Google Data » Melissa Horwitz

Protect your brand and budget with Video Verification

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 15:00:00 +0000

With increasing video spend in digital and the higher media cost of in-stream video ads, it’s crucial for marketers to understand where their video ads are running and whether they were actually seen by their intended audience. As a first step to address this need, we announced the availability of Active View, Google’s viewability metric, for Video in January. Today, we are excited to build on this with the launch of Video Verification, now available to customers on the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, globally. Video Verification enables advertisers to gain insights unique to video to help ensure they’re getting what they planned and paid for.

Advertisers can now confirm not only that their ads are viewable, but that every view is as prominent as possible. This means you’ll know whether your video ads are mostly displayed in large players, front and center, or in little players off to the side. With these insights, advertisers can take steps to ensure that every video dollar spent goes toward high-quality, relevant inventory.

With DoubleClick Verification, here’s what advertisers will be able to measure for video ads, including those that run on YouTube:

Average player size
Average player position
Measurable impressions for player size and position
Viewable video impressions
A graphical illustration of player size
Number of impressions that were muted at start
Prominence score (low, medium, or high), which is calculated by combining the above metrics

Video Verification UI. Player size: red = small, blue = large, green = HD

MEC uses DoubleClick Verification to ensure brands are safe, smart, and cutting edge online

As one of the world’s leading media agencies, MEC is committed to getting the highest-quality, most relevant and cost-effective buys for its clients. To ensure their clients’ messages only appear next to brand appropriate content and that their marketing dollars are well spent, MEC started using DoubleClick Verification.

With DoubleClick Verification built right into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, the team has access to unified data, which helps them make better decisions across search and display.

The team also found that they save 48 hours of turnaround time on every campaign since DoubleClick Verification requires no extra work, such as tagging. This makes the team more efficient and ensures campaigns launch on time.

Beyond peace of mind and time savings, MEC has moved from a reactive to a proactive approach to protect their clients’ brands. Tools like ad blocking guarantee that ads only appear next to brand safe content. For example, MEC recently implemented ad blocking for a major healthcare client to ensure their ads don’t appear on websites containing adult content, which could damage the healthcare firm’s brand.

To learn more about the team’s approach and results, read the full case study here.

Below are upcoming events and available resources to help you learn more about DoubleClick Verification:

Join Oren Mor, Product Manager for DoubleClick Verification, in a Hangout on Air at 12pm EST / 9am PST on Tuesday, February 24th. Register here.
Download the whitepaper, “5 Keys to Protecting Brand and Budget,” which guides advertisers through the process of evaluating a winning verification solution.
Visit the Help Center.

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“with DoubleClick” 2014 wrap-up

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Increasingly, marketers are looking to integrate their digital marketing efforts in order to get better campaign performance, while also benefiting from workflow efficiencies for their teams. To celebrate and learn from the successes these teams are seeing, we launched with DoubleClick, highlighting stories and perspectives from marketers and agencies about how integrated platforms are changing how they work, creating bigger impact, and fueling better decisions.

We kicked off the series with a recent study, “Adding Data, Boosting Impact,” where the Boston Consulting Group found that marketers who use an integrated platform to power their programmatic buying are seeing major uplifts in performance and engagement. The study, now published on Think with Google, identifies five steps marketers should take to achieve these uplifts.

And throughout the series, we highlighted specific marketers and agencies who realized similar gains. Like Neo@Ogilvy, and how they freed up 40 hours per week with more streamlined workflows, and how Kia improved their CPA by 30% with powerful attribution tools. We saw how T-Mobile eliminated static backup images by 85% with HTML5, and how the Kellogg Company increased their ad viewability rate to over 70%. Dive in to learn about these and many more success stories.

Today we wrap up the series, but stay tuned for more with DoubleClick customer spotlights in 2015.

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with DoubleClick: Kellogg dishes up offline sales and increases viewability with programmatic buying

Melissa Horwitz — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:00:00 +0000

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

Kellogg Company is a century-old marketer with some of the world’s most trusted brands. Kellogg’s vision is to enrich and delight the world through foods and brands that matter, and digital marketing plays a key role in helping them move consumers through the path to purchase. The cereal powerhouse adopted DoubleClick Digital Marketing for programmatic buying. Using the unified platform, they were able to gain a holistic view of the consumer, deliver the right message to the right person, and ensure that their digital marketing efforts delivered maximum effectiveness.

Kellogg recognized that traditional marketing channels often aren’t enough to reach consumers in today’s digital age. To help solve for this, Kellogg embraced programmatic buying as a key part of their digital strategy to stay at the forefront of changing consumer behavior. “Programmatic buying has played a significant role in our digital marketing strategy,” said Aaron Fetters, director of Kellogg’s Insight and Analytics Solution Center. “It’s an opportunity to drive further success in our core metrics for digital advertising, and to use data and technology to deliver our message to the target audience.”

Formulating the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for their digital marketing campaigns was vital in reaching Kellogg’s goal of driving offline sales. And for this, the right digital measurement tools were critical. One of Kellogg’s main KPIs was ad viewability, and with programmatic buying and measurement solutions from DoubleClick, Kellogg’s viewability rate increased to over 70%. “It's amazing the impact you can have on a measurement like viewability, when you focus on it, plan for it, and optimize for it,” Fetters said.

DoubleClick solutions have helped Kellogg refine the targeting and frequency of their digital campaigns, and the team is confident that with DoubleClick they’re reaching the right consumer and managing their campaigns more effectively. The food company is now two to three times better at ensuring their impressions go directly to the consumers they most want to reach.

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

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Protect your brand and budget: 8 major updates to DoubleClick Verification

Melissa Horwitz — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Today we’re excited to announce a complete revamp of DoubleClick Verification to help marketers protect their brand and budget, and empower them with confidence to invest in digital.

As a digital marketer today, you can deliver the right message to the right user at the right time and place. But with the rich options in formats, inventory sources, and types of buys, it’s crucial that your messages reach your audience as intended, and that you're getting what you planned and paid for.

We launched DoubleClick Verification in 2012 to ensure just this. Seamlessly integrated into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, DoubleClick Verification was built to give advertisers more confidence with their digital investment. It’s designed to be a natural extension of campaign workflow, to be a part of every campaign to ensure that brands and budgets are protected. Today we’re excited to share with you 8 major new features in DoubleClick Verification.

Robust insights: Verification covers all the potential brand safety and waste issues that can hamper a digital campaign. This means you get insights about contextual and geographic issues, viewability, and spam and fraud.

Custom classifiers allow you to create custom categories based on what’s suitable for your brand. DoubleClick Verification has always reported on a rich set of predefined, industry-standard categories that give you contextual insight into where your ads served - like adult, violence, alcohol, politics, etc. Custom categories go beyond this by allowing you to specify more granular categories. For example, an airline may want to avoid advertising next to content about plane crashes specifically.
Digital Content Labels: Just as movies are given ratings such as PG, PG-13, and R, websites, videos, and mobile apps are classified according to the brand safety of the content. You can now target inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager with labels that range from "DL-G", which corresponds to content that's suitable for general audiences, to "DL-MA", which corresponds to content suitable only for mature audiences. Digital Content Labels provide a consistent definition for brand safety across all Google advertising products - including DoubleClick, YouTube, GDN & AdMob.
Viewability and Report Builder integration: Active View, Google’s solution for measuring and buying viewable impressions, is now built directly into DoubleClick Verification, as an important part of the solution to analyze and eliminate all potential waste. In addition, you can now add Verification data to Report Builder reports, allowing for more customization and the ability to schedule reports.

Coverage across formats, screens, and channels: DoubleClick Verification works in all the ways your campaigns work - protecting your brand in all scenarios across formats, screens, and channels.

Video verification (coming soon): With double-digit growth predicted for digital video advertising for the next four years*, video verification is critical for marketers. You will now have access to insights unique to video like player size and location. This means you’ll know whether your video ads are mostly displayed in large players, front and center, or in little players off to the side.

Objectivity and transparency: We’ve built DoubleClick Verification to ensure utmost objectivity and transparency.

Updated spam filtering & fraud detection: At Google, we take fraud protection very seriously. With over 100 engineers committed to this effort, we removed more than 350 million bad ads from our system last year**, and in February, we acquired spider.io, a company that has built a world-class ad fraud fighting operation. DoubleClick Verification draws from Google’s extensive spam and fraud expertise, and we’ve recently updated spam filtering with pre- and post-bid filtering capabilities. With a growing set of sophisticated filters, pre-bid blocking avoids buying fraudulent impressions in the first place, and post-bid filtering automatically purges fraudulent impressions from reporting and billing, so you get accurate reporting and don’t have to pay for these impressions.

Action in real-time: DoubleClick Verification empowers action in real-time through automation.

Ad blocking automatically prevents ads from serving in unwanted locations and contexts across display, mobile web, and video inventory. Serve-time blocking protects your reservation-based campaigns in real-time. Pre-bid blocking protects your programmatic buys by blocking the bids on impressions that would serve in undesired contexts. And your settings are synced between your reservation and programmatic buys.
Custom alerts and notifications deliver straight to your inbox exactly the information you need to know to ensure that your campaigns are running as expected and that you're getting what you paid for. For example, you can set a preference to receive an alert if more than 5% of your ads appear on violent content, or if more than 3% of your campaign is serving in off-target geographies.

MEC, one of the world’s leading media agencies, has been testing many of these features - including ad blocking - and has already seen great success. Nick Foord, Analytics Consultant, told us, "Buying digital media is much more complex today than it used to be. Transparency into where ads are serving is critical to ensuring our ads are being served in the right place, and next to the right content.” Steve Richards, Digital Technology Manager added, “Appearing in an inappropriate place online could really damage a brand’s reputation. Ad blocking has removed a huge amount of risk for us, and allowed us to take a proactive approach to protecting our clients’ brands.” Look for more details on MEC's success story in the coming weeks.

To learn more about DoubleClick Verification:

Download the new whitepaper, “5 Keys to Protecting Brand and Budget,” which guides marketers through the process of evaluating a winning verification solution.
Watch the training videos on Ad Blocking and Active View in Verification, and look out for additional deep dives on the blog in the coming weeks.

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

*“US TV Ad Market Still Growing More than Digital Video,” eMarketer, June 12, 2014. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-TV-Ad-Market-Still-Growing-More-than-Digital-Video/1010923

**“Busting Bad Advertising Practices — 2013 Year in Review,” Google, January 2014. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/01/busting-bad-advertising-practices-2013.html

with DoubleClick: Matalan boosts conversion rate 28%

Melissa Horwitz — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 15:00:00 +0000

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

As one of the UK's leading family clothing retailers, Matalan must be nimble -- faster decisions mean better customer engagement and more sales. So they worked with Morpheus Media to implement Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Campaign Manager to provide Matalan with more powerful insights and help them make better business decisions, faster.

Matalan was already using DoubleClick Campaign Manager to centralize their digital marketing and reports. Adding Google Analytics Premium side-by-side showed them campaign effectiveness even more clearly, allowing them to uncover the hidden value of their digital marketing efforts, like transactions where digital advertising had assisted a conversion on another channel.

“It’s really helpful to be able to see one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel,” says Lee Pinnington, Matalan's Multi-Channel Marketing Director.

With a complete view of their digital marketing ROI thanks to the integration of DoubleClick Campaign Manager and Google Analytics Premium, Matalan was able to put their marketing dollars where they would truly be most effective. And the results were dramatic: a 28% rise in conversion rate and significant growth in both site visits and revenue.

To learn more about Matalan's approach, check out the full case study.

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with DoubleClick: KLM flies high with 200% increase in ROI

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 15:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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with DoubleClick: Kia gears up with 30% improvement in CPA

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 15:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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with DoubleClick: Periscopix drives 330% increase in clients’ conversions

Melissa Horwitz — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 15:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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with DoubleClick: T-Mobile increases creative effectiveness across screens using HTML5

Melissa Horwitz — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 14:00:00 +0000

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

T-Mobile is one of the largest mobile providers in the US. As a cutting-edge company, it was fitting that they create a cutting-edge brand experience when it came time to showcase the powerful new Samsung Galaxy S5.

The team was looking to maximize reach on mobile devices for the digital campaign. But ads built using Flash - the animation standard for many years - was a big obstacle in getting mobile reach, as the format won’t render on mobile at all. So instead of engaging with rich ads, mobile users are served a static backup image. With over 25% of all global web usage occurring on smartphones or tablets*, that's a bad experience for users, and lost opportunity for advertisers.

T-Mobile, along with its agencies, Publicis Seattle and Optimedia, turned to the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, and built rich, engaging HTML5 creatives to solve this shortcoming. HTML5 is a universal language for display ads that ensures they render seamlessly across any screen - smartphone, tablet, or desktop. Beyond improving campaign reach, the team would no longer need to build separate creative assets for desktop and mobile, saving lots of creative time and resources.

They then targeted a tech-savvy audience across devices. Optimedia was even able to target users of competing mobile providers, to entice them to switch to T-Mobile, thanks to the targeting capabilities available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

T-Mobile's campaign results confirmed the power of HTML5:

Eliminated 85% of all instances of static mobile creatives. There was a 1.1% creative backup rate on HTML5 impressions, versus 7.3% for Flash.
Mobile CTR was 400% that of desktop. The team believes this improved result was due largely to HTML5 providing a more richly engaging experience for more mobile users.
Equal or better performances than Flash desktop ads in key conversion categories. Once on T-mobile.com, users who had clicked on HTML5 smartphone ads were just as likely or more likely than Flash desktop users to explore content, interact, and show intent to purchase.
Lower serving fees. "HTML5 uses cloud technology, so its file sizes are much smaller than Flash," says Nelson Fortier. "This results in lower ad serving fees, saving T-Mobile valuable media dollars."

Armed with these results, T-Mobile and Publicis Seattle have begun using HTML5 for other campaigns with DoubleClick.

"We saw a huge difference with HTML5 compared to similarly-targeted Flash banners," says Nelson Fortier of Publicis Seattle. "It’s compelling proof that with HTML5 and DoubleClick, T-Mobile's reach on both desktop and mobile devices far eclipsed that of Flash-based ads."

To learn more about the team's approach and results, check out the full case study here.

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* "2014 Internet Trends," by Mary Meeker. Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, Byers, May, 2014. http://goo.gl/DxrLAJ

with DoubleClick: Neo@Ogilvy drives 38% higher ROI for major hotel chain

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 14:00:00 +0000

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

Neo@Ogilvy, Ogilvy & Mather’s global media agency, manages the digital performance and media strategy for some of the world’s most innovative and respected brands.

The Neo@Ogilvy team needed the right tools in place to execute on clever, innovative campaigns for their clients, in addition to a better understanding the impact of their campaigns. To focus on these more strategic activities, they needed to change how their team worked, by spending less time on manual tasks that were time-consuming and inefficient.

They started using DoubleClick Digital Marketing to streamline the end-to-end campaign management process. With an intuitive interface that lets you view all campaign information from a single page, the platform has freed up 40 hours of Account Executive time per week - that is one full hire. Javier Oliete Vivas, Manager Director at Neo@Ogilvy told us, “DoubleClick Digital Marketing enables us to standardize analysis and have just one single approach, one way of analyzing all channels.”

Beyond the time and resource savings, the efficiencies from using a unified platform led to real campaign performance gains. Neo@Ogilvy was able to optimize their campaigns in real-time with clean, fresh cross-channel data, resulting in tremendous uplift. For one client, a major hotel chain, their conversion rate improved by 400%, and their ROI increased by 38% after moving onto the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. At the same time, their CPA improved 40%.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, watch the video below.

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with DoubleClick: How Media Partnership helped leading health care firm decrease CPA by 25%

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 14:00:00 +0000

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

A leading health care firm turned to Media Partnership, an Interpublic Group media agency, to help them increase online health insurance applications, and better understand where to invest its digital marketing dollars. Media Partnership was already using the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to reach prospective customers with relevant messages across search and display.

In order to make the best decisions about how to allocate budget, the team needed to understand the path of exposure across channels that led to a conversion. They began using DoubleClick attribution tools, like the Path to Conversion report. Greg Young, media strategy supervisor at Media Partnership, said, "It gave us very interesting insights into the consumer journey and allowed us to develop an understanding of how certain vendors or media executions affected the end conversion."

This understanding helped the team move beyond last-click attribution, which gives all of the credit for a conversion to the last click before a conversion occurs. The team then began experimenting with the Attribution Modeling Tool to build custom models. They defined exactly how they wanted to apply different credits to different interactions, analyzed the implication on channel performance, and reallocated budget.

Just three months after beginning to adjust spend and media tactics based on their attribution analysis, the team doubled the conversion rate for the campaign, resulting in many more online health insurance applications. At the same time, they were able to drive down overall CPA by 25%.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, check out the full case study here.

with DoubleClick: 20% boost in revenue for Chain Reaction Cycles

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 14:00:00 +0000

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

Net Media Planet - traditionally an SEM agency with a proven record in paid search marketing - was looking to expand its services and grow its business. They adopted the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, starting with DoubleClick Search. The tool allowed the agency to work more efficiently and increase search performance for its clients. Building on this, they then expanded to display using programmatic buying on the platform to access new revenue streams and boost performance.

Chain Reaction Cycle - the world’s largest online bike retailer - is a key client who benefited from streamlining its operations. With all their data in one place, the team was able to really focus on identifying strategic opportunities. As a result, they increased revenue by 20%, and increased the number of clicks per month by 35%.

“Growing a search management agency can be challenging, being a very saturated sector, standing out is hard”, notes Luke Judge, Sales and Marketing Director for Net Media Planet. Not only did the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform allow the agency to work more efficiently and improve performance, but the tool also allowed the agency to unlock new opportunities for its clients.

Display now accounts for 20% of Net Media Planet’s revenues, and projections for future growth are more than positive: “We expect this to grow 70% year on year for the next 2-3 years”, says Luke.

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

with DoubleClick: AlmapBBDO helps increase sales by 56% for Gol Airlines

Melissa Horwitz — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 14:00:00 +0000

This is the first customer spotlight in the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

Brazilian airline Gol Linhas Aéreas had a goal to increase ticket sales by engaging the country’s thriving online market of 100 million people. Along with their agency, AlmapBBDO, they recognized they needed a better understanding of how their digital ads were reaching and influencing potential fliers across channels. Using the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, they were able to integrate workflows, create targeted messages, and measure the overall impact of their campaigns, resulting in a 56% increase in Gol’s sales.

In order to reach more travelers and increase ticket sales for Gol, the team was looking to gain a unified view of its marketing and customers. They began using the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to bring all of their digital efforts together. "Before the arrival of DoubleClick, we had to implement everything from zero. We never had a single vision of the campaign," says Ana Cester, Almap’s Director of Insights and Analytics. DoubleClick gave them that single vision by integrating their workflows and insights across the creation, execution, and measurement of their campaigns for search, programmatic and reservations display, and rich media.

And with fresh, cross-channel data in one place, Almap and Gol began digging into the powerful DoubleClick attribution tools. With a better understanding of the customer journey, and which channels were driving conversions, the team was able to make more strategic decisions about where to spend its digital marketing dollars.

Since adopting the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, Gol’s sales increased by 56% from the previous year, and the company doubled its ad spend return.

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

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… with DoubleClick

Melissa Horwitz — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Digital has redefined our daily lives - changing how we stay informed, shop, communicate, and stay entertained. The essence of this is captured in the video above, where even high school basketball games will never be the same.

For marketers, this means new opportunities to reach more consumers in more ways. They must focus on delivering the right message to the right user at the right time on the right screen. To achieve this, many brands and agencies are turning to integrated marketing platforms to help them save time, achieve better campaign performance, and make better decisions.

To both celebrate and learn from the success advertisers are having, we are launching with DoubleClick, a weekly series where we’ll highlight success stories and perspectives about how advertisers are changing the ways their teams work, seeing better performance, and making better decisions with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.

Today, we’ll start by shining a light on a recent study, “Adding Data, Boosting Impact”, where the Boston Consulting Group found that advertisers and agencies are leaving opportunity on the table because of inexperience with new capabilities, inconsistent campaign execution, and a fragmented approach to campaign development and delivery.

The good news is, when marketers use advanced data-driven techniques, they are seeing major uplifts in performance and engagement. For example, the brands in the study saw a 32% average decrease in cost per action. To achieve these kinds of results, the study identifies five critical steps marketers should take.

The first step is adopting a unified technology platform. Marketers need de-duplicated conversions and cross-channel data. They need to be able to buy, execute, and optimize campaigns across screens in order to create the most compelling consumer experience. And more and more we are seeing advertisers and agencies turn to unified platforms, like DoubleClick Digital Marketing, to bring all their digital efforts together, simplify their strategies, and attack the fragmentation that exists today.

Next week, look out for our first with DoubleClick customer spotlight: AlmapBBDO and what they did to increase sales by 56% for Gol Airlines.

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Introducing DoubleClick Planning: unifying cross-channel planning and buying

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Starting today, DoubleClick clients will have a brand new way to manage their planning and buying: DoubleClick Planning. In today’s fragmented media landscape, marketers need a simple way to put their dollars to work across channels and screens, whether the media is bought programmatically or traditionally. DoubleClick Planning begins to unify programmatic and traditional reservation inventory management, enabling you to carry out all of your buys in one place.

We will host a live webinar (register here) and discuss the feature at IAB MIXX, but in the meantime, we chatted with Adam Champy, lead Product Manager for DoubleClick Planning, to hear his thoughts on the changing digital media landscape and thinking behind DoubleClick Planning.

Q: What is the vision for DoubleClick Planning?

A: Marketers can only make better decisions if they are looking at their media plans holistically - across all channels and screens. Our goal is to help marketers and agencies make smarter buying decisions, seamlessly coordinate with inventory providers, and ultimately drive better campaign performance. To achieve this, we had to rethink how buyers and sellers communicate - challenging today’s methods and timelines in the traditional RFP process. The vision for DoubleClick Planning is to help marketers and agencies do just this: plan, discover, and acquire inventory in one place, across channels and screens.

Q: How does DoubleClick Planning fit in today’s digital media buying landscape?

A: We are seeing that digital media teams today are trying to break down the silos that are in the way of making fast, smart decisions. One critical divide has been between channels and media - as specialized teams and platforms were built to tackle one particular piece of the digital marketing puzzle - such as programmatic-, mobile-, or video-specific platforms. As a result, most products in the market today don’t help marketers and agencies actually make decisions across channels and all types of buys.

We started to address this with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, built to unify the process and enable a true cross-media customer experience. Now, DoubleClick Planning is a tool within the platform that brings together reservations and programmatic capabilities to help marketers and agencies discover and buy the best inventory, regardless of how it is bought. DoubleClick Planning was built to help teams work better together, across the customer journey, with the following features:

Today

Two-way sync between planning and campaign execution

Most of the information required to traffic campaigns is already generated during the planning process. Now you can take advantage of that, with the seamless integration of planning and campaign execution, by pushing campaign information directly into trafficking.

Efficient Request for Proposal (RFP) process

Create, issue, and track RFPs so publishers can provide inventory options that meet your goals. You can also track negotiations and publisher provided inventory electronically.

IO management and billing actualization

Create order documents like insertion orders and change orders with custom terms and contracts. And create billing actualization reports to measure delivery against contracted amounts.

In the next few months

Unified Alerts

Automatically get alerts and notifications about discrepancies between planning and trafficking, including under-delivery and verification errors.

Integrating DoubleClick Insights

Learn from previous campaign data and optimize media allocation across channels and inventory sources with auto-generated insights built directly into DoubleClick Planning.

Q: What is the plan for MediaVisor?

A: MediaVisor has served our customers well over the years, but this new world of buying and planning requires new tools. We’ll be winding down support for MediaVisor by the end of 2014 and working with our customers to transition them to the new tool

Q: Looking ahead, what are the major opportunities for digital planners and buyers in the next year?

A: First, there is a major opportunity to make media planning and buying even more efficient. For example, in the next few months, we’ll be bringing automation to traditional reservations. The elements that make products like DoubleClick Bid Manager so powerful - direct access to inventory, zero-discrepancy clearing, and buyer data and targeting - will become available for guaranteed reservation deals.

Second, marketers will begin to consolidate their insights across channels and screens, building one, integrated media plan across all types of buys. Whether a published proposed inventory or you are buying on an exchange, you will be able to put together a multi-channel plan, and get a unified view of your inventory portfolio.

Faster and more efficient cross-channel planning will enable more responsive strategies, better discoverability of unique inventory sources, and ultimately, better campaign performance.

Learn more about DoubleClick Planning by registering for our webinar with the product team, which will include a live demo and time for Q&A.

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

Broader views and faster action for marketers: Google Analytics Premium integrates with DoubleClick Digital Marketing

Melissa Horwitz — Fri, 30 May 2014 19:35:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics blog

“With Google, we’re getting actionable insights, whereas before we were just getting a lot of data.”

- Lee Pinnington, Multi-Channel Marketing Director, Matalan

As we announced earlier this week, Google Analytics Premium is now integrated with both DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. This enhancement is now available for Google Analytics Premium customers.

Today's consumers move easily across many channels and devices on their journey to a purchase. Top marketers rely on the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to run the sophisticated cross-channel ad campaigns that can reach their customers every step of the way. This new step gives Google Analytics Premium users even better ways to see the full customer journey, so they can adjust and make the most of marketing dollars across all channels and devices.

The integration is providing a whole new level of visibility for display advertising by reporting on view-through visits in addition to click-through visits. We're now reporting detailed post-view and post-click engagement and conversion metrics to offer a better view of your strongest opportunities.

1. A clearer view of the customer journey

Display campaigns are typically used in the upper funnel, so they don't get credit in simplistic last-click attribution models. But better attribution models can give full credit to display and other top-of-funnel marketing tools. With the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration you can link your DoubleClick Campaign Manager campaign information into Google Analytics Premium reports, Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) and/or Data-Driven Attribution (DDA), and as a result, you'll see a much more holistic view of how display works together with other channels to drive site engagement and conversions.

“This gives us the ability to see the hidden power of different channels. One of the most interesting things about the DoubleClick Campaign Manager integration has been around assisted conversions. It’s really helpful to see how one channel that might not be a heavy hitter in terms of revenue or traffic has an impact in creating a conversion on another channel.”

- Adam McCann, Online Search & Affiliate Assistant, Matalan

2. Better investment decisions

With a complete view of the customer journey, you can make smarter decisions on how to allocate your marketing spend. This change helps Google Analytics Premium customers analyze campaigns and ROI at the level that matters to them most, even down to specific versions of creative. It's even easier now to act on this data in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, since Google Analytics Premium uses the same campaign hierarchy and dimensions as DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

3. Greater speed

The integration with DoubleClick Campaign Manager means you can spend less time merging campaign data and more time planning winning strategies. We've also made this integration easier, starting with new automatic campaign tagging within DoubleClick for Google Analytics Premium. In the past you had to manually tag every single campaign, creative and landing page URL for them to be recognized in Google Analytics Premium. Now, in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, a simple checkbox makes it incredibly easy to accurately track those campaigns in Google Analytics Premium.

4. Automated and customized marketing

Advertisers are seeing great results with Google Analytics remarketing, for example, Watchfinder revealed a 1300% return on their campaign investment. We’re improving these tools by enabling you to create granular remarketing lists from your Google Analytics Premium account and then share the lists with a DoubleClick Bid Manager advertiser account for real-time remarketing. Plus, Google Analytics Smart Lists feature also works with this integration, allowing you to generate a remarketing list of your best users automatically, based on machine learning from their conversion data.

We added Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration this year in order to further optimize our strongest lead generating campaigns. 70% of our display leads come from our retargeting campaigns, and the Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager integration allows us to move beyond optimizing by site and creative, to quickly personalizing creatives - optimizing using our knowledge of distinct visitor segments not just generic visits.

- Melissa Shusterman, Strategic Engagement Director, MaassMedia

The amazing changes in customer journeys are opening up real opportunities for businesses. Making the most of those opportunities starts with seeing the journey more clearly, then reacting quickly to reach the right customers at the right moments with messages that are designed just for them. This new integration is designed to help Google Analytics Premium customers do all those things. We’re just getting started as we’re planning deeper integrations within DoubleClick Digital Marketing in the coming months so stay tuned!

Learn more today and get started

Find out more about the Google Analytics Premium integrations with DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. And download a case study.

Posted by: Ravi Mruthyunjaya, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Join us for a conversation on the future of digital advertising

Melissa Horwitz — Thu, 08 May 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Digital is no longer just another marketing channel. It’s a medium that’s changing the art of storytelling and reinventing the way companies connect with consumers.

How will digital advertising evolve next? You’re invited to tune in live as industry leaders tackle the question at DoubleClick’s annual event on digital trends.

Speakers include:

Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation
Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer at Google
Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising at Google

Wednesday, June 4

9:30 am PDT - 10:45 am PDT / 12:30 pm EDT - 1:45 pm EDT

Time not convenient? When you register you’ll receive a link to watch the recording on demand.

We hope you can join!

Here’s footage from last year’s event to give you a taste of the 2014 live stream:

Insights at your fingertips, for more effective campaigns

Melissa Horwitz — Tue, 06 May 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Today we are excited to announce Insights, a brand new, beautiful reporting tool that provides marketers and agencies with auto-generated insights about campaign performance across channels to help optimize future campaigns.

To ensure their messages are seen by the right users, today, advertisers spend hours analyzing data, or digging through spreadsheets to find meaningful campaign insights. It shouldn’t be this way. In today’s constantly connected world, where we reach consumers across many screens and channels, real-time, actionable insights are more critical than ever. However, fragmented tools and reporting are major pain points that prevent this, according to a study conducted with the Boston Consulting Group.

Actionable insights at a glance

The Insights tool allows advertisers to view campaign performance at a glance, without having to dig through data or build complex reports manually. You can learn about campaign factors that you undervalued, or ones you may have overlooked. This new tool helps you answer questions like:

Which publisher had the lowest cost-per-action (CPA) in previous campaigns for the same advertiser?
What time of day generates the highest cost-per-click (CPC)?
How does campaign performance vary by mobile platform?
Do certain creatives perform better on certain browsers?
Am I maximizing exposure on high-performing placements?

Interactive design for faster and more efficient media planning

Real-time visualizations and graphs replace manual spreadsheets, showing you detailed information faster. The new Insights tool in reporting is highly interactive, with the ability to drill down based on the following:

Dimensions

Publisher; Placement; Creative; Geo; Platform type; Browser

Goals

Click-through rate; Cost per click; Conversions per impression; Conversions per click; Cost per activity; Rich media interaction rate; Rich media click rate; Video completion rate

Over the coming weeks and months, you will see more and more dimensions added into the tool that will help you surface key insights for smarter campaign management.

Insights across channels

This new tool includes data across both reservations and programmatic buys. Today, the data is presented together across channels, and in the coming months, we will provide data that is broken out between your reservations and programmatic buys.

Matthew McIntyre, Senior Media Manager at Unique Digital, told us about the benefits they are seeing with the new tool:

“The new Insights tool is really exciting for us as an agency because it lets us see where and how we can make improvements in our campaigns almost immediately. The customizable goals and visualizations allow us to tailor the dashboard for every campaign and instantly make decisions which will drive better results for our clients. The insight provided on performance gives our planners more time and clearer data to make future media plans faster and with more clarity on how to drive the best performance.”

Our goal with DoubleClick Digital Marketing is to integrate your digital marketing efforts seamlessly, so your teams can effectively manage your cross-channel campaigns. With data that is fresh, de-duplicated, and auto-generated, the Insights tool takes us a step closer to this goal.

Insights is available to all DoubleClick Campaign Manager customers, globally, so if you’re still using DoubleClick for Advertisers, ask your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

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

Posted by Oren Mor, Product Manager, DoubleClick

Making digital marketing faster and simpler with the new trafficking workflow

Melissa Horwitz — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 14:30:00 +0000

Before the new year, we discussed a number of new capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, like the audience features that allow you more deeply understand your customers, and the integrations that help streamline the tagging process. Today, we’re going to deep dive into the area that makes the execution of all of these capabilities possible: the new trafficking workflow.

Trafficking can be one of the most labor-intensive aspects of managing digital campaigns. In fact, of the 25+ pain points agencies and marketers have across the campaign life cycle, many involve manual work like difficult-to-edit data entry and quality checks, according to a Boston Consulting Group study. Reducing the time spent on inefficient activities is crucial to maintaining a competitive advantage. We completely re-imagined the workflow that agencies and marketers use to traffic their campaigns by building a faster and more intuitive interface:

Simplifying cross-screen campaigns:

You no longer have to create separate ads and placements for mobile devices. Mobile is now a natural extension of your campaigns, with one campaign for all screens.
Additional mobile targeting features — Platform Type, Operating System and Version, Connection Type, Mobile Carrier and Browser — enable you to serve the right message to the right user.
With HTML5 support, so you can create just one HTML5 creative that will serve across devices and automatically adjust to the corresponding ad size.

Faster and sleeker interface:

The user interface loads in a fraction of a second, and it’s up to five times faster than DFA in responding to your actions.
Campaign changes go live in just minutes, whether it’s changing ad targeting or updating creatives. With a faster time-to-live window, you can QA and modify campaigns and rest assured they’ll go live in a fraction of the time.

Easier to use with a redesigned workflow:

A single-page view of all campaign elements allows you to see placement, ad, creative, and tag information in one place. You no longer need to flip through multiple tabs and risk losing your place while navigating across your campaigns.
Efficient assignment workflow makes it much easier to assign multiple placements, ads, and creatives all at once. In fact, the number of clicks to perform common trafficking tasks has been reduced by several orders of magnitude.
Bulk edits allow you to change multiple object properties at once, significantly reducing the amount of time it takes to make changes to your campaigns. For example, with bulk name editing, you can make mass naming convention changes, like adding a prefix or suffix, across multiple entities in seconds. And with in-line edits, it’s easier to edit placements, ads, and creative details from the campaign view, without going to a property page.
Event tags help you streamline the process of applying and managing pixels in bulk across campaigns or groups of campaigns.
You can customize and save your campaign view to your workflow needs, with any combination or grouping of columns. This makes it easy to work your own way.
Built-in reporting dimensions make it easy to QA campaigns, with impression and click data directly in the trafficking interface.
A new timezone selector makes it easy to traffic global campaigns without manual time conversions.

Power users from Situation Interactive - Mara Winkler, Senior Media Planner, and Joyce Tse, Media Coordinator - told us about the benefits they’re seeing from using the new trafficking interface: “With the upgrade to DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we’ve been able to streamline the trafficking process. The new trafficking workflow makes it easy to edit everything without switching pages, and allows us to use our time more efficiently. For example, when we swap creative it’s an extremely easy and intuitive process, and changes are reflected almost immediately. This helps us to ensure that the correct creative is running at all times.”

Watch the webinar, under “Learn about DCM”, where we live demoed these new features, and many more.

If you're an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Ian Fulton, Product Manager

Exploring the value of integrated digital marketing platforms

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Today, marketers and agencies have countless opportunities to engage audiences with rich formats across channels and devices. And to help them capture the full opportunity, they have an abundance of ad technology solutions to choose from. In fact, the average number of ad tech platforms deployed by organizations grew from 4.3 to 4.7 this year.¹

But marketers also know the real opportunity lies in creating unified, cross-channel digital experiences that span multiple touchpoints. 75% of marketers and agencies believe that an integrated platform can meet all their marketing needs - a 23% increase from 2012. And they believe the benefits range from improved customer insights, better campaign performance, and more efficient use of marketing resources.

In our new collection of insights, “Exploring the Value of Integrated Platforms,” you can see how top marketers and agencies are approaching unified buying to transform their businesses and maximize the impact of their marketing. In this collection, you can see how marketers are investing in integrated ad technology platforms to unlock the full potential of digital marketing for their organizations. We look at the latest trends in adoption, case studies and perspectives from industry leaders to answer questions like: What do today’s organizations want from digital marketing platforms? What is the value of an integrated digital platform? How are marketers investing in newly available technologies? How are they measuring success?

In the coming weeks, we will add more research, best practices and perspectives to the collection. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

1 "Unraveling the Digital Display Industry: Understanding the Tools and Benefits of Digital Marketing", DoubleClick by Google, Dec. 2013

Making tagging easy in DoubleClick Campaign Manager

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 14:45:00 +0000

Last week we dove into the new audience capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager that enable you to define, reach, and more deeply understand your customers. Tags plays a critical role in this process, as they allow you to track and measure the impact of your advertising. Today, we’ll dive into how we’re making tagging a much easier and more streamlined part of your digital marketing campaign management.

As it stands today, tagging is one of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of digital campaign management. In fact, on average, marketers host 14 tags on their sites, 68% of which are third-party. Implementing these tags often involves back-and-forth emails, implementation that can take weeks or months, and a lack of transparency about which tags are installed where. And when tags are implemented incorrectly, it can cause further campaign delays and additional implementation cycles.

We recently introduced two features that will greatly reduce the inefficiencies involved in tagging your campaigns: DoubleClick’s integration with Google Tag Manager, and Tag Assistant.

Making conversion tagging easy with Google Tag Manager integration

To streamline the conversion tagging process, DoubleClick Campaign Manager is now integrated with Google Tag Manager, Google’s free tag management solution. With Google Tag Manager, rather than implementing many individual tags across your site, you can implement one site-wide container tag that uses rules to determine which Google and third-party tracking and measurement tags to dynamically fire. The integration allows you to easily push DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag - Floodlight - directly to Google Tag Manager, making tag deployment faster and and more efficient, while still respecting current campaign management roles.

Deploy tags more quickly: You can push Floodlight tags with one click to Google Tag Manager, reducing implementation time from weeks or even months to minutes. This means you’ll save time, and your campaigns can go live faster. Once your tags are implemented, you can update them in the Google Tag Manager interface in minutes, and you will see these tags deployed on your site within 15 minutes or less. The tags are fired asynchronously, which means they load without blocking other elements on the page from loading, enabling sites to load faster during high-traffic times.

Implement tags more efficiently: With Google Tag Manager, you can rest assured your conversion tags are implemented correctly, as there is only one site-wide contain tag to implement. This helps reduce human error and ensures accurate data is recorded, thanks to rules within Google Tag Manager that determine which tracking and measurement tags to dynamically fire. And you will be able to deploy Floodlight tags across both mobile and desktop pages, making the experience consistent across all devices.

Respect tagging roles: We recognize that different roles within your organization may be responsible for each step of the tagging process. Our goal with this integration was to respect these roles and give you tools to implement tags correctly as quickly as possible. Advertisers still have control over which conversion tags are pushed to Google Tag Manager, and webmasters still have control over which tags go on the page, as they can approve or reject tags within Google Tag Manager.

Simplifying ad tagging with Tag Assistant

Beyond simplifying conversion tagging, we’re also improving how you implement ad tags. One of these initiatives is Tag Assistant, which aims at simplifying the QA process.

Tag Assistant is a Chrome extension that automatically validates the implementation of Google tags on any of your pages. The tool is designed for you to checks tags on the fly and escalate more complex or in-depth issues to support teams.

How it works: Tag Assistant has a predefined list of implementation checks to perform for each tag. When the web page loads, Tag Assistant scans the page, compares your tag implementation against the correct/standard implementation, and cross-references the list of implementation checks. If your tag is implemented correctly, Tag Assistant returns a green status. When a problem is found, a red status is returned along with recommendations and support documentation. The tool not only supports DoubleClick ad tags, but Google Tag Manager, AdWords, and Google Analytics tags as well.

A deep dive into the new audience features in DoubleClick Campaign Manager

Melissa Horwitz — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Understanding your audience is key to delivering them relevant and compelling messages. In DoubleClick Campaign Manager - the upgraded version of DFA - there are a number of new capabilities to help you define, reach, and more deeply understand your audience, so you can engage them in even more powerful ways. We announced some of these audience features when DoubleClick Campaign Manager launched globally, and today we are going to deep dive into the capabilities.

Define your audience with powerful segmentation tools

With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, you can build segments to define your target audience based on specific actions your customers took, like viewing a certain product on your website, or adding items to their shopping cart. You can also build segments based on combinations of data available in Floodlight custom variables. For example, you can segment users with cart values over a certain amount but who did not check out. Best of all, we’ve enabled existing Floodlight tags to be compatible with building segments, so there’s no need to re-tag in order to take advantage of these features.

Reach your audience with powerful targeting tools

Once you’ve built your audience segments, you can leverage them in real time across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. Segments are shared and synced automatically with DoubleClick Bid Manager, allowing you to apply audience insights to engage your audience across your reserved and programmatic buys. For example, you can combine your first-party segments with powerful keyword-contextual and audience targeting capabilities available in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

And with Dynamic Creative pushed from DoubleClick Studio, a single ad template can support millions of iterations, rotating creative elements like background color, headlines, product images, product descriptions, calls-to-action, and pricing. We optimize to the best combination of variables for each audience segment over time, providing the “perfect ad” for each impression.

Understand your audience with deeper insights

Surfacing strategic insights is crucial for optimizing your campaigns. So we introduced new audience performance reporting that brings audience dimensions to all standard reports. This means all campaign metrics, such as clicks or impressions, can be aggregated or filtered by audience characteristics or specific first-party lists. These reports help you answer questions like, “Did my publisher deliver to the audience that we wanted to target?” and “How many impressions did I deliver to my first-party remarketing list versus everywhere else?” As a result, you can better understand the audience segments with which your message resonated most, and use that information to optimize your campaigns.

DoubleClick Bid Manager customers can also report on audience segments created as part of their reservations buy (and see how they overlap with their third-party lists) with the Audience Composition Report available in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

We are continuing to build powerful audience capabilities into DoubleClick Campaign Manager that enable marketers and agencies to deliver the right message to the right user, on any device.

Next week, join us for a deep dive on the tagging capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Adam Champy, Product Manager

What industry leaders value in a digital marketing platform

Melissa Horwitz — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 16:15:00 +0000

A few months ago, we launched the new version of DFA - DoubleClick Campaign Manager - globally.

The launch coincided with DFA’s 15th anniversary, so we wanted to use this opportunity to hear from some of our longtime partners. Surely, the world has changed since the early days of DFA, 15 years ago. With new opportunities to reach consumers in more ways than ever, come many new challenges for digital marketers. And marketing platforms must continuously evolve to meet the demands of a shifting and ever-growing industry.

We asked industry leaders Kurt Unkel, President of Product & Solutions at VivaKi, Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, and Angelina Eng, VP of Digital Media Ops at Carat what they value in a platform in this day and age, and how DoubleClick has evolved to address those needs. Here’s what they told us:

Efficiency, reliability, and simplicity are crucial to helping marketers streamline the campaign management process. Kurt Unkel said, ”What we get with DoubleClick that we struggle to see anywhere else is simplicity - the ability to integrate a lot of disparate technologies into a common stack. That’s something that really makes a difference in our business, because it allows us to focus on the bigger, strategic things.”
Marketers need integration across channels and screens, and to be able to track and execute across their efforts within one system. Angelina Eng notes, “When we talk about all of these different things that are coming out - verification, video, mobile - how do make that work all together? A company that’s embracing that is one that we want to work with.”
Platforms must help marketers gain more actionable insights and act on them in real-time. “We have almost too much data at our disposal,” Megan Moldovan tells us, “and it can sometimes be hard to sift through all of that information and understand what it really means, and particularly understand what everything means when you look at it together.”

With DoubleClick, we are investing in tools to help your digital teams work more efficiently to maximize your results across channels and screens.

In the coming weeks and months we will deep dive into many of the new product features available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Stay tuned to the blog to learn about the new tools that will simplify digital, help you engage across channels, and enable better decisions.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

Introducing an all-new DFA: DoubleClick Campaign Manager

Melissa Horwitz — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 09:08:00 +0000

The phase of adolescence is a transitional one, and this year, on the 15th anniversary of DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) we find ourselves celebrating a big milestone: an entirely rebuilt campaign management platform for marketers and agencies, the coming of age of DFA. In June, we announced that DoubleClick Campaign Manager would be available to all advertisers in the coming months, and today I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched globally.

DoubleClick Campaign Manager is at the core of our DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. It re-imagines how marketers and agencies manage the entire scope of their digital marketing efforts - from planning and executing, to measuring and optimizing their campaigns.

Intuitive workflows that give you back time. With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we started by building new, time-saving features into a noticeably more beautiful and responsive user interface. This means the time gained from speeding things up can free up opportunities for you and your team to work on higher-value activities.

A new trafficking interface loads up to 5 times faster than before, and ads and ad changes now go live in just 2 minutes. You can also view campaign information centrally from a single page, rather than flipping across tabs. With in-line and bulk editing, we’ve greatly reduced the number of clicks to perform common trafficking tasks.

Easy tagging. Floodlight, DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag is integrated with Google Tag Manager. Now, you can push Floodlight tags directly from DoubleClick Campaign Manager to Google Tag Manager (and your site), reducing the time it takes to implement tags from weeks, to minutes.

Programmatic and reservations in one place. With one unified UI and reporting system across DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, you get access to accurate, de-duplicated conversion data. Creatives and tags are shared, and remarketing lists are synced so you can engage your audience seamlessly across every part of your buy.

Seamless support for mobile/HTML5, video, and rich media formats. DoubleClick Campaign Manager makes it easier to produce, scale, and traffic creative formats - from mobile and video, to rich media and dynamic.

A mobile-first approach. Mobile is built into the fabric of our platform. Support for IAB-compliant HTML5 creatives means a single creative can render on any device and help you take advantage of the engaging, rich-media capabilities of HTML5. We’ve ensured that your tags work everywhere too. There is no longer a separate mobile tag, and mobile targeting and reporting dimensions are automatically available in all served tags.

Powerful video features. An intuitive approach to video trafficking allows you to share and re-use companion ads across videos, and get a detailed performance breakdown. And support for the next wave of video formats - including interactive video and dynamic VPAID - helps you deliver more engaging videos. Additionally, you can now track your YouTube TrueView campaigns alongside all your other placements, allowing for more holistic insights.

Easier Rich Media. Integration with DoubleClick Studio allows you to easily sync creatives into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, saving you time and effort. New preview functionality allows you to test and QA creatives without relying on your creative agency. And you can create ads that are tailored to your audience with dynamic creative that optimizes the best combination of variables to serve the “perfect ad” for every impression.

New audience features help you surface key insights and optimize campaigns for better performance.

Create powerful remarketing lists based on custom Floodlight variables. Your lists are automatically shared with DoubleClick Bid Manager and updated in real-time, helping you establish second contact with your audience quickly.

New audience reporting gives you strategic insights. Audience is now a new dimension in standard reporting, so you can understand the segments with which your message best resonated. If you use DoubleClick Bid Manager, audience composition reporting shows you how your first party lists overlap with your third party lists. We will be bringing this capability to all customers soon.

Enhancements in reporting for better decisions. Reporting has always been the backbone of the DoubleClick platform, with de-duplicated reporting across channels. We built on this foundation last year with Report Builder, Multi-Channel Funnels, and DoubleClick Verification. Now, with DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we bring you even more insightful reporting tools:

Powerful attribution with Multi-Channel Funnels helps you better understand your customers’ journey from initial interaction to final conversion and more accurately credit the channels and touchpoints that contributed to your conversions. With the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can choose from several basic models of assigning credit for impressions and clicks, or you can create your own model in a way that makes the most sense for your business.

Integration of Wildfire’s social technology platform with the DoubleClick attribution suite means you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in driving social conversions. Additionally, social ad impressions and clicks can be tracked directly in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, allowing you to measure your social programs alongside the rest of your efforts.

When DoubleClick for Advertisers was founded in 1998, we invested in the promise that digital can forge connections and bring value to advertisers, publishers and users. Today, as we celebrate its 15th anniversary, we’re excited to be investing in the next wave of digital marketing where we are even more connected than ever before.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

Payam Shodjai

Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick Campaign Manager