Google Data

Today we're happy to announce the general availability of DoubleClick Network Builder, a complete toolkit for building and managing networks of partner sites to create new revenue opportunities, expand reach and increase efficiency.

We first introduced this initiative a little over a year ago in response to the audience fragmentation challenge facing many of our publisher clients. This challenge is even more pronounced today. The overall number of websites and blogs has continued to grow in tandem with online audiences, increasingly fragmenting consumer time and attention across more and more online destinations. In response, many publishers continue to leverage their brands to build vertical networks of partner sites to expand their overall reach and grow advertising inventory.

With the potential revenue opportunity that vertical networks offer also comes a number of operational challenges. These include efficiently managing network inventory, partner management, billing and reconciliation and reporting. In our customer surveys, publishers also expressed the need for better inventory forecasting and reporting that was more tightly integrated with the systems they were already using to sell their owned and operated content. Similarly, our ad network customers voiced the need for a better solution to manage their numerous and often complex partner relationships and inventory.

With these needs in mind, we built DoubleClick Network Builder to provide a comprehensive solution for brand-name publishers and ad networks to solve many of the challenges involved in managing networks including:

• Integration with core ad systems - Seamless integration with our DART for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform unifies data and workflow across both owned and operated content as well as partner sites. This streamlines and enhances key sales and operations tasks including inventory packaging, forecasting, reporting, and trafficking. Publishers also benefit from DFP's industry-leading reliability, scalability, and service.
• Efficient network management and control - We designed DoubleClick Network Builder to help increase efficiency and visibility through intuitive partner management, automated tag generation, simplified network inventory setup, and extensive controls for revenue adjustments.
• Managing partner relationships - DoubleClick Network Builder's partner portal allows large publishers and networks to more easily provide the service and transparency needed to retain partners, enabling more rapid and profitable network growth. The partner portal provides partners with the ability to login and view their sites' performance, access detailed reporting, pick-up tags and receive messages from the network.
• Managing complex financial reporting and partner payments - DoubleClick Network Builder's revenue and financial reporting can help publishers drastically simplify the partner payment process and improve overall profitability. DoubleClick Network Builder gives publishers the flexibility to accommodate a number of complex partner financial terms and features a complete set of reconciliation tools including expense deductions and partner payout calculations. The product's detailed revenue reporting makes it easy to monitor the performance of site partners and provide visibility across the network and for each individual partner.

Since October 2008, we have been testing a beta version of DoubleClick Network Builder with a number of premium publishers and networks, including Real Girls Media and InvestingChannel. These publishers realized a number of immediate benefits including significant improvements in the efficiency and accuracy of their network operations, enabling more rapid growth. Today, we're excited to extend these benefits by making DoubleClick Network Builder available to all publishers using our DART for Publishers ad serving platform. If you're a publisher who is ready to start using DoubleClick Network Builder to help create and manage your network, contact your DoubleClick account manager or click here to learn more. If you aren't already a DoubleClick client, please contact us here.

Posted by Rany Ng