Google has revamped how its ad services and products are organized and sold in a bid to make its advertising system easier for brands to understand.
After two decades, Google is retiring AdWords and DoubleClick names and rebranding them instead. They are also being reorganized in order to better showcase their capabilities and growth trajectory. DoubleClick products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite will now fall under the umbrella of Google Marketing Platform. DoubleClick Ad Exchange and DoubleClick for Publishers will be integrated into the Google Ad Manager whileAdWords will now be called Google Ads.
The newly introduced Google Marketing Platform is designed to assist clients in planning, buying, measuring and optimizing their digital media and customer experience. The decision to merge the DoubleClick and Analytics 360 Suite brands was the result of marketer feedback regarding the advantages of using analytics and ads technology to create improved customer understanding and bigger business results.
Meanwhile, Google Ads will represent the extent of the company’s advertising capacity across its numerous properties, like Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube. Google Ads will also roll out a new type of ad strategy called Smart Campaigns. This feature will be utilizing machine learning technology and focuses on small businesses. It will be the default experience of start-up companies.
As for the Google Ad Manager, the unified programmatic system is developed to help partners to generate higher revenue in a more efficient manner.
The three new brands are being hailed as a way to help all advertisers and publishers pick the right solutions for their business, regardless of the size. It also aims to make it easier for companies to provide consumers with trustworthy ads and an improved experience regardless of the channels and devices used.
Therestructuring of its ads business was announced on Tuesday by Sridhar Ramaswamy, the SVP of Ads at Google. According to Ramaswamy, the company’s extensive ad offerings is challenging for advertisers, ad agencies, and publishers to navigate. He also mentioned that while advertising opportunities have never been greater, it has also become more complicated.
“It is harder for advertisers, publishers, and agencies that help them choose the right products for their business and know how to use them,” Ramaswamy said.
Despite the changes, brands have nothing to worry about as Ramaswamy emphasized that Google’s “underlying products aren’t changing.” But while the rebranding is basically just a name change, there will be small changes in some ad interfaces that will streamline the different services that the company’s advertising and marketing products offer.
Google’s DoubleClick announced today the ability to include video with both mobile and desktop native ads. This is important considering that more than half of all ad queries on DoubleClick’s publisher platform are on mobile.
“With the addition of video to our native ads solution, publishers can now capture premium video advertising budgets on their non-video content,” said Jonathan Bellack, DoubleClick’s Director of Product Management of Publisher Platforms.
Chris Quinn, Head of Commercial Operations at Kijiji, which is a subsidiary of eBay, commented on their tests with native ad video:
“The [DoubleClick] native video templates — content and app-install — enable Kijiji to give our advertisers an alternative to banner and static native. We were excited about the ability to run assets seamlessly without embedded video players, which will hopefully give us a jumpstart in the video space. Testing has just begun across our iOS app, and we look forward to seeing positive results and potentially incorporating into our greater offering in 2017.”
DoubleClick Extends Exchange Bidding to Mobile
DoubleClick has also expanded the beta of Exchange Bidding to include mobile apps.
“Exchange Bidding helps publishers maximize demand for every impression by letting them put multiple exchanges into competition in real time without adding any new client-side code,” said Quinn. “Since we announced it earlier this year, the number of participating publishers has grown 4x, the number of exchange partners has doubled, and we’ve moved the product from alpha into closed beta in the US.”
Christian Sieweke, Senior Product Manager at Smaato, commented on their use of Exchange Bidding:
“By integrating directly with DoubleClick for Publishers, Smaato can compete in real time for ad impressions based on price and priority, in parallel with other exchanges. We’re delighted to be an early participant in Exchange Bidding and look forward to expanding this solution to all of our partners.”
DoubleClick Extends Dynamic Ad Insertion To VOD
They also announced that they were extending Dynamic Ad Insertion to video on demand (VOD). Dynamic Ad Insertion delivers seamless, personalized ad experiences to all screens, especially TV.
“Publishers like A+E Networks are now inserting relevant, highly targeted ads into both long- and short-form VOD content across all devices, and delivering personalized ads while eliminating common pain points like buffering,” noted Bellack. “This feature will be capable of serving both direct-sold and programmatic campaigns – in both cases delivering smarter, data-driven ads that perform better.”
Googles Paul Muret, VP, Display, video & Analytics at Google, says that Google’s research shows that the average mobile site takes 19 seconds to load. If however, through optimization you can get your site to load within 5 seconds or less, Google estimates that you can earn twice as much revenue than those at the 19 second average.
“Think about that for a minute,” said Muret in a post on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog this week. “That’s a long time! Not only is this frustrating for users but it’s also a huge missed opportunity for publishers.”
A web surfers sensitivity to website speed have gone up significantly in the last few years. In a recent study of google.com search, the Google team found that every four hundred millisecond delay in delivering search results resulted in a half point drop in overall search volume. “It’s about the time it takes to blink and on mobile the situation is even more important,” commented Muret in a talk at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit earlier this week. “Creating a great user experience necessarily means making it super fast, but an alarming 77% percent of publishers today, their web pages take more than 10 seconds to load, and the average is actually 19 seconds.”
AMP for Ads
Google’s main initiative to make the mobile web faster is a the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), launched last Fall, which is an open sourced global community of publishers and other tech companies. Google’s analysis shows that mobile web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data on average than non-AMP mobile web pages. Over 145 million AMP pages have been created so far from 640,000 demands. Google sees AMP as a first step because it only covers publisher content, but not the ads, which means opening a web page still involves “much slower loading javascript bundles.”
At the DoubleClick conference Muret announced AMP for Ads, a new initiative to incorporate AMP technology into the ads themselves in order to make the entire mobile experience faster. In an example that Paul Muret gave the Washington Post, which is an early adopter of AMP and AMP for Ads, instead of the ad taking 4 seconds longer to load than the publishers content, with AMP for Ads it loads seamlessly at the same time as the mobile page content.
AMP for Landing Pages
Google announced “AMP for Landing Pages” to make the click-through fast as well. This much speedier experience is likely to significantly increase conversions for mobile marketers.
“Making experiences fast is the first step, but they also need to be really well integrated into their environments into the context that they sit in,” said Muret. “If ads are not integrated well it can lead to ad blindness, or worse, annoyance and ad blocking. As an industry we need to come together and think about creating better ads for all of our users.”
Muret believes that good integration starts with native advertising. He said that we need the ads to really fit into the context of experience.
DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM)
If you are a DoubleClick user this will be of interest to you, Muret announced programmatic native in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) which “brings the power of native to all advertisers to be able to run programmatically at scale across all their campaigns instead of delivering arbitrary of rectangles of content all over the place.” He said that advertiser’s can create asset bundles that can include headlines, images, and colors that are “dynamically fit to the form and function of the page it’s on.” This should make for a much more integrated experience which Google hopes will result in less ad blindness, less blocking and more clicks!
Google’s DoubleClick also wants to make sure that there is enough inventory for these dynamic programmatic ads. That’s why Muret also announced that DoubleClick was expanding their support for native and Double-Click for Publishers to include ALL app and web content and ALL deal types, programmatic and reservations. What this means for DoubleClick is that they now offer full coverage of the massive shift to native advertising.
Muret noted that DoubleClick’s new technology, in a test with eBay, caused a 3 times increase in user engagement compare to eBay’s normal non-native ads.
Programmatic Video
Video is the future of internet advertising without a doubt, and of course DoubleClick and Google are on top of this trend. Muret said that an amazing 85% of “Ad Age Top 100 Advertisers” have already bought programmatic video ads on DoubleClick Bid Manager. More importantly, they are seeing a 550% increase in programmatic video revenue from TV & media companies year over year.
Google, like many other tech media companies, is at the forefront of the video advertising revolution that has been long predicted, but is now finally happening. One of the key trends is multi-device viewing which Google sees as an opportunity to deliver video ads in even more places while users seamlessly move back and forth between different content formats.
“Over 90% of people use multiple devices sequentially to accomplish a task,”said Meghan Lee, Agency Development Manager for Google AdWords. “Adwords advertisers are used to a very simple and clear way of measurement and they have that same expectation on mobile.”
Outstream Video
Muret also announced a new product from DoubleClick, Outstream Video, which is for non-video content. “For advertisers this means getting additional reach with the power of sight, sound and motion,” Muret told the conference audience. “For publishers this means tapping into TV budgets and driving yield even when the the content is more traditional.”
Outstream Video ads are served outside of a video player, often between paragraphs of text, typically without sound. According to Google, interstitials, native, and in-feed are types of outstream video. An example of outstream video ads is the autoplay silent video on Facebook, for instance.
VR & AR Ads
Google is also very aware of another massive disruption and opportunity in digital advertising, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Research by Digi-Capital predicts that VR and AR will be a $150 billion industry by 2020. The study forecasts that AR (augmented reality), a less intense experience, will take the lion’s share around $120 billion and VR $30 billion.
Virtual Reality is a technology that can be very disruptive in that it has the potential to impact how we live and what we do and from a marketers perspective it opens up a whole new world.
“Obviously virtual reality and augmented reality are coming are are here and are being incorporated,” said Muret. “Rest assured we are going to be your partner in delivering those experiences as we get those built into our advertising system.”
“The promise of VR is what the industry calls “presence”—the feeling that you’re really somewhere else,” commmented Aaron Luber, who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships.
TrueView Discovery Ads
A prelude to true VR and AR is already here, 360-degree TrueView ads, which Muret announced they are now making them available to all advertisers. YouTube is king of 360-degree videos, of which uploads of 360-degree videos are growing and have doubled over the past three months, according to Luber.
Google announced, just yesterday, that they were changing the name of “TrueView in-display ads” to “TrueView Discovery Ads.” They didn’t stop with just the name change though, they also made significant enhancements to the product, TrueView Discovery Ads will now appear on mobile search results.
They’ve also made TrueView Discovery Ads more relevant on search results pages and are being used across the full inventory of YouTube videos, which Google says has increased ad click-through by 11%.
With TrueView Discovery Ads, your videos can be discovered across YouTube, YouTube search results, video watch pages and on the YouTube homepage, no matter what device you’re on,” commented Josh Rubel, Head of Brand Product Strategy at YouTube, in a promo video for TrueView. “Users initiate the ad by simply clicking your video, which takes them right to your videos watch page. By bringing the user to your channel environment, the level of engagement and activity… subscribes, shares, and additional views is impressive.”
The traditional television industry is finally feeling the pressure of the data rich micro-tuned digital advertising world of the internet and is hitting back with addressable advertising. For years advertisers have become accustomed to extreme targeting with website advertising and particularly with search advertising. Over the last few years micro targeted video ads have become the norm as video is quickly becoming mainstream on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This is causing a shift in ad spending from television to the internet that the TV industry is working to stop, or at least join in on.
The TV industry’s first step was to make viewing options available on all devices, often referred to as over-the-top (OTT) content viewing. This has been sped along by users, especially millennials and even younger teens watching more and more traditional television content on small internet connected devices. Additionally, smart TV’s are connected to the internet and more importantly are also being connected to smart cable boxes capable of serving the same kind of targeted ads that are served on the internet. This targeted advertising is called addressable advertising and it is the television industry’s competitive answer to the internet.
“One of the things we’re thinking about is whether TV channels go away and become apps,” Brian Hughes, senior vice president-audience analysis and practice lead at Magna, told MediaDailyNews during a preview of the report.
Hughes added that while the way consumers and industry practitioners think about television may be changing, its vitality as a medium remains as important as ever. It’s just becoming more complicated to track, understand and manage.
“The message you keep hearing from the industry is that TV is dead, but I think we’re finding that it’s a lot more complex than that. It’s the fact that OTT usage has exploded. TV is not, in fact, dead. It’s just changing. But it remains a central experience for most consumers and a vital medium for most advertisers,” he explained.
Asked what it’s changing into, Hughes said it’s part of the same meta theme that has been transforming much of the traditional media marketplace: a shift to an “on-demand world, where content is at your fingertips and you can get it where you are on the devices you are on.”
With addressable advertising advertisers will be able to target diapers in a video commercial to a stay-at-home-dad watching ESPN on either his mobile device or even on his home TV, while others watching the same live or recorded show will see different commercials based on their own demographic, sociographic and behavioral data. No longer will all men be shown shaving and truck commercials.
Big data is being collected and utilized by companies such as Google’s DoubleClick to make addressable advertising possible enabling the merging of traditional television viewing with the viewing of that same content on small devices to serve targeted adverting.
“Advertisers and programmers who embrace the fundamental shift from a “big game” mentality to one of reaching viewers across many screens and devices will be rewarded with up-to-the-minute flexibility, deeper audience insights and much more dependable ROI data,” according to a recent report by the DoubleClick the Marketing Team and posted by Anish Kattukaran. “With much more granular attribution and measurement, advertisers can now understand the true performance of their ad–including engagement, brand lift, and conversions. Addressable advertising creates value for everyone in the advertising chain. This lets marketers reach and attribute highly specific targets, and helps broadcasters and distributors better value their content and monetize multiple audiences at the same time. It also give the viewers themselves a better experience, with ads that are more interesting and relevant to them.”
Advertisers can still advertise to the masses, such as in the Super Bowl, but will also have the option of using granular data attribution to reach subsegments of the audience that are more likely to be interested in their offer. This is both a benefit and a challenge to the television industry because targeted advertising will bring higher CPM’s but with this new data advertisers will also be able to track conversions (sales) and know whether their ads are working or not. This is something traditional TV has not had to deal with and has been a huge frustration to the internet advertising industry because they have had to work with advertisers on this extreme tracking for years, while watch ad dollars go to TV which didn’t have to prove out their value. Addressable advertising is leveling the playing field.
True conversion reporting for television and television content across all devices is the holy grail for advertisers because it lets them target ad dollars much more effectively.
“Advertisers and programmers who embrace the fundamental shift from a “big game” mentality to one of reaching viewers across many screens and devices will be rewarded with up-to-the-minute flexibility, deeper audience insights and much more dependable ROI data,” says Kattukaran. “With much more granular attribution and measurement, advertisers can now understand the true performance of their ad–including engagement, brand lift, and conversions.”
“Gannett has historically and traditionally been a newspaper business. We like to think of ourselves as a full-fledged media company at this point,” stated Wolfe. “What’s unique about Gannett is that we have a national to local reach. We’ve got over 90 local markets across the country as well as our flagship brand USA Today.”
Wolfe added, “Some of the challenges we face selling our audiences programmatically is that we have had a lot of demand for a very specific subset of our audience. Gannett leverages DoubleClick for Publishers First Look across the network to increase yield by allowing some of our preferred advertisers and preferred relationships to engage with the top 1% of our audiences.”
“Once we started to understand the impact across that 1% we’ve really started to evaluate what our pricing strategy was and needed to be,” said Wolfe. “We at Gannett are pulling in all of the data from all of our different sources into a centralized data depository. From there we’re making the decisions around what pricing we want to set.”
Wolfe added details:
As part of the transparency that the Google Ad Exchange provides us we’re able to look into the Open Exchange details as well as the Private Exchange details and better understand who’s winning with high frequency across our audiences. We want to monazite all of our inventory and all of our audiences to the greatest extent that we can. Introducing First Look as well as Enhanced Dynamic Allocation and a lot of the other products and suites that Google has offered us has been tremendously helpful.
First Look has been a great compliment to our monetization and to our ad stat. Since implementing First Look we’ve seen a 15% lift in eCPM’s of our programmatic channel vehicle. As we look to the next 5 years we anticipate programatic to be a driver and a leader of monetization across the entire digital ecosystem including desktop, mobile and video.
Google made a handful of television-related announcements at the National Association of Broadcasters Show television industry event.
For one, Google Search will start showing live TV listings serving as your TV guide in a way that you probably hoped it had in the past. You can edit your provider for accuracy. It works for both shows and movies, which is cool.
The company also announced DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ad Insertion, which it says makes ads “hyper relevant” for viewers across any screen.
“By creating individual streams for every viewer using server side ad insertion, we are able to deliver a better, more personalized viewing experience that looks and feels as seamless as TV today,” explains Daniel Alegre, President of Global Partnerships at Google. “And not only will this work for both live and on-demand TV but it works across directly sold and programmatic.”
For DoubleClick for Publisher clients, Google announced that it will “seamlessly enforce” the level of control that has been established in TV across all inventory, whether sold directly or indirectly.
“That means, we are able to honor competitive separation – so two automotive ads don’t appear in the same commercial break – and other rules like making sure an alcohol and children’s cereal ad don’t appear in the same commercial break,” says Alegre. “This has been major blocker to enabling programmatic to work for TV. And now you no longer need to turn down attractive opportunities from advertisers interested in transacting programmatically because of compliance concerns.”
New TV partners include MCN, Roku and Cablevision, which have all signed on to use DoubleClick for Publishers to serve ads.
Finally, Google announced that it is collaborating with Autodesk on a new cloud-based rendering solution called Maya for Google Cloud Platform ZYNC Render. More on this here.
Google announced that First Look is now available to all DoubleClick for Publishers clients around the world and that it has begun testing exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation.
DoubleClick for Publishers First Look was first announced in beta several months ago, and in the meantime, the company has accumulated over 200 partners to test it. Publishers have seen their programmatic revenue increase by double-digit percentages, Google says.
“While First Look makes it easy for publishers to capture new revenue from high-paying buyers, we are also testing a new technology to help publishers manage yield between multiple exchanges and supply-side platforms (SSPs),” says director of product management Jonathan Bellack.
“Exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation will allow publishers to invite trusted third-party exchanges and SSPs to submit real-time prices using industry-standard RTB calls,” he explains. “These prices will be considered along with bids from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the publisher’s reservation campaigns to pick the highest-paying ad. Exchange bidding also empowers publishers with unified and accurate reporting on the revenue they are earning from each exchange/SSP. And just like First Look, exchange bidding works with no additional client-side code.”
The company is working with Index Exchange and Rubicon Project as well as About.com, Hearst, Meredith Corporation, and Zillow on the new technology. They’ll be testing this before rolling it out to more partners.
Marchex announced a new integration with DoubleClick Search to deliver better return on ad spend for search marketers that rely on inbound phone calls to drive revenue. According to the mobile ad analytics company, the integration is the only one to provide 100% keyword attribution for calls placed directly from paid search ads for an unlimited number of keywords.
“Marketers rely on paid search campaigns to reach customers across multiple digital platforms,” a spokesperson for Marchex said in an email. “But when it comes to measuring the results of these campaigns, there’s a significant gap between online ad impressions and offline sales – especially in today’s mobile world when inbound calls are easier than ever.”
The integration seeks to change that.
They cite research from Google showing that 57% of smartphone users call a business after searching for info on their phone because they want to talk to a real person.
Marchex Search Analtyics delivers call intelligence data such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) inputs for each keyword directly into DoubleClick Search so markters can optimize their search marketing efforts accordingly.
“Our integration with DoubleClick search is designed for the largest search marketers with hundreds of thousands of keywords,” said Nilesh Dhawale, Senior Product Manager at Marchex. “We are thrilled to partner with DoubleClick Search to provide any client that uses click-to-call the ability to properly automate paid search bidding.”
The Marchex Analytics Platform is already being leveraged with DoubleClick Search for clients in a variety of industries. including Time Warner Cable, Liberty University, and Location3.
Google announced that it is phasing out Flash from ads entirely. As of June 30th, advertisers will no longer be able to upload Flash ads into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, Bid Manager, or AdWords.
Beginning on January 2nd, 2017, Flash ads won’t be able to run through DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, or the Google Display Network.
Google has already given advertisers tools to help them build HTML5 ads, and HTML5 will be required as these dates approach.
“Advertisers who currently use display ads built in Flash in their campaigns have several easy ways to navigate the transition, ensuring your creative continues to reach people successfully,” says DoubleClick product manager Karin Hennessy.
Google encourages advertisers to check out this Mobile and HTML5 Overview site, which features Google Web Designer, AdWords Ready Ad Gallery, and DoubleClick Studio Layouts. These are considered “HTML5 authoring or plug-and-play solutions”.
In other “death of Flash” news, Adobe launched Animate CC, killing off the Flash Professional name.
Google announced some new features for its DoubleClick Digital Marketing solutions to help marketers build app install campaigns for branded apps.
For starters, if your app is in the Google Play Store, you can now automatically track installs of the app as conversions in DoubleClick without making any changes to code.
“If your app is in the Apple App Store or if you work with an app measurement provider, we support integration with popular third party app tracking platforms (initially announced in September), so that you can track installs measured by those systems as conversions for your campaign,” notes product manager Steve Chang.
There are new templated app install creative formats in DoubleClick Bid Manager that can instantly generate programmatic display ads. They pull in app info from Google Play or the App Store to create app install banners.
Also now available are universal ads in DoubleClick Campaign Manager to help advertisers build traffic and serve one rich media unit that works across the web and app environments.
DoubleClick Search has new app extensions to link to your app from Google Search text ads.
Chang shares some more features that can help you reach customers here.
Image via Doubleclick
Google announced that it has added simplified workflows to Google Web Designer that are designed to make it easier to build dynamic ad creative in HTML5.
DoubleClick advertisers can utilize the tool to choose which data signals and feed attributes to connect to each dynamic element pulling from the profile they’ve set up in DoubleClick Studio.
“As the holiday season gets underway, you’re likely focused on reaching holiday shoppers as they browse for gifts for their family and friends,” says Google’s Becky Chappel. “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.”
Google says online retail marketplace Kaymu saw a 580% increase in clickthrough rate compared to their previous non-HTML5, non dynamic campaign when they used the new dynamic workflow.
“CyberAgent, a media agency based in Japan, also used Google Web Designer for a recent dynamic remarketing campaign,” says Chappell. “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.”
Google Web Designer is also getting animation improvements, updates to text authoring capabilities, and two new components to the component gallery. These are a Spritesheet component and a Streetview component.
Google announced that it is bringing programmatic support native ads and mobile video interstitials to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.
The company announced native formats in DoubleClick for Publishers earlier this year, but now publishers can sell native ads programatically in the open auction and in private marketplaces on the exchange.
It’s available immediately in apps and will roll out for cross-screen native ads over the coming months.
“Along with native ads, we’re also introducing programmatic support for mobile video interstitials in apps on DoubleClick Ad Exchange,” says Jonathan Bellack, director of product management. “Video is key to driving brand impact in the moments that matter, no matter where they occur. With these new immersive, full-screen video ads available programmatically, again in both the open auction and in private marketplaces, publishers can offer their advertising partners a new way to bring engaging brand experiences to users seamlessly, driving advertiser performance and growing publisher revenue. During beta tests, publishers realized gains as high as 30% CPM in interstitial video compared to regular interstitial performance.”
“Together, these innovations help address a strong demand from ad buyers for native and mobile video formats that can be bought programmatically,” he adds.
Google announced a couple of Active View-related updates for DoubleClick as part of the company’s efforts to help with the advertising industry’s viewability woes.
The first is the addition of Active View optimization to DoubleClick Bid Manager, which the company describes as a better way to programmatically buy viewable impressions. This is available to all 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,” Google says in a blog post. “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,” it adds. “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.”
Google also announced Active View for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which the company says brings holistic viewability measurement to publishers.
Google’s DoubleClick announced that it is currently in the process of applying for TAG Registration and that its version of Payment IDs is available in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to all buyers globally. This is an effort to support the adoption of Payment IDs across the ecosystem.
Last week, the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) announced the Verified by TAG initiative. This is a two-part initiative, which includes Payment ID – aimed at preventing payments to fraudsters – and TAG Registry, which is to identify responsible ad providers. The registry is already available.
“The TAG Registry and upcoming Payment ID system will act like a ‘two-factor authentication’ for the digital ad supply chain,” said TAG CEO Mike Zaneis. “Through the TAG Registry, buyers will be able to ensure that they are working with trusted parties at every step of their campaigns, while the Payment ID system will ensure that payments only go to legitimate players, choking off the cash to criminals. These programs will serve as the cornerstone of TAG’s anti-fraud efforts by providing transparency across the digital ad ecosystem. Registration is now open, and it’s time for every company in digital advertising to get TAG’ed.”
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.
Among those who have already vowed their support of Payment IDs are DoubleClick Bid Manager, Dstillery, Magnetic, MediaMath, Rocket Fuel, The Trade Desk. Integrations should come within a few months.
You can learn more about the Verified by TAG initiative and the Tag Registry in an announcement here.
Google announced that Bing Shopping Campaigns are now part of the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite.
It’s always heartwarming to see Google adding support for more Microsoft offerings isn’t it?
“Bing Shopping Campaigns for Bing Ads make it easier and faster to advertise your products from your Bing Merchant Center store online,” says DoubleClick Search product manager Henry Tappen. “This streamlined way of getting Product Ads up and running on Bing is also driving meaningful impact for advertisers.”
“With the addition of Bing Shopping Campaigns to the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, you can easily extend the reach of your product-focused advertising,” says Tappen. “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.”
There’s a guide to setting up Bing Shopping Campaigns with DoubleClick Search here.
The addition joins several other new features Google announced for DoubleClick Search last month, including mobile and tablet bid adjustments for Bing Ads campaigns.
Last week, Microsoft announced 5 new features for Bing Product ads support for used and refurbished products as part of the inventory, product ads on Bing Mobile, share of voice reporting with impression share metrics, catalog statuses available via the Content API, and Bing Shopping Campaign availability in UK and Australia.
Google just announced the launch of its new Certified Publishing Partner program for AdSense and DoubleClick.
Partners in the program are considered (by Google) experts at account management services including full-service ad operations, implementation and testing; mobile, web app and responsive design and development; content moderation; video integration; monetization; and ad customization.
“Certified Publishing Partners are trained experts on AdSense, DoubleClick for Publishers, and DoubleClick Ad Exchange who could help you earn more from your sites while also saving you time,” explains Google SMB Publishing Marketing Manager Sahar Golestani. “Whether you’re just starting out with ads, fine-tuning your existing ad setup or looking for brand new revenue sources, Certified Publishing Partners are ready to help you achieve your goals. They know how to make online ads work harder for you so you can spend more time creating and publishing your great content.”
“When you see the Certified Publishing Partner badge it means that a partner has been carefully vetted and meets Google’s rigorous qualification standards,” says Golestani. “They have received high rankings in client satisfaction. They are, in short, a trusted business partner.”
Here’s what the badge looks like:
Current partners include: Acceleration eMarketing, Acqua Media, AddApptr, AddSuite, adingo, ADOP, AdThrive, AdZouk, Agora, bRealTime, CyberMedia, DQ&A Media, Evolve Media, Ezoic, FourM, Hi Media Spain, JW Player, MSO Digital, Nabler, Netlink, Operative, Outsourced Ad Ops, Readwhere, SalesFrontier, SEM SEO y Más, Total Media Group, Traffective, WOSO, and YourBow.
You can check out the program, find a partner, and apply to become a partner here.
Google announced that it’s making new efforts to eliminate injected ads from the advertising ecosystem including an automated filter in DoubleClick Bid Manger. This gets rid of impressions generated by ad injectors before bids are made.
As the company explains, “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.”
Google says it has received nearly 300,000 user complaints about ad injectors in Chrome this year alone. In fact, they’ve heard more about this than about any other issue.
“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,” says Google’s Vegard Johnsen. “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.”
The DoubleClick Bid Manager filter detects ad injection and creates a blacklist that prevents the system from bidding on injected inventory. It currently blacklists 1.5% of the inventory it accesses across exchanges. It varies by provider though. Without naming names, here’s how the exchanges compare to each other:
Google says its efforts won’t immediately solve the problem, but it’s calling on others across the industry to take additional action.
Google is striving to improve the measurement accuracy between different app attribution trackers and DoubleClick with the announcement of its ability to integrate app install and event data from third party measurement partners, beginning with TUNE.
As a result of the integration, marketers can use third-party partners to attribute in-app activities to the in-app ads they’ve run through DoubleClick.
Google says the launch gives customers choice, accuracy, and better performance. The choice comes from being able to use one of the supported app tracking tools.
On accuracy, Google’s Steve Chang says, “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.”
“Minimize cost-per-acquisition to get the best performance for your budget,” he says in regard to performance. “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).”
If you want to use the feature with DoubleClick Bid Manager, Google offers directions for doing so here. For Campaign Managers, you can find directions here.
Google’s DoubleClick announced a new Gross Rating Point (GRP) solution resulting from a partnership with comScore, which was announced last year. It’s called comScore vCE in DoubleClick.
It also announced updates to its Active View viewability solution.
comScore vCE in DoubleClick is described as an independent, tagless audience delivery measurement service for integrating directly in to an ad server to give advertisers and publishers a “trusted” solution for video and display.
It’s available to all 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,” says Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement at DoubleClick. “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,” Ahari adds. “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.”
On the Active View front, Google announced that users will be able to measure average viewable time (in seconds) in DoubleClick Bid Manager.
The company says that in response to feedback from clients, it’s also working to expand Active View beyond Google’s own media and platforms so that advertisers and publishers can use it across all their media buys.
Google just announced that it’s bringing cross-device measurement to DoubleClick to enable advertisers to measure all of their campaigns across the web.
Cross-device conversions are Google’s estimates based on aggregated and anonymized data from users who have previously signed in to Google.
Google wants advertisers to capture “leaked” conversions from their campaigns, which include when some “micro moments” take place on various devices. Google recently launched a Micro Moments resource site, which provides insights to help marketers better understand how people are interacting with their business.
Google is now sharing conversion uplift benchmarks for various industries and in four countries. As the company explains, these are additional conversions that would otherwise not have been attributed to AdWords when using single-device measurement methods.
“Consumer behavior is undergoing a massive shift: the consumer journey has fragmented from a series of predictable media sessions to hundreds of ‘micro-moments,’ where people turn to the nearest device to solve an immediate need,” Google explains in a blog post. “Our goal is to help marketers put the puzzle pieces of the consumer journey back together, which is why we’ve been investing in cross-device technologies for the last two years. Since the delivery of cross-device reporting in AdWords last year, advertisers around the world have seen an uplift in conversions reported when including cross-device data.”
Here’s a look at leaked conversions:
Google has a “best practices” checklist for optimizing across devices in AdWords here.
Google announced app install ads for DoubleClick Search on Thursday – one of the many announcements from the company as it hosts its annual Google I/O developers conference.
Starting immediately, DoubleClick Search will support AdWords app install search ads that run on Google.com and soon on the Google Play Store. Advertisers will be able to incorporate app distribution into their search marketing campaigns across Android and iOS in order to drive sales and loyalty, Google says.
“In today’s constantly connected world, people are moving seamlessly between screens, sites and apps,” the company says. “To be effective, marketers must connect consumers with relevant content in the moments they are looking.”
Google is launching a new campaign set-up flow for mobile app promotion. Here’s that as described by Google:
Campaign and ad creation
Create AdWords mobile app install campaigns for search ads directly in DoubleClick Search, including bulksheet support
Develop app install ads in DoubleClick Search using your app URL and your app icon in the Google Play and Apple App Stores
Targeting
Add keywords to target users looking for apps like yours on Google.com and Google Play1
Show ads on phones and tablets (you can optionally exclude tablets), only to users who do not currently have your app installed
Conversion tracking across mobile platforms
Measure success with tracking that works on both Android and iOS
Utilize simple, “SDK-less” conversion tracking on Android that doesn’t require modifying your app
Use Floodlight activities for conversion tracking on iOS (coming soon)
Bid optimization
Maximize the total number of app installs with automated bidding
Bid based on your unique objectives, on a CPC or CPA basis
Google gave developers a bunch of new tools for promoting, measuring, and monetizing apps this week. Read this for some of what has become available.
