Free Google White Paper Helps Buyers Benefit from Real-Time Bidding

In September 2009, the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange (ADX), built on Google technology, opened for business with support for real-time bidding (RTB). Since then, we’ve witnessed explosive growth in RTB. For example, RTB spend as a percent of spend on ADX has risen from 8% in January 2010 to 68% as of May 2011. Plus, the volume of impressions purchased via RTB for the first half of 2011 is 6.4x that of the first half of 2010.

At Google, we believe that the overall display advertising pie can get bigger and see RTB as one of the technologies that can help get us there. In February 2011, we did a “Real-Time Display Advertising State of the Industry Survey” with Digiday, which found that advertisers and agencies are reporting that they will spend more on digital advertising in 2011 because of the benefits of RTB.

To help buyers achieve the benefits they expect from RTB, we’ve published a white paper that shares our view of real-time bidding for online display advertising. Based on research and primary interviews with Google’s RTB experts across our product, sales and services organizations, this paper provides a clear definition of what real-time bidding is and how buyers can get involved with it. Whether you are a large or small advertiser, an agency or a trading desk or a media buying intermediary, Google would like to help you succeed with real-time bidding. We hope that this paper helps.

Download the free white paper (PDF)

Update posted 8/4/2011: Figure 1 in this white paper was missing the demand-side platform LucidMedia. We have now added them.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

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Going Beyond Placements with Ad Planner

Since its release DoubleClick Ad Planner has strived to simplify the display planning experience by helping you find the most relevant sites on the internet for your campaign. But even the best placements get extraneous impressions - folks who are unlikely to convert in a direct response campaign or outside the target audience for a brand. Why can’t you always reach the right people as well as the right placements? Well - now you can.

Here at Google we’ve been working on some novel technologies to enable audience based buying. Thanks to this effort audience buying is now available to all AdWords users. And today we’ve brought the ability to plan for an audience buy into Ad Planner. You can now select from over 1,000 interest categories across the more than 500 million daily users of the Google Display Network (GDN). Advertisers like ShoeDazzle have used audience buying on the GDN to improve conversion volume as much as 400% and interest targeting consistently shows CTR far greater than the display ad average. This phenomenal performance is driven by the power of Google audiences across the GDN.

Through Ad Planner you can now set up a campaign that will reach your users across the GDN regardless of the site they are on. That means greater ROI for advertisers who want to reach their audience at scale for brand or performance goals. This will also result in more meaningful, relevant ads for users, ultimately translating into higher conversion rates. And it means an easier time building the campaign by allowing you to focus on defining your audience rather than sorting through a list of sites and placements.

Log into Ad Planner and take a test drive on the new Audience Planning tab. While you’re doing that we’ll be working on the next set of exciting features for interest categories powered by Google.

Posted by Roshan Khan, Product Manager

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