releasing new research to help the industry better understand video ad viewability rates around the world and across devices, and announcing updates to our Active View measurement technology that helps advertisers place their ads where they have a better chance to be seen.

The current state of video ad viewability

Last year, we announced that globally, average video ad viewability on YouTube grew to 93%, significantly higher than the 66% average video ad viewability across the rest of the web and apps. Today, this number is even higher: Globally, average YouTube video ad viewability is now 95%, while the average video ad viewability across the rest of the web and apps remains at 66%.¹ And what’s more, 95% of YouTube ads are audible.²

Read the full “State of Video Ad Viewability” report to see viewability rates across different inventory types and devices around the world.

New Active View optimization strategies in DoubleClick Bid Manager

To ensure all of your video ads are being seen and heard, not just those on YouTube, we’re launching two new Active View bid optimization strategies in DoubleClick Bid Manager for video ads on the rest of the web and apps, where video ad viewability is lower. This includes the ability to optimize towards a video ad that is viewable on screen for at least 10 seconds, or towards a video ad that completes in view and is audible.

Active View optimization uses machine learning to maximize the impressions that meet your viewability and audibility goals. Specifically, this means that Active View factors in signals like video player size, domain and position on page to determine the optimal bid for each impression, so you get the most from your marketing budget. These new bidding strategies allow you to improve view-through rate for situations when you need to know that your audience is paying attention — if, for example, you need more time to explain your offering, or if your branding or logo doesn’t show up until the end of the video.

These two new Active View bid optimization strategies are now available in Bid Manager for all advertisers globally, building on our existing Active View bid optimization strategies that help you deliver against viewable CPM goals.

Advanced Active View metrics for all of your video ads

Earlier this year we announced enhanced reporting for YouTube TrueView campaigns in DoubleClick. Now, we're expanding on that announcement and making new Active View metrics available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager for all of your video ads, not just YouTube.

These new viewability and audibility metrics allow you to uncover deep insights into creative performance and user attention, including:

Studies have shown that the longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in brand metrics like brand awareness and consideration. With new viewability and audibility metrics in DoubleClick, you can get closer to understanding which of your video ads are holding the attention of your viewers, and are thus most likely to make an impact, and which you need to improve in order to deliver more impact.

And, because DoubleClick Campaign Manager is MRC-accredited for viewable video ad impressions for desktop web, mobile web and mobile app, when you view these metrics in Campaign Manager you can feel confident that they’ve undergone a stringent, independent audit. We are also in the process of seeking MRC accreditation for video impressions and viewability statistics in both AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Today’s announcements are the next evolution of Active View and reflect our commitment to empowering you with the data and tools you need to ensure your ads are capturing attention. Visit the Help Center to see all available metrics in Campaign Manager and Bid Manager reports.

Posted by Babak Pahlavan Senior Director of Product Management, Analytics Solutions and Measurement, Google

^{Google and DoubleClick advertising platforms data, May 2017
Google Internal Data, Global, August 2016 (when volume is at least 10% for YouTube ads)}

If your business offers a large number of products or services, it can be difficult to manually create and manage keywords and ads for each and every one of them. Inventory keyword campaigns allow you to automatically convert your product catalog to highly relevant, up-to-date search ads. Today we’re providing additional flexibility and scale to feed-based automation with new upgraded inventory management. You can now automatically create thousands of campaigns, ad groups, keywords and other items based off any feed.

Endless possibilities with one easy setup

Getting started with upgraded inventory management is easy. First, connect the feed you want to use. Then, create an inventory plan. Finally, create templates for your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads, and other items. DoubleClick will automatically create thousands of each item at once, so you don’t have to. When creating new items, you can save time by editing your existing templates instead of starting from scratch.

Let’s say you’re a clothing retailer looking to promote your new line of Fall dress styles. Through a single setup, you can create an inventory plan that uses your dresses product feed to automatically generate a campaign for each and every dress style. Then for each dress style campaign, create thousands of relevant keywords, sitelinks, and more.

Show more relevant ads

Your ads will always be up to date as they’ll automatically reflect any changes to your feed. You can customize almost anything using your feed and apply functions and rules to that data. For example, show how many dresses are available by applying the COUNT function to the headline of your ad template. You can also apply a rule to automatically pause these ads when you sell out of that particular dress.

Holiday Hypermarket, a popular UK travel aggregator, uses upgraded inventory management to help improve its ad targeting and increase efficiency. The brand saw click through rates increase by 88%, ROI increase by 11% and saved upwards of 30 hours in campaign creation.

“Upgraded inventory management’s ability to generate entire campaigns based off of templates has saved us many hours in legwork. We can now focus our time on running and optimizing campaigns.”
- Ruaridh Stewart, Senior Account Manager, Periscopix

You can learn more about upgraded inventory management in the DoubleClick Search Help Center.

Posted by Henry Tappen Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Cross-posted from The Keyword

The vast majority of online content creators fund their work with advertising. That means they want the ads that run on their sites to be compelling, useful and engaging--ones that people actually want to see and interact with. But the reality is, it’s far too common that people encounter annoying, intrusive ads on the web--like the kind that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page. These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads--taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation.

We believe online ads should be better. That’s why we joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads. The group’s recently announced Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers, and today I’d like to share how we plan to support it.

New tools for publishers

The new Ad Experience Report helps publishers understand how the Better Ads Standards apply to their own websites. It provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences we’ve identified to make it easy to find and fix the issues. For a full list of ads to use instead, publishers can visit our new best practices guide.

The Ad Experience Report lists when we have identified ad experiences on a site that are likely to harm users or violate the Better Ads Standards.

“We’ve always put our users first and fully support the Coalition’s Better Ads efforts and standards. At the same time, we deal with so many different websites and ad experiences it’s hard to tell at a glance which ads experiences we need to replace. The report’s videos and screenshots are incredibly helpful and make the Coalition’s research actionable for our teams. We’re impressed with the level of detail and transparency Google is providing and are 200% behind this initiative.” - Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Media

As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor.

“Looking at the past few years, we’ve come to realize that to the rise of ad blockers has negatively impacted potential revenue across all of our properties, particularly in Europe. Funding Choices allows us to have a conversation with visitors using ad blockers on how our business works, and provide them a choice to whitelist or contribute to our newsroom. We’ve found that people are generally open to whitelisting once they understand how content gets created.” - Marc Boswell, SVP, Sales Operations & Client Services, Business Insider

Funding Choices is available to publishers in North America, U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand and will be rolling out in other countries later this year. Publishers should visit our new best practices guide for tips on crafting the right message for their audience.

Chrome support for the Better Ads Standards

Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

Looking ahead

We believe these changes will ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to have a sustainable way to fund their work with online advertising.

We look forward to working with the Coalition as they develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards, and are committed to working closely with the entire industry—including groups like the IAB, IAB Europe, the DCN, the WFA, the ANA and the 4A’s, advertisers, agencies and publishers—to roll out these changes in a way that makes sense for users and the broader ads ecosystem.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

At DoubleClick, we're always looking for new ways to help you drive growth and efficiency. This means giving you tools that let you scale and customize your marketing in a way that suits your business needs.

A pain-free bid strategy with Automated Bidding

Scale and customization are critical to effective media buying. But a dependence on manual processes is often painful, especially when you’re running thousands of campaigns. It’s time-consuming and prone to mistakes.

To ease this pain, we’ve rebuilt Automated Bidding from the ground up. Rather than trying to guess the best bidding strategy, you can use Automated Bidding to leverage deep insights informed by Google’s machine learning. You set your bidding strategy to meet campaign goals, such as conversions or viewable impressions, and DoubleClick does the work for you, analyzing dozens of signals to dynamically place bids on the most valuable impressions.

Automated Bidding is now available in all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts.

Flexing to meet your business goals with Custom Algorithm

While Automated Bidding lets you scale your marketing campaigns to meet a number of common goals, many marketers have campaign objectives specific for their business.

We’re introducing Custom Algorithm to address this need. This solution lets you customize the DoubleClick Bid Manager algorithm based on your proprietary data and models. You can assign a value to each impression based on your own unique data, and then Bid Manager automatically optimizes your strategy against those values, rather than clicks or conversions.

Fully customizable to meet any campaign goal, Custom Algorithm offers brands in any industry a way to better drive results using their proprietary data and insights. For instance, a financial services company could customize the algorithm to serve more of their ads to consumers with a high credit score, while a retail advertiser could use their historical purchase data to reach people likely to make high-value purchases.

Custom Algorithm also creates opportunities in more complex scenarios. Google’s internal media buying team used Custom Algorithm for the launch campaign of the Pixel phone. With the aim of optimizing for viewable placements on premium inventory, the team used previous campaign results to build a media buying model to score impressions based on these two factors. They used Custom Algorithm to increase the number of impressions on premium placements, while reducing cost per viewable impression.

They saw great results: Impressions on premium inventory more than tripled and viewable CPM fell 34% when comparing to previous campaigns that didn't use this approach.

Custom Algorithm will launch in limited beta in June 2017 and roll out in full availability in 2018.

Adapting your bids to the user’s context with Bid Multipliers

Automated Bidding and Custom Algorithm are new tools to help marketers automatically set their bids to reach their broader marketing goals. But the most effective bid strategies are ones that align to the user’s context.

For instance, imagine you want to adjust your bids based on the device consumers are using. Right now this process requires you to manually set these bids in separate line items.

We’re aiming to improve your productivity with Bid Multipliers. This new solution lets you set different bids for six dimensions all within the same line item, including device, site, audience lists, demographic, location and time of day. You can also adjust your bids to better reach particular customer segments. For example, if your customers are converting at a higher rate on mobile than desktop, you could shift your strategy to bid higher on mobile campaigns.

We’ll roll out Bid Multipliers to all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts over the next few months.

We understand the leverage you can gain when we invest in tools that give you greater efficiency and help you scale. With these new solutions, we aim to increase your productivity and empower your team to achieve more impactful results.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar
Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick

Mobile has fundamentally changed how we live our lives. With our devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find, watch or buy anything at anytime. That’s why earlier this year we shared that we’re developing a new, cloud-based measurement solution for YouTube, designed for a mobile world. Today, we’re announcing the beta for this solution, Ads Data Hub, to help advertisers get more detailed insights from their campaigns across screens while also protecting user privacy.

We are also announcing that Ads Data Hub is a solution not just for YouTube, but a tool that offers access to more data and helps unlock actionable insights across Google ad platforms, including the Google Display Network and DoubleClick. And with Ads Data Hub now in beta, we’re expanding who can use it.

Built on infrastructure from Google Cloud, including BigQuery, Ads Data Hub gives advertisers or their preferred measurement partners access to detailed, impression-level data about their media campaigns across devices in a secure, privacy-safe environment. Data from other sources, such as a CRM system or marketing database, can be incorporated as well. With this full view, advertisers or their partners can analyze the data and draw out insights specific to their business.

For example, if an e-commerce retailer wants to understand what the path to conversion looks like, they can bring additional online data about their customers into BigQuery, and Ads Data Hub will enable them to combine that data with their ads data so they can see what a typical journey is from first encountering a user until conversion.

Consistent with our commitment to privacy, no user-level data can be removed from the secure Cloud environment. Impression-level data is only accessible for the purposes of analysis and generating insights. In the future, advertisers will be able to act on the insights they get from Ads Data Hub and buy media with greater precision.

As an early alpha partner, Omnicom Media Group helped to define the solution and has seen significant value from both the amount of data available through Ads Data Hub and the broad set of analyses and custom queries that are possible.

"With the complexity of today's consumer journeys, we are seeing that marketers are looking to solve harder business challenges than ever before. Through our partnership with Google and our use of Ads Data Hub, we will be able to answer a broader range of questions and expand our analytical services."
- Slavi Samardzija, Global CEO, Annalect, An Omnicom Media Group Company

With the shift to mobile, consumer behavior has changed for good. Marketers need tools to help them make sense of this new world, and Ads Data Hub is a key step forward.

Posted by Geoff Samek Senior Product Manager, Ads Data and Privacy

Making marketing easier with new tools for productivity

Mobile continues to raise the bar for marketers - as consumers increasingly reach for their smartphones to get things done, they expect fast and frictionless assistance. And to help them in these moments with more useful and personalized ads, you need scalable, easy-to-use tools that allow you to manage your marketing in smarter ways.

This morning at Google Marketing Next, we shared the next generation of AdWords, DoubleClick and Google Analytics tools, each of them shaped by your feedback and built to help you work as productively and efficiently as possible.

Below is a round-up!

The new AdWords experience will be available to all advertisers by the end of the year

The new AdWords experience marks the most powerful change we’ve made to how advertisers visualize and manage their campaigns in over 15 years. The redesign makes AdWords significantly easier to use to help you reach your unique marketing goals and get things done.

Earlier this year, we previewed a few of the new tools and features in the new AdWords experience. This includes the new Overview page, which automatically surfaces relevant insights about your performance so you can take action more quickly.

Here are some other new things to check out:

Campaign creation

Build campaigns designed around your marketing goals

Performance estimates

View performance estimates to help plan your display campaigns

Landing page report

See how your landing pages are affecting campaign performance

Since rolling out the new AdWords experience, we’ve seen some inspiring results. We see that pages load much faster — on average, 20% faster. Customers like iProspect North also reported that the new design and layout saves them 30% more time when completing everyday tasks. Starting today, we’re rolling out the new experience to millions of additional AdWords accounts and it will be available to all advertisers by the end of the year. Get started by reviewing our Best Practice guide.

Better together: Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 integrate with AdWords

Your marketing workflows should be seamless and integrated, from managing media to optimizing your site and collecting performance insights. This allows you to easily apply learnings from one step to another and take action faster. With new integrations for Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 with AdWords, you'll be able to test landing pages and gain insights about your ads more efficiently.

Available globally to all advertisers at no cost, Optimize helps marketers test and deliver custom site experiences to improve performance. With the Optimize and AdWords integration, you can quickly and easily create new versions of your landing pages and then apply them to any combination of AdWords campaigns, ad groups, and keywords – no coding or webmaster required. For example, on a summer beachwear campaign, test whether a landing page that features an image of beachgoers performs better than one that showcases your latest swimsuit styles. Optimize will figure out which variation works best for your business and help you get more value from your AdWords campaigns.

Surveys 360 makes it easy for anyone to create a survey, find a specific audience sample across the web, and generate results in just a few days. With the Surveys 360 and AdWords integration, you can easily target surveys to people in your remarketing audiences to help you understand the “why” behind how consumers react to your marketing. For example, ask customers what they thought was the most compelling part of your ad. Or, if you want to know what customers thought of the landing pages you tested on your summer beachwear campaign, quickly launch a survey and ask site visitors what stood out to them on the page.

Smarter planning in DoubleClick Bid Manager

The programmatic revolution has focused on combining data, machine learning and automation to drive better performance. However, few of these benefits have carried over to the world of media planning. To help save you time and improve performance, we’re bringing the power of machine learning to campaign planning with a new workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Bid Manager uses machine learning to analyze your past campaigns and understand what's performed well for you before. With these insights, it will recommend the right inventory and targeting to reach your audience based on your unique marketing goals. The result is an optimized media plan tailored to your business, which you can then tweak, approve and activate with one click.

New workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager

“Planning in DoubleClick Bid Manager helps us find the right inventory and strategies in a matter of seconds. Now we can invest even more time in understanding our audience rather than how we should reach them.” - Louise Lévesque, Vice-President, Marketing & Sponsorship, National Bank of Canada

Unique Reach arrives for AdWords Display campaigns and DoubleClick

Once your ads are up and running, you want to know how many people are seeing them. Reach and frequency are hallmark metrics to measure the impact of display and video campaigns today. At the same time, you need to be thoughtful about how often you connect with a single user to avoid overloading them. 30% of people today use 5 or more devices¹ - that means if you reach someone three times on each screen, you could be showing them fifteen ads!

We launched Unique Reach for YouTube in AdWords earlier this year and are soon expanding availability to Display campaigns in AdWords. We’re also bringing Unique Reach to DoubleClick for all your video and display ads, no matter where they run. Unique Reach helps you measure the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user you get from video and display ads. Metrics are de-duplicated across devices, campaigns, inventory and formats so you can see how many people you reached and how often you reach them.

We can’t wait to get these new tools into your hands to hear what you think and help you work faster and smarter. To get the full replay of new innovations at Google Marketing Next, watch the keynote here.

Until next year!

Posted by Paul Muret Vice President of Display, Video and Analytics, Google

^{1 Google / TNS Connected Consumer Survey, US population 18+, n=1000, Q1 2016}

Succeeding on mobile starts with getting the basics right. People choose brands that meet their needs instantly and seamlessly. That means no matter how great your site looks, if it loads slowly, users will leave and you’ll miss out.

The open source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project launched 18 months ago to help make the web better with faster experiences. Since then, we’ve been expanding how we surface fast-loading AMP pages on Google Search — starting with the top stories carousel and extending to organic search listings.

Today we’re introducing two new ways to harness the speed of AMP to improve advertising performance. First, we’re launching a new AdWords beta that lets you use fast-loading AMP pages as the landing pages for your search ads. Second, we’re speeding up ads served across the Google Display Network by using the same technology that makes AMP pages so fast.

Improving campaign ROI with lightning-fast AMP landing pages

We’ve said before that the median page load time for an AMP page from Google Search is under one second. If that wasn’t already fast enough, last week we announced that these pages are now twice as fast. No wonder AMP has been so widely adopted – more than 2 billion AMP pages have been published from 900,000 domains. Advertisers like Johnson & Johnson, Toll Brothers and eBay have already seen increased engagement with their brand by directing people to AMP pages from organic search results.

The new AdWords beta brings the performance benefits of faster mobile pages to search campaigns. Now, when advertisers link their search ads to AMP landing pages, consumers will get the fast mobile web experiences they've come to expect from AMP pages on Google Search. If you’re interested in participating in the beta, sign up here.

“We understand the importance of speed in delivering effective advertising campaigns. That is why we're incredibly excited to apply the speed of AMP to our paid campaigns in AdWords."
-‎Aaron Cocks, Online Marketing Optimization Manager, Toll Brothers

“Johnson & Johnson has seen great results in testing AMP with our product information pages. For specific pages, we've seen page speeds improve by 10x and engagement rates improve by 20%. J&J is looking forward to expanding our application of AMP."
-‎Paul Ortmayer, Head of Digital Analytics - EMEA, Johnson & Johnson

Ensuring display ads are seen with AMP

When ads load fast, people are more likely to see them. That means media budgets work more effectively and messaging strategies realize their full potential. Fast-loading ads also create better experiences for users.

To make ad experiences on the web a lot better and faster, the AMP Project launched The AMP Ads Initiative last year. The Initiative applies the technology powering fast-loading AMP pages to ads.

As of today, a significant number of ads shown on AMP pages across the Google Display Network are automatically converted and served in the new AMP ad format. We’ve found these ads load up to 5 seconds faster than regular ads even though the creative looks exactly the same. Ultimately, this ensures that your messages are actually seen by your intended audience and that the experience users have with your brand is seamless.


Speed matters. To meet the needs of today’s customers, you have to be fast. Bringing the speed and performance of AMP to advertising will help you deliver more effective campaigns that keep up with accelerating consumer expectations.

Posted by Jerry Dischler
Vice President, Product Management

Welcome to the Google Marketing Next live stream! Tune in live at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET to learn about Google’s latest marketing innovations, the moment they’re announced.

Join the conversation at #GoogleMarketingNext.

Good morning, San Francisco! As the city starts to wake up, my team and I are gearing up to welcome over a thousand marketers from around the world to Google Marketing Next, our annual event where we unveil the latest innovations for ads, analytics and DoubleClick.

A big theme you’ll hear about today is machine learning. This technology is critical to helping marketers analyze countless signals in real time and reach consumers with more useful ads at the right moments. Machine learning is also key to measuring the consumer journeys that now span multiple devices and channels across both the digital and physical worlds.

It's a growing and important trend for marketers today, and will continue to shape how you build for success in the future.

Below is a sneak preview of a few of the announcements I’ll be making. There are many more that I can’t wait to share with you. Be sure to tune in at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET.

Hello Google Attribution, goodbye last-click

Today, we're announcing Google Attribution, a new product to answer the question that has challenged marketers for ages, “Is my marketing working?” For the first time, Google Attribution makes it possible for every marketer to measure the impact of their marketing across devices and across channels — all in one place, and at no additional cost.

With today’s complex customer journey, your business might have a dozen interactions with a single person - across display, video, search, social, and on your site or app. And all these moments take place on multiple devices, making them even harder to measure.

Marketers have been trying to make attribution work for years, but existing solutions just don't cut it. Most attribution tools:

• Are hard to set up
• Lose track of the customer journey when people move between devices
• Aren’t integrated with ad tools, making it difficult to take action

As a result, many marketers are stuck using last-click attribution, which misses the impact of most marketing touchpoints. With Google Attribution, we’ll help you understand how all of your marketing efforts work together and deliver the insights you need to make them work better.

Here’s how it works:

Integrations with AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search make it easy to bring together data from all your marketing channels. The end result is a complete view of your performance.

Google Attribution also makes it easy to switch to data-driven attribution. Data-driven attribution uses machine learning to determine how much credit to assign to each step in the consumer journey — from the first time they engage with your brand for early research down to the final click before purchase. It analyzes your account's unique conversion patterns, comparing the paths of customers who convert to those who don’t, so you get results that accurately represent your business.

Finally, you can take fast action to optimize your ads with Google Attribution because it integrates with ads tools like AdWords and DoubleClick Search. The results are immediately available for reporting, updating bids or moving budget between channels.

“Given today’s multi-device landscape, cross-channel measurement and attribution is indispensable for HelloFresh to have a 360º panorama of our customer journey and gives us the best data to make the best decisions.” -  -‎Karl Villanueva, Head of Paid Search & Display

Google Attribution is now in beta and will roll out to more advertisers over the coming months.

Mobile-local innovations drive more consumers to stores

Mobile has blurred the line between the digital and physical worlds. While most purchases still happen in-store, people are increasingly turning to their smartphones to do research beforehand — especially on Google.com and Google Maps.

To help consumers decide where to go, marketers are using innovations like Promoted Places and local inventory ads to showcase special offers and what’s in-stock at nearby stores. Now, you can also make it easy for them to find a store from your YouTube video ads using location extensions.

We introduced store visits measurement back in 2014 to help marketers gain more insight about consumer journeys that start online and end in a store. In under three years, advertisers globally have measured over 5 billion store visits using AdWords.

Only Google has the advanced machine learning and mapping technology to help you accurately measure store visits at scale and use these insights to deliver better local ad experiences. Our recent upgrade to deep learning models enables us to train on larger data sets and measure more store visits in challenging scenarios with greater confidence. This includes visits that happen in multi-story malls or dense cities like Tokyo, Japan and São Paulo, Brazil where many business locations are situated close together. Store visits measurement is already available for Search, Shopping and Display campaigns. And soon this technology will be available for YouTube TrueView campaigns to help you measure the impact of video ads on foot traffic to your stores.

Still, measuring store visits is just one part of the equation. You also need insights into how your online ads drive sales for your business. You need to know: are my online ads ringing my cash register? In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out store sales measurement at the device and campaign levels. This will allow you to measure in-store revenue in addition to the store visits delivered by your Search and Shopping ads.

If you collect email information at the point of sale for your loyalty program, you can import store transactions directly into AdWords yourself or through a third-party data partner. And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States. There is no time-consuming setup or costly integrations required on your end. You also don’t need to share any customer information. After you opt in, we can automatically report on your store sales in AdWords.

Both solutions match transactions back to Google ads in a secure and privacy-safe way, and only report on aggregated and anonymized store sales to protect your customer data.

Virgin Holidays discovered that when it factors in store sales, its search campaigns generate double the profit compared to looking at online KPIs alone. A customer purchasing in-store after clicking on a search ad is also three times more profitable than an online conversion.

“Store sales measurement gives us a more accurate view of the impact our digital investment has on in-store results, especially through mobile. This has empowered us to invest more budget in Search to better support this critical part of the consumer journey.” -James Libor, Performance Marketing and Technology Manager

empowered us to invest more budget in Search to better support this critical part of the consumer journey.”

Machine learning delivers more powerful audience insights to search ads

People are often searching with the intent to buy. That’s why we’re bringing in-market audiences to Search to help you reach users who are ready to purchase the products and services you offer. For example, if you’re a car dealership, you can increase your reach among users who have already searched for “SUVs with best gas mileage” and “spacious SUVs”. In-market audiences uses the power of machine learning to better understand purchase intent. It analyzes trillions of search queries and activity across millions of websites to help figure out when people are close to buying and surface ads that will be more relevant and interesting to them.

This is an important moment for marketers. The convergence of mobile, data and machine learning will unlock new opportunities for marketers — and I’m excited to be on this journey with all of you.

Please join us at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET to see the entire keynote at Google Marketing Next, and all the other innovations we’re planning to announce for ads, analytics and DoubleClick.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Picture this: You're chilling on your couch, streaming your favorite show. In the next ad break, the ad loads slowly and is grainy and pixelated. Clearly, you're frustrated because you expect more from your HD TV and lightning-fast internet connection.

You're not alone. Advertisers and broadcasters hate it when this happens too — they want you to stay deeply engaged with what you're watching and not be distracted by the streaming experience. But providing TV-quality ad experiences has become challenging with the proliferation of connected TV devices that people use to stream video.

At DoubleClick, we are focused on helping deliver great user experiences by enabling advertisers and TV broadcasters to show seamless, high-quality video ads across all screen sizes and device types.

In this vein, we partnered with the IAB, CBS Interactive, Ad-ID and others last year to develop a new digital video standard that allows advertisers and broadcasters to deliver TV-quality ads to living room screens and devices. This standard, called VAST 4.0, updates previous video standards to work better for the viewing behavior in today’s world.

Today, we’re rolling out support for aspects of VAST 4.0 in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and DoubleClick for Publishers. It was important to launch this standard for both advertisers and broadcasters simultaneously to ensure that the whole ecosystem runs smoothly, from insertion order to ad serving.

To enable optimal viewing experiences on living room screens, we prioritized our focus on two specific aspects of VAST 4.0:

• TV-quality viewing experiences: TV-quality creative files (known as mezzanine files) uploaded to DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick for Publishers can now be passed to services that dynamically stitch ads into video streams (server side ad insertion platforms). This helps ensure a higher quality viewing experience, especially for connected TVs, by enabling the TV-quality ad creative to be transcoded and served in one stream alongside the video content.
• More efficient ad delivery: A universal ad ID system helps the server side ad insertion platform better identify unique vs. existing creatives, which reduces unnecessary transcodes.

This updated set of standards applies across ad servers and server side ad insertion tools, helping advertisers and broadcasters provide high quality viewing experiences for their audiences.

To learn more about VAST 4.0 and how we’re supporting it in DoubleClick, please register for our webinar, coming up next Monday, 5/22, from 12-1pm ET.

Posted by Peentoo Patel and Sunil Gupta
Product Managers, DoubleClick Video Ads

We are excited to announce that programmatic native ads are now available to all advertisers in DoubleClick Bid Manager, allowing more brands to build beautiful ads and deliver them at scale to mobile-first audiences.

A “native ad” is a paid advertisement that fits the look, feel and function of a publisher’s content. It’s assimilated into the design so that it feels like it belongs on the page or in the app. Users are responding positively to native ads: across the DoubleClick platform, we've seen that users are more than 2X as likely to click on a native ad as a traditional banner.¹

DoubleClick’s component-based native ad solution makes it easy for brands to create compelling native ads that look great across any site or app, and on any device. Exact audience targeting and access to thousands of premium publishers provide both reach and precision — Bid Manager’s 40+ exchange integrations give access to hundreds of billions of global monthly native impressions. And the unified workflow lets you seamlessly integrate native ads with other buys and measure native alongside other campaigns to get a holistic view of performance.

“Native allows us to deliver ads that look good, with appealing text and information, for users to learn about products. We’re able to provide users with an integrated experience.” - Elie Milan, Associate Director of Programmatic at Starcom

Native advertising drives results

Native ads offer many benefits for advertisers. To date, over 500 brands and agencies have used DoubleClick Bid Manager to execute native ad strategies across both brand and direct response campaigns, with success across multiple objectives.

For example, Starcom helped Saudi Telecom reach a younger, tech savvy audience with native ads in DoubleClick, with a 30% increase in unique user reach and 2X improvement in operational efficiencies. Sojern team with SF Travel and used DoubleClick’s native solution to drive 1662% more bookings than their previous campaign with greater media efficiency.

“Thanks to our work with the San Francisco Travel team and Google, programmatic native ads in DoubleClick are now a proven method for driving direct bookings. We’ve since expanded this opportunity and made it available to all of Sojern’s clients.” - Jackie Lamping, VP of Marketing for Sojern

Visualize native ads with our new interactive tool

We've heard from a number of advertisers who want to better understand how their native ads will look before delivering them across a range of different publisher formats and devices.

We’re launching a new tool to help solve this challenge. Our interactive native ad gallery allows you to visualize your native ads before you begin building them. You can use the tool to preview native ads across multiple website templates and multiple devices, using sample creative or uploading custom assets to see your branded ads in action.

Try our interactive tool now to start visualizing your next native campaign.

Getting started with programmatic native ads in DoubleClick Bid Manager

We have also created a guide to help advertisers better understand native and the benefits of buying native ads programmatically. This guide gives you an overview of programmatic native in DoubleClick Bid Manager and offers practical tips to get you started.

DoubleClick’s native solution can help you build beautiful, relevant ads at scale, engaging consumers with better experiences across any screen and context.

Explore native ads in DoubleClick with our new interactive tool and getting started guide.

Posted by Ladika Jackto Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

¹ Internal data, DoubleClick, April 2017