advertisers | Google Data

Reach holiday shoppers at scale with DoubleClick Ad Exchange

November 20th, 2015 | by Stephen Kliff | published in Google DoubleClick

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

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

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

Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

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Google Helps You Shop Between Holiday Cooking and Tree Trimming

November 19th, 2015 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords

This fall, shopping-related searches on mobile surpassed desktop, signaling a shift from shopping marathons to shopping moments.¹ To help shoppers more easily discover, browse and buy on mobile this holiday season, we’ve redesigned Google Shopping to be incredibly fast, seamless, and intuitive.

Here’s a look at what’s new:

Helping shoppers narrow down options

Shoppers often don’t know the exact product they’re interested in — forty-percent of shopping searches are on broad terms — so they turn to search to discover and explore.² With the new mobile redesign, if a shopper searches for droids, we’ll show the most commonly searched categories to help her narrow down her search. Similarly, if she searches on Google Shopping for tricycles for kids, we’ll show tricycles grouped by attributes that people commonly shop by: features, brand, and price. This gives her the freedom to discover what she might want in a more organized way, while helping drive more qualified traffic to your site.

Browse by Scrolling and Swiping

Once a shopper’s narrowed down her options, she can now easily browse through lots and lots of products without having to load entirely new pages to see more. She can get a feel for a specific product, such as a Lego Starwars Turbo Tank, that she’s interested in by tapping on the product, flipping through images, skimming reviews and scanning product info. She can easily swipe to the next product or dig deeper into specs, features, and even videos to learn more about what you offer.

When she knows exactly what she wants, and searches for a chromecast, for example, we’ll surface more information upfront. She can see which merchants carry the product, which stores have it in-stock, and also get a quick glance at reviews and manufacturer details.

Driving shoppers In-store

Lastly, if she’s out and about it’s important for her to know what products are available nearby. One in four people who avoid stores do so because they don’t know if a product is in-stock.³ Now, if she searches for olaf toys near me or applies the available nearby filter, we’ll show a map of stores closest to her with the toy in-stock.

This new mobile experience makes it easier for shoppers to discover and explore products. To make sure they’re browsing and exploring your products, follow the tips in our Holiday Shopping Readiness and Holiday Shopping Survival guides.

Happy Holidays!

Posted by Karen Corby, Senior Product Manager, Google Shopping

¹Google Internal Data, shopping-related searches defined by those that trigger a Shopping ad, October 2015.
²Google Data, anonymized, aggregated searches that trigger a Product Listing Ad, US, November, 2015.
³Google, Ipsos MediaCT and Sterling Brands, Digital Impact on In-Store Shopping, Published on Think with Google, May 2014.

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New ways to reach your audience in DoubleClick Bid Manager

November 18th, 2015 | by Andrea | published in Google DoubleClick

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

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

Reach customers throughout all stages of the purchase funnel

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

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

Audience solutions in action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Maithreyi Raman
Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager

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The Google Display Network ups its commitment to viewability

November 17th, 2015 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords

For years, brand advertisers have been looking for ways to ensure their online ads are seen. This can be difficult — 56% of all display ads and 46% of all video ads aren’t viewable because they’re below the fold, scrolled out of view, or in a background tab. For several years, we’ve been working to help advertisers address this challenge and today we are introducing 3 key improvements: the upgrade of all CPM campaigns to viewable CPM campaigns; new viewable frequency capping; and supplementary reporting metrics built on the viewability standard.

All CPM campaigns are now viewable CPM campaigns
As we announced in September, we’re furthering our commitment to make viewability the currency of digital advertising by upgrading all CPM campaigns on the GDN to viewable CPM (vCPM) campaigns. We’ve now completed this upgrade, making the Google Display Network (GDN) one of the only media platforms where advertisers don’t pay for an impression unless it’s actually viewable by a user.

Viewable CPM (vCPM) buying was launched in AdWords in 2013 so advertisers could choose to only pay for display and video impressions that meet the MRC defined industry standard for viewability. Fifty percent or more of the ad must appear on screen — for at least 1 second for display ads and 2 seconds for video ads, as measured by Google’s Active View technology. This year, tens of billions of impressions were filtered out before ever being charged to AdWords advertisers because they didn’t meet this standard.

Viewable CPM helps brand advertisers buy efficiently and reach their campaign goals:

Devialet, an audio equipment company based in Paris, wanted to make more consumers aware of its speakers and amplifiers. To broaden its reach, Devialet shifted its campaigns from CPC to vCPM. As a result, Devialet increased its viewable impressions per dollar by 49% and increased its average time spent on site by 50%.

New viewable frequency capping will give advertisers better control
Frequency capping helps you control how many times your ads appear to the same person. When unviewable impressions are counted toward a frequency cap, a user may not see your ad as many times as you intended.

Starting in the next few weeks, frequency capping will only count viewable impressions for display and video campaigns in AdWords. This will help advertisers maintain better control over how often their ads are actually viewable to users. To learn more about setting a frequency cap, visit the Help Center.

New reporting metrics give a better picture of campaign performance
To give advertisers a better picture of how their display and video campaigns are performing, we’ve added supplementary metrics built on the viewability standard, such as:

Total impressions that were viewable
Percentage of impressions that were viewable
Percentage of viewable ads that were clicked

These metrics give advertisers more clarity on which placements and creatives are driving campaign performance when they are viewable to users.

We’ve long advocated for the adoption of viewability as a common currency to help marketers and publishers work together transparently, efficiently, and with accountability. This is another important step along that journey.

Posted by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager, AdWords

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Dynamic creative comes to Google Web Designer

November 17th, 2015 | by Stephen Kliff | published in Google DoubleClick

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

Streamlining production of dynamic creative in Google Web Designer

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming Google Web Designer Hangout on Air

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

Wednesday, Dec. 9th @ 12pm ET / 9am PT. RSVP here
Thursday, Dec. 10th @ 5pm PT / Friday, Dec. 11th @ 12pm Sydney time (APAC Friendly time) RSVP here

Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

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Capture more holiday traffic with click share for Google Shopping

November 16th, 2015 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords

More shoppers are turning to online shopping with each holiday season, increasing the opportunity for you to attract shoppers to your online store. Today we’re launching click share to better help you identify when you’re missing out on traffic. Click share is a new metric that shows the percentage of total possible clicks received by your Shopping ads.

Click share metric for product groups

Let’s walk through an example of how to use click share to identify product groups with potential for more traffic to ensure your ads show prominently enough to maximize traffic to your site on Black Friday. First, add the click share column on the Product groups tab. In this example, you see “winter coats” with a click share of 30%. This means that you only got 30 out of every 100 possible clicks on your “winter coats” ads. Second, take this opportunity to adjust your bids for “winter coats” to make them more prominent. Third, make sure to check back frequently, especially for your most popular products, to closely monitor click share and continue to optimize bids.

There is more you can do to ensure holiday success. In addition to driving traffic, you’ll want to fine-tune your campaigns to reach new shoppers and drive sales. We’ve created two holiday checklists to help you manage your campaigns over the coming weeks and through the new year:

Holiday Readiness Checklist: Get your Shopping campaigns Black Friday-ready to connect with shoppers at the moments that matter and convert them into customers
Holiday Survival Checklist: Follow this checklist to make mid-flight changes to your campaigns and learn how to adjust bids for new trending products

By taking these lists and checking them twice, and tuning your campaigns based on click share insights, you can increase sales this season…and have a happier holiday!

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager, Google Shopping

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Drive sales and app downloads with video this holiday season

November 16th, 2015 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords, Youtube

The holiday shopping season is upon us once again, and advertisers are at the ready to make sure it’s their products that fly off the shelves. And this holiday, video will play a bigger role than ever in how those products fly off the shelves. Across a wide range of brands and categories, we’re seeing the power of TrueView video for driving consumer intent in addition to driving awareness. In a recent analysis of TrueView campaigns, 57% of campaigns saw lift in consideration and 24% saw a lift in favorability. Plus, 35% of campaigns saw a lift in purchase intent.¹

Video can be an incredibly powerful tool in creating demand for your products. So over the past year, we’ve focused on creating tools on YouTube to help you connect the dots between inspiration and purchase. Today, we’re making these tools readily available to advertisers through AdWords. Here is a rundown of the features we’re launching.

New campaign set-up tailored to your marketing objectives
Setting up a video campaign should be as simple as telling us what action you want consumers to take – and today we’re announcing a way to do that right at the start of the campaign creation process. Whether your end goal is to drive sales, app downloads or to generally build your brand, you can now declare these goals right up front. Further, we’ll tailor the rest of your campaign set-up and optimization for your chosen marketing objective.

Shopping campaign option

App promotion campaign option

Drive app downloads at your set price with target cost-per-acquisition bidding
The holiday season is incredibly important for app promotion, as consumers outfit their new devices with apps. To start an app promotion campaign with video, select the new “app promotion” option to access settings specifically tailored for promoting apps. You can now use target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding, which lets you define the amount you’re willing to pay for a conversion, and then automatically sets your bids to give you as many conversions as possible at that price.

Clients participating in our beta have seen great results, including Com2us, the maker of the game Summoners War, whose Marketing Manager Eric Cho had this to say:

“At Com2us, we use TrueView for app promotion to acquire new app customers at scale across Europe, the Americas and Southeast Asia. Our campaigns are exceeding expectations around volume while maintaining our ROI goals. Target CPA bidding has allowed us to achieve our goals on Android and we look forward to expanding in the future.”

Target CPA bidding

New shopping formats now available in AdWords
And today, two powerful performance-oriented formats are available to all advertisers – both TrueView for Shopping and Shopping ads on YouTube are now available in AdWords.

TrueView for Shopping campaigns create interactive video ads that highlight the value of your products and drive consideration. These TrueView video ads have actionable shopping cards embedded in them which provide an easy bridge to purchase for viewers. They are also a powerful audience solution, enabling you to remarket to viewers who may have visited your site or viewed your other videos.

TrueView for shopping

Shopping ads on YouTube work even lower in the funnel, by enabling shopping cards on creator videos that feature your products. This is a great way to capture demand when viewers are most interested in exploring and researching products. These also allow you to extend the reach of your Shopping campaigns beyond www.google.com.

Shopping ads on YouTube

To extend your Shopping ads to YouTube, make sure your Shopping campaigns in AdWords are opted into search partners.

These new TrueView features are made possible thanks to our recent migration of TrueView video ads into the core AdWords front end, and represents only the first first step towards a simpler, goal-oriented video ad experience. Now get out there and drive some sales and app downloads with video!

Posted by Diya Jolly, Director, Video Ads Product Management

¹TrueView Brand Lift Meta Analysis of US Q3 2015 campaigns
Consideration n=708 studies
Favorability n=118 studies
Purchase intent n=211 studies

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Share Google Analytics data and remarketing lists more efficiently using manager accounts (MCC)

November 12th, 2015 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords, Google Analytics

From monitoring account performance at scale to making cross-account campaign changes, manager accounts help many of the most sophisticated AdWords advertisers get more done in less time. To deliver more insightful reporting and scale your remarketing efforts, we’re introducing two new enhancements to manager accounts: Google Analytics account linking, and remarketing tag and list sharing.

Access your data with a single link

You can now link your Google Analytics or Google Analytics Premium account directly to your AdWords manager account using the new setup wizard in AdWords under Account Settings. This streamlined workflow for linking accounts eliminates the need to link each of your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts individually.

Now when you import your goals, website metrics, remarketing lists, or other data from Google Analytics, you’ll only need to do it once. And whenever you add a new AdWords account to your manager account, it will automatically be linked with the same Analytics properties.

These enhancements save time so you can focus on optimizing your campaigns. You can learn more about linking your Google Analytics account into your manager account in the AdWords Help Center.

Scale your remarketing strategy

Many advertisers are seeing tremendous success re-engaging customers and finding new ones using Display remarketing, remarketing lists for search ads, and similar audiences. To help scale these efforts across the AdWords accounts you manage, you now have options for creating and sharing remarketing lists directly in your manager account from the new “Audiences” view, including any lists imported from Google Analytics or Customer Match.

You can also create remarketing lists using a manager-level remarketing tag and use them across your managed accounts. This eliminates the need to retag your website and manage multiple lists in each AdWords account. If any of your managed accounts have their own lists, they can be made available for use in your other managed accounts.

These enhancements make it easier and faster than ever before to get your remarketing strategy up and running. You can learn more about sharing remarketing tags and lists in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Vishal Goenka, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

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Active View updates: Improved cross-screen options for brands and publishers

November 11th, 2015 | by Stephen Kliff | published in Google DoubleClick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by:

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

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Jellyfish drives more online university students with DoubleClick Search

November 10th, 2015 | by Stephen Kliff | published in Google DoubleClick

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

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

Goals

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

Approach

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

Results

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

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

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

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New tools and insights to optimize your Shopping campaigns this holiday

November 9th, 2015 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords

Last month, we shared our 2015 holiday trends on how shoppers are preparing to shop early and throughout the holiday season. Though Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain key traffic drivers, mobile will make every day a shopping day. As a retailer, you’ll want to prepare your budgets and campaigns for peak traffic drivers but also optimize to reach shoppers throughout the holiday season.

To help you quickly analyze your Shopping campaigns and make the right adjustments, we’re launching a few new features just in time for the holidays:

Identify which product groups to optimize first

A product groups tab view at the campaign and account levels make it easier to compare performance and make changes across all product groups
Product groups filtering helps you select which product groups to optimize (e.g. those with the best cost-per-conversion) without needing to manually review all groups in your account

More insights to make better bidding decisions

Mobile bid adjustment simulator, launched earlier today is available at the campaign-level so you can size up your mobile opportunity as you change your mobile bid modifier
Conversion estimates included in bid simulator provide insight on how many conversions your ads may have received if a different bid was used
Performance metrics added to the subdivision dialog, like clicks and cost per conversion, to help you structure your product groups based on your performance

Let’s walk through how these will help you save time and make your holiday a little less crazy. Imagine you’re an apparel retailer, and you want to check-in on your campaigns a few days before Black Friday with plans to optimize your top selling products.

Firstly, shopping-related mobile searches have grown more than 120% year-over-year with no signs of slowing during the holidays.¹ You’ve noticed a similar surge in your mobile traffic as well. Use the mobile bid adjustment simulator to optimize your mobile bids at the campaign level to see how adjusting your mobile bids can help increase traffic to your mobile site.

Mobile bid adjustment simulator

Now you want to dive a little deeper to optimize your product groups. By taking a look at the product groups tab at the account-level, you use product group filters to identify the “jackets” product group as the product group with highest conversions and lowest cost-per-conversion. Knowing this, you decide optimize the “jackets” product group.

Product group filters at the account-level

A low cost per conversion for “jackets” is a sign that there’s opportunity to scale and increase sales volume. By taking a look at conversion estimates in the bid simulator, you see the impact your bid changes might have on your product group to drive additional conversions and set bid to the conversion level you’d like to get for “jackets.”

Conversion estimates in bid simulator

Lastly, you see site data that a few jacket brands are already gaining traction from shoppers during early-bird sales. You can find out which jacket brands are selling better in your ads by taking a look at performance columns in the product group subdivision dialogue. Sort by total conversions or low cost per conversion to get an idea of which brands require separate, higher bids.

Performance columns in product group subdivision dialogue

And that’s it! This should help you optimize throughout the holidays quickly and efficiently. Now you can get back to your own shopping moments and maybe find a gift for yourself for all your hard work!

For more information, visit our Help Center to learn more about Shopping campaigns, the mobile bid adjustment simulator, and product group filtering. Also check out other ways you can analyze and scale your optimizations using the dimensions tab and scripts.

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager, Google Shopping

¹Google Global search data Q3 2014-Q3 2015, as defined by searches that trigger Shopping ads

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Payment IDs now available in DoubleClick Ad Exchange

November 5th, 2015 | by Stephen Kliff | published in Google DoubleClick

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by:

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

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Investing in choice: New Viewability options on YouTube

November 3rd, 2015 | by Anish Kattukaran | published in Google DoubleClick

Cross-posted from the Google Agency Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bing Shopping Campaigns are now part of the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite

November 2nd, 2015 | by Stephen Kliff | published in Google DoubleClick

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Henry Tappen
Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

^{1 Merkle/RKG Digital Marketing Report for Q3 2015}

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DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays Series: Plan to get ready for next year

October 28th, 2015 | by Stephen Kliff | published in Google DoubleClick

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

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

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

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

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

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