Bid optimization series: Fast tools to make use of every opportunity

This is the fourth in a series of 7 blog posts about the DoubleClick Search bid optimization white paper, Seven Factors to Consider When Choosing a Bid Optimization Platform.

Last week, we explored the importance of using a smart bid optimization tool to choose the right bids for your keywords. But even smart bids can quickly become irrelevant in a dynamic search landscape. That's why "speed" is as important as "smarts" when it comes to effective bid management.

To learn more about the importance of fast search management platforms that execute quickly to make use of every opportunity, follow the full blog post series on the DoubleClick Search Blog.

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More investments for powerful, flexible, and fast reporting in DoubleClick Search

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog

With online advertising expanding across different ad formats, new devices, and multiple channels, it’s no surprise that reporting continues to be a challenge for marketers. In fact, 69% of business and technology leaders have pinpointed the inability to gather, understand, and act on all the data about their customers as a leading challenge(1). To answer this growing complexity, we at DoubleClick have been focusing on developing the right tools to power your business with all the insights you need. We’ve recently introduced ways we’re making reporting on all your data easy, to help drive insights exactly when you want them, where you want them. Today, we’re excited to announce 4 new features that build on this by ensuring important business data is accessible and actionable within DoubleClick Search: our offline conversions API, Google Analytics data integrations, Formula Columns, and Web Query support.

A few weeks ago, we announced Multi-channel funnels in DFA, which allows advertisers to quickly build, customize, and compare marketing attribution models. By creating and reviewing multiple models standard to the tool, DFA users will be able to more accurately assign value to the various advertising channels in their marketing campaigns. In DoubleClick Search, we debuted the availability of instant Floodlight conversion data for automatic, intra-day conversions in all DoubleClick Search reports, to bring you the freshest, most reliable campaign data.

Event API for easy offline conversion integration

DoubleClick Search already lets you leverage a variety of solutions to report on conversions, including our proprietary Floodlight tag, AdWords conversion tracking, or Google Analytics goals. But we understand that online advertising also fuels offline conversions. To capture these lost conversions and bring offline into your online world, we’re announcing the open beta of our Event API for uploading offline conversion automatically. Upload new conversions to account for in-store transactions, call-tracking, or other offline activities, or edit existing conversions to account for discounts, returns, credit, or fraud through integrated API access. Today, you can combine this information with our Performance Bidding Suite to optimize your campaigns based on even more of your business data.

Google Analytics website data, with the rest of your search

Couple this with the integration of Google Analytics metrics (beta), which incorporates statistics including bounce rate, page views, transactions, and revenue from Google Analytics, to get a clear picture of how search influences customer interaction on your website. These recent developments in reporting mean faster decision making with all your data holistically captured in DoubleClick Search -- all without mashing up and matching reports or worrying about the potential data drop off of reporting from separate tools. In the next few months, we’ll introduce the ability to use bid strategies with your website metrics, ensuring your campaign’s bid optimization is informed by important user engagement metrics.

Formula magic, directly in the interface

With this wealth of data at your fingertips, how do you more easily make sense of it all? In the past, you’d need to use a spreadsheet tool like Excel to create these calculated columns. Formula Columns lets you create your own customized columns, based on calculations that you apply to existing columns. Now, apply formulas directly in DS and streamline your workflow: track custom KPIs, re-express columns in your own terms, and calculate customized fees, costs, and weights, among other applications.

Web query for data, where you want it
And finally, when it comes to easily accessing all your important data right where you want it, we’re introducing Web query support: instead of scheduling or downloading a file to access your reports, DoubleClick Search now provides a URL that you can use to automatically download and refresh that report’s data -- directly in Excel. This makes it even easier for you to create common report templates in Excel and populate those with the latest DS data, removing the need to manually download and import reports.

Formula Columns, instant conversions, and Web Query support are are available now in DoubleClick Search. To learn more about the Event API or Google Analytics integration, please reach out to your Technical Account Manager, or our support team at ds-support@google.com.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search Team

1. Source: PricewaterCoopers (PwC), “4th Annual Digital IQ Survey,” Jan 31, 2012

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Making smarter decisions with fresh, reliable data

This is the second in a series of 7 blog posts about our bid optimization white paper, Seven factors to consider when choosing a bid optimization platform.

At Google, we recognize that the freshness and accuracy of data is paramount to any data-driven system. And since bid optimization platforms are essentially decision engines, data lies at the center of the process, with the engine considering and analyzing data before deciding on the best bid for a given keyword. It’s no surprise, then, that low-quality and stale data going in often means poor results coming out.

To learn about our position on the quality of fresh data in the bid optimization process, and how the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite fits in, follow the full blog post series on the DoubleClick Search Blog.

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Get your DoubleClick Search Fundamentals Certification!

Before jumping into managing search campaigns with any SEM tool, you’ll want to make sure that you and your teams can demonstrate proficiency with the right workflows and techniques to effectively manage large-scale search campaigns.

With this need in mind, we are pleased to announce the DoubleClick Search (DS) Fundamentals online training certification course for new users looking to learn the fundamentals of DoubleClick Search. This self-paced, interactive, online course allows a new user to ramp up on DS basics quickly.

The training modules use interactive graphics, videos, and guided tutorials to teach campaign management, reporting, and the Performance Bidding Suite for bid optimization. After completing the course, trainees take a quiz, and if they pass, will receive a certificate of achievement showcasing their proficiency with DS.





After completing and passing the full program, the trainee should feel comfortable launching and managing a search campaign, analyzing performance through reports, and creating bidding goals through the Performance Bidding Suite.

DS Fundamentals online training certification is offered in English and will be available in multiple languages soon. You can register here (sign-in required; click the link, then locate “DS Fundamentals” course at the top of the Search Results).

For more information on DoubleClick Search, visit our website: www.doubleclick.com/search

Posted by the DoubleClick Search Team

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Programmatic in the future: What publishers think

In our second edition of 'Programmatic in the future', join us tomorrow, 12/6 at 1:30ET/10:30PT as Mario Diez, CEO at Quadrant One, the industry’s premier private exchange marketplace, weighs in on what the potential of this technology is for publishers and advertisers everywhere. Log into your Google+ account and look for the Hangout on Air in the Think with Google +page stream. Hit the play button to tune in.

Last week, Curt Hecht, Chief Revenue Officer at The Weather Company, shared his views on on the value of transacting through programmatic channels in a conversation with Rob Beeler, Content Czar at AdMonsters.

In case you missed it, here’s what he had to say:




Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

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Attend an upcoming DoubleClick Bid Manager Training Webinar

Doubleclick Bid Manager: Overview for New Users
Tuesday, December 11th, 2012 – 11:00am - 12:30pm EST
Wednesday, January 16th, 2013 – 12:30pm - 2:00pm EST
Wednesday, February 6th, 2013 – 6:00pm - 7:30pm EST

Join us for a live webinar covering the fundamentals of DoubleClick Bid Manager. This two-hour session will go through the steps to build a new campaign. If you have recently upgraded to Doubleclick Bid Manager, will upgrade soon, or are new to the system, this webinar is a great place to begin. Please register in the DoubleClick Bid Manager Help Center.

DoubleClick Bid Manager: Reporting
Thursday, December 13th, 2012 – 10:30am - 12:00pm EST
Thursday, January 17th, 2013 – 3:00pm - 4:30pm EST
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 – 6:30pm - 8:00pm EST

Please join our 1.5 hour live webinar on generating reports and reading inline statistics in DoubleClick Bid Manager. We will discuss how these reports can help you optimize prospecting, audience, and remarketing campaigns. If you run reports, review data, or make optimizations, this session is for you. This is also useful for anyone who will soon upgrade from Invite Media to DoubleClick Bid Manager. Please register in the DoubleClick Bid Manager Help Center.

Posted by Molly Larrison, DoubleClick Bid Manager Product Trainer

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Case Study: DoubleClick Ad Exchange helps Media6Degrees find the safest inventory for brand advertisers

Brand advertisers want to know that the inventory they are buying is safe, clean, and high quality. We take this very seriously at Google and employ both cutting edge technology and human review to ensure that DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) can offer the best environment to our buyers. We’re not alone in this fight. Media6Degrees has developed a proprietary system to filter out suspicious activity to protect their clients’ brands and we’re happy to say it validates AdX’s inventory quality. Brand advertisers who want to make sure their programmatic campaigns are running on safe and reliable traffic can look to DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Media6Degrees.

Finding the right customers -- at scale
Major M6D clients who buy media at scale -- brands like Verizon, Disney, Hyundai and Adobe -- rely on M6D and AdX to make sure they reach the right audience. For brands like these, placing their ads only on the best-quality inventory is paramount.

To find the right audience and the safest traffic, M6D relies on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. "We help marketers drive scale in online media campaigns," says Alec Greenberg, VP of Media Operations for M6D. "Once our platform identifies the audience that matches the brand signal of a client, that's where AdX comes in. I want to buy the best targeting inventory and not worry about what is or isn't clean," says Greenberg. “AdX delivers. It's clean inventory and a ton of volume.”

Screening out invalid activity
"Earlier this year we turned off about 1000 real-time bidding publishers where we'd seen suspicious activity," says Alec. "When we compared notes with Google, we found that AdX had already turned off every single one. Every other partner on our list had suspicious sites still active, but Google had filtered out 100% of them."

To ensure their clients only buy the cleanest safest inventory, M6D's engineers developed a proprietary system to sniff out suspicious traffic and remove it from consideration. While M6D is diligent at protecting their clients, they’d prefer their ad partners remove suspicious activity before it even gets to them. With AdX, they get a partner that has been fighting invalid ad activity with great success for years.

"We are fanatical about what we do," says Alec Greenberg. "We believe we have the best targeting system out there and that we're delivering real results driven by real human behavior. That's why Google provides the largest piece of our inventory every day."

"Their scale and their quality are second to none. For anyone entering the fray of programmatic buying, AdX should be the first partner you engage."

Read the full case study here.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Manager

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Programmatic in the future: What publishers think

A recent study by eMarketer estimates that more than 25% of US digital display dollars will come through real-time bidding (RTB) by 2016. As brand dollars move to this channel, publishers are left to answer a few key questions.

Over the next few weeks, join leaders in the online publishing business as they share their views on programmatic buying and its implications for online advertising.

Log in with your Google+ account and tune into the Think with Google +page at 1:30 PM ET tomorrow, November 29. Rob Beeler, VP - Content & Media at AdMonsters, will interview Curt Hecht, Chief Revenue Officer, The Weather Company, about the future of this technology.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Manager

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Google Tag Manager: Video and Q&A

Have you ever struggled with implementing new marketing and measurement tools on your website? For many people, deploying data collection “tags” (like conversion tracking, remarketing, audience reporting and analytics) can take weeks or months. Worse, the tag implementation is often incorrect, meaning you’re missing out on valuable information about your site and its users.

It doesn’t need to be difficult. We recently held a webinar to introduce users to Google Tag Manager, a free tool that helps marketers and IT departments manage their marketing and measurement tags quickly and easily. Watch the video here to learn more about:

• Overall benefits and features of using Google Tag Manager
• A quick demonstration of how to deploy a new tracking tag
• Tips for getting your company started with Google Tag Manager

In addition to this webinar, we’ll be hosting a technical webinar in January to help new users through the nuts and bolts of installing Google Tag Manager (with lots of concrete examples). Stay tuned -- we’ll share registration information in a future blog post, or you can check back on the Learn with Google webinar site.

Read on for responses to some of the top questions we received during the webinar.

Questions and Answers

Where can I find out more about the core concepts described in the webinar?
To learn more about the Google Tag Manager management interface, please visit our Help Center -- you may want to start with our Before you Begin article. There you can find more information about key concepts like Tags, Rules, and Macros. For developers interested in how to implement Google Tag Manager, please visit our developer documentation. Or if you’d like help with implementation, you can contact one of our Partners. You can also ask questions (and find responses to questions from others) on the Google Tag Manager product forum.

What happens to historical data if we move to Google Tag Manager?
All of your historical data should be preserved when you move to Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager only changes the way that tags are deployed and managed on your site, it does not change the way data is collected.

How would you migrate a tag?
Follow these steps to migrate tags -- whether it’s a single tag or all the tags on your site. If you’re just getting started, take a look at our Before you Begin article.

• Create a Google Tag Manager Account and a Container associated with that account.
• Install that Container code snippet on every page of your website (so that it appears immediately after the opening <body> tag). The container should be empty.
• Map your site - thinking about what data you want to collect, what events you want to track, and which tags you want to use to track that data. You should think about where your current tags are implemented, but now is a great time to rethink your overall data collection goals and start fresh.
• (Optional) If you would like to make use of the Data Layer functionality, create a data layer on the pages where you wish to pass information or fire tags
• Create Tags, Rules and Macros within the Google Tag Manager interface according to the map you just created. Make sure to apply the correct Rules to your Tags to make sure they fire in the right place.
• Test the changes you’ve made in Google Tag Manager using debug and preview mode.
• Then push a version of your site live that has removed the hard-coded tags from within the page. At this time, also Publish your changes using the Publishing feature of Google Tag Manager, which pushes the changes live to the site.

For more precise details on these steps, read our developer documents about migration.

Can you add tags to events or buttons?
Definitely! In order to use Google Tag Manager to fire tags on events and buttons, follow these steps (for more detail, read our developer document on event handlers):

• On your page, proactively add the dataLayer.push({ ‘event’: ‘myEventName’}) to the event handlers for all events and buttons you might want to track.
• Create a new rule where “event equals myEventName”.
• Associate this rule with any tag you’d like to fire when the specified event happens.

Can hard-coded tags and tag manager co-exist? Do I have to remove my other tracking tags?
We strongly recommend that you completely migrate all your tags, so you can take advantage of the benefits of managing and updating those tags within Google Tag Manager. However, if a full migration seems too hard, you can use Google Tag Manager in parallel with hard-coded tags. Some of our users use Google Tag Manager to only manage adding new tags.

If you choose to do a partial migration to Google Tag Manager, you need to be very careful to make sure you don’t accidentally start double-counting your tags. If you decided to deploy a tag via Google Tag Manager, make sure that you don’t have a version of the same tag firing on the same page.

Can you build your own custom tag templates? And how do I become a recognized Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager?
Custom Tag templates within Google Tag Manager allow you to copy/paste any HTML or Image tags directly into Google Tag Manager and fire it based on your predefined rules and macros. To turn it into a template, use the {{macro_name}} syntax to populate the tag code with dynamic values. We will also do a syntax check to ensure that when you copy your 3rd party tag, it will fire as intended.

If you’re interested in having your tag added to the list of predefined templates, apply to become a Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager by completing this interest form.

How does this work with Google Analytics? How do you do things like track pageview and track event within Google Analytics?
Google Tag Manager is a convenient way to correctly deploy Google Analytics across your site. To use Google Analytics within Google Tag Manager, simply create a Tag with the Google Analytics tag template. You can select the “Track Type” as either a pageview, an event, or a transaction.

Make sure you have some version of the Google Analytics tag firing across all pages on your site. A good way to do this would be to have a basic tag firing on all pages, but blocking on pages where your more customized tags are firing (like the thank you page where you’d be firing a specialized transaction tag type).

Can the Google Tag Manager snippet be placed in <head>? How about in my footer?
The recommended best practice is to have the Google Tag Manager snippet at the top of the <body> to maximize data collection, but some clients may find it easier to implement the Container snippet elsewhere in the in the page, like the footer.

Do not place the Google Tag Manager snippet in <head> (for the IT folks: this is because there is an iframe in the <noscript> case, which can have unpredictable results in some browsers).

No matter where you install the container snippet, you will need to make sure that this snippet of code is on every page of their site. Google Tag Manager will still work if you only deploy it on part of your site, but Google Tag Manager’s rule based system will only work on pages where the snippet is deployed. For more details, read our developer documents.

Does Google Tag Manager replace Doubleclick Floodlight?
No, Google Tag Manager does not replace Floodlight -- they are complementary. Floodlight is a conversion pixel for DoubleClick products (Floodlight tags can now be deployed within Google Tag Manager), and Google Tag Manager is a tag management system or “container tag” for multiple tagging technologies. Floodlight has previously been used by some users as a container tag as well, but moving forward, Google Tag Manager is a way to deploy all tracking technology.

You also have the ability to pass custom floodlight variables through Google Tag Manager into Floodlight, through the Data Layer. For more information, please review the material in the Developers Guide.

We hope this webinar and this blog post will help you as you get started with Google Tag Manager, and we look forward to seeing you at our technical webinar in January. (Registration details coming soon).

Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

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An SEM platform?

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search Blog

Today, agencies are looking for ways to continue running high-performing search campaigns across different search engines, geographies, formats, and devices. To turn this complexity into opportunity, many look to SEM platforms as a single place to manage, optimize and measure all their campaigns - on many search engines across the world.

Choosing a platform to manage all this isn’t easy. There’s lots of advice and suggestions about how to choose one, (such as this and this).  But we’ve learned that every client has different needs - some only want to manage search ads, some want a real integration with their display and mobile campaigns, some have dedicated teams, some are more budget conscious. Through our formal and informal customer feedback sessions we‘ve taken onboard marketers and agencies’ key questions and requests, and used that to revamp DoubleClick Search version 3.  And through these same sessions over recent years, we see and hear the factors that are important to marketers and agencies in their choices - these are the questions that most commonly come up in RFPs, in our discussions and in our feedback sessions.  

We created a guide with the factors that clients consistently tell us are most important. These guide our investment in DoubleClick Search, and we hope they might be a useful summary for you if you are looking for, or testing out, an SEM platform partner. See the entire guide on the DoubleClick Search blog.

Posted by Ariel Bardin, Product Management Director

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Optimizations using Attribution Modeling in DFA

In September we launched Multi-Channel Funnels with Attribution modeling for DFA, a powerful tool built into DFA which allows you to create and apply custom attribution models within the UI and in real-time. Since then, we’ve received feedback from advertisers who are better able to understand how their marketing efforts are working together to drive conversions. We put together this short video to highlight how you can use attribution modeling to optimize your campaigns today.



So start optimizing your campaigns today - attribution is already available for all the data in your DFA campaigns.

Attribution modeling is just one area where clients will benefit from a single view of the customer via the unified platform, DoubleClick Digital Marketing. To learn more about what you can do with attribution in DFA, reference these articles in the DFA Help Center (sign-in required).

Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager

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Join us for ClickZ Academy’s bid optimization webinar, Choosing the Right Bid Optimization Platform to Drive Paid Search Results

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog

Search marketing today is changing faster than ever before, and as a result, marketers are increasingly turning to powerful bid optimization platforms to help them scale their keyword bidding and take advantage of new opportunities. However, with so many tools in the market -- including our own DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite -- search marketers need to carefully evaluate different platforms before investing in one.

We invite you to join us and paid search luminary Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman at Didit, for a ClickZ Academy webinar, Choosing the Right Bid Optimization Platform to Drive Paid Search Results.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How automated bid optimization can help search marketers meet their unique business goals
• Why smart, fast, and flexible platforms are a must in an increasingly-complex search landscape
• How to navigate the balance between automation and control to achieve the best results

Register today to attend the webinar. Live Q&A will follow.  

Date: November 19, 2012
Time: 1:00pm ET / 10:00am PT

To follow our bid optimization blog post series on the 7 factors to consider when choosing a bid optimization platform, subscribe to the DoubleClick Search blog.

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Introducing our guide for the holidays: Scale your holidays with DoubleClick Search

Online holiday shopping is turning into a yearly endeavor for consumers -- and a yearly challenge for marketers. If you're a search marketer, how do you succeed in search during one of the busiest times of the year, to reach the right people with the right message, when it matters?

With the holidays quickly approaching, we want to be right there with you to ensure that yours are stress-free and merry. For seasonal trends, tips, and tricks on how to win this holiday season with DoubleClick Search solutions that’ll let your search go faster, smarter, and better, visit the DoubleClick Search blog to access our Guide to the Holidays, and sign up for our holiday best practices training on November 14th.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search Team

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1 Week, 5 Hangouts, Showcasing 5 Standout Campaigns

Re-posted from the Google Agency Blog

Looking for fresh inspiration to start off the holiday season? We’ve invited a few of the creatives and developers who have campaigns featured on the Creative Sandbox gallery to join a series of Google+ Hangouts on Air, in conversation with Google product experts. They’ll talk about what they did, how they did it and explain their hangups and breakthroughs. 

To RSVP for the series, visit the Google+ Event.

We love seeing the work our agency partners come up with using digital tools, bringing brands and ideas to life. We hope that the Creative Sandbox Hangouts will fuel your creativity. Sometimes all it takes is an example to inspire the next big idea.

Here’s the detailed schedule:

Monday: Mobile | 2:30pm EST | featuring Beattie McGuinness Bungay | Watch at http://goo.gl/ITC17

Tuesday: YouTube API | 2:30pm EST | featuring Saatchi & Saatchi LA, Stoop LA, and Ogilvy Paris | Watch at http://goo.gl/0OlFr

Wednesday: DoubleClick Rich Media | 2:30pm EST | featuring Grow and Spinnaker | Watch at http://goo.gl/xKvKp

Thursday: Google+ API | 2:30pm EST | featuring Resn, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Hook | Watch at http://goo.gl/kdqlW

Friday: Geo API | 2:30pm EST | featuring McCann New York, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Famous Interactive | Watch at http://goo.gl/AwQT6

Posted by Hope Friedland, Associate Product Marketing Manager

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Google Tag Manager: Webinar, GoPro case study, and product updates

Just over a month ago, we launched Google Tag Manager, a free tool that makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags—including conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing and more—with just a few clicks. Since then, we’ve released the product in 35 languages, we’ve added new tagging capabilities for Google Analytics, and we’ve been hard at work building more enhancements.

To help you get the most out of Google Tag Manager, we’ve scheduled a webinar next week with Product Manager Laura Holmes to walk through the tool and go over implementation basics:

Webinar: Getting Started with Google Tag Manager
Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT
Register: goo.gl/YTulu

We’ve also been hearing great feedback from our users, including GoPro, the world’s leader in wearable and gear-mountable cameras and digital devices. With the growing popularity of GoPro products and accompanying complexity of their digital marketing activities, GoPro found itself with dozens of tags measuring countless engagement activities across its web properties. It was critical to find a way to implement and maintain marketing tags that would scale with the marketing organization. Analytics Pros, a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Google Tag Manager specialist, led a comprehensive migration to Google Tag Manager -- and GoPro stakeholders were delighted with the results:

“Google Tag Manager centralizes our tags into a single location that gives our marketing and analytics teams the flexibility to make tagging updates within minutes without burdening IT.”
- Lee Topar, Director of Online Marketing, GoPro

Download the full case study.

We hope you’ll join us at the webinar next Tuesday the 13th. If you’re not able to attend, we’ll be posting a recording of the webinar about a week afterwards here on the blog and on YouTube, and you can also read more about Google Tag Manager on the website or the help center.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager

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How HTML5 is changing the game for creative innovation and mobile ad development: A Q&A with Product Manager Wook Chung

We’ve heard a lot of talk about HTML5 and it’s potential to alter the way ads are developed and trafficked online, but we wanted more details. So we chatted with Wook Chung, Product Manager for DoubleClick Mobile, to hear his thoughts on the changing landscape.  

Q: So what’s the big deal with HTML5? (Why should people care about it?)
A: We’re living in a multi-device era where people use a variety of devices to meet their daily needs. Advertisers want to reach their audience on all surface areas and HTML5/Javascript is the only known language that runs across all modern day devices. With HTML5, a given ad creative can potentially run everywhere.

Furthermore, HTML5 gives advertisers access to native device features such as touch, gyroscope, GPS, and even 3D graphics acceleration. Creatives now have access to many more primary constructs which translates to infinitely more possibilities in what content can be. With HTML5, we have an opportunity to revolutionize digital advertising. Finally, the HTML5 spec is still yet to be finalized, which means it can remain agile in adapting to hardware innovations.  

Q: How does HTML5 specifically improve the possibilities for mobile ad development?
A: HTML5 is the only known language that runs across all major mobile operating systems and browsers. Without it, mobile advertising would be relegated to custom native code rendering governed by ad SDK providers. It would not be scalable and designers would be severely limited in flexing their creative muscles. With HTML5, we can now unleash all sorts of possibilities. Currently, the majority of the mobile ads seen out in the internet are static images. We can change this with HTML5.

Q: How is Google and Doubleclick thinking about HTML5?
A: Google has been a strong supporter of the HTML5 standards alongside other companies and organizations. Through our contribution to the WebKit open-source project and our Chrome browser, we continue to push the boundaries in showcasing what is possible with HTML5. You can check out the latest HTML5 innovations and experiences in our Chrome Experiments projects or HTML5Rocks.com. Another great example is Google Maps on browsers that use WebGL for 3D renderings.  

Just as Google places a high priority on HTML5, we also envision a healthy ad ecosystem based on HTML5 ads. We see a world where a single creative can potentially run on any device, any screen size, and naturally respond to user interactions and device movements. To realize this vision, Google is working with industry partners to establish HTML5 ad standards, educating creative agencies on HTML5, and building products and services that can support these ads, from our DoubleClick platform to our ad networks and SDKs.

If you work on a creative team at an agency, we would love to hear from you to understand how you're currently creating HTML5 ads and how you'd like to be creating them in the future.

Please complete this short survey to let us know how we can better meet your needs. You can enter to win one of two Nexus 7 tablets if you complete the form!*
*Only participants located in the United States, who submit their email addresses, are eligible to win prizes. Winners will be selected on November 30th, 2012 and notified within 2 weeks.

Update 11/16/12: We've decided to push the deadline of the survey back until Dec. 7th, 2012. Winners will be selected on Dec. 7th and will be notified within 2 weeks.
Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Rich Media

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Attend an upcoming DoubleClick Bid Manager training webinar

DoubleClick Bid Manager: Overview for New Users
Tuesday, Oct 30, 2012 - 12pm EDT

Join us for a live webinar covering the fundamentals of DoubleClick Bid Manager. This two-hour session is designed for new users to the system, where we will go through the steps to build a new campaign. If you have recently upgraded to Doubleclick Bid Manager, are new to the system, or will upgrade soon, this webinar is a great place to begin. Please register in the DoubleClick Bid Manager Help Center.

DoubleClick Bid Manager: Reporting Webinar
Thursday, Nov 1, 2012 - 2pm EDT
Thursday, Nov 15, 2012 - 3pm GMT

Please join our two-hour live webinar on generating reports and reading inline statistics in DoubleClick Bid Manager. We will discuss how these reports can help you optimize prospecting, audience, and remarketing campaigns. If you run reports, review data, or make optimizations, this session is for you. This is also useful for anyone who will soon upgrade from Invite Media to DoubleClick Bid Manager. Please register in the DoubleClick Bid Manager Help Center.

Posted by Molly Larrison, DoubleClick Bid Manager Product Trainer

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Getting Real with DoubleClick Bid Manager

In 1994 an unassuming display ad appeared on hotwired.com. A few curious people waited 15 seconds for the ad to load over their 14.4 Kbps connections. And when they clicked on the ad, they changed the world of advertising forever. Display ads ushered in the digital revolution of advertising, as well as the innovations that followed in search, video, mobile and social ads. In recent years, the adoption of real-time bidding, exchanges and audience data has resulted in a step-change in efficiency and precision, laying the foundation for how display ads will be transacted for years to come. This week, display advertising turns 18, and our emergence from adolescence as an industry has been characterized by the move to programmatic buying.

Today, we’re happy to announce the general availability of DoubleClick Bid Manager, a platform for programmatic buying built from the ground up on Google infrastructure and fully integrated into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. The last few years have been busy, as we’ve worked to take the best of Invite Media, DoubleClick, and Google to build a demand side platform that helps our agency and advertiser partners buy display better.

Agencies and marketers use DoubleClick Bid Manager for a number of key benefits:

Unified, streamlined workflows
As we worked on DoubleClick Bid Manager, our agency, trading desk and advertiser partners have given us great insights into the operations of their business and the everyday challenges they face. Based on their feedback, we’ve focused on workflow optimizations that will help them operate more easily and efficiently. Usability studies show that it takes 18% less time to carry out common tasks in DoubleClick Bid Manager, as compared to Invite Media.

Further, integrating DoubleClick Bid Manager into our buy-side platform, DoubleClick Digital Marketing, has allowed us to eliminate some of the most tedious trafficking tasks. We now sync everything from creatives, to conversion pixels, to remarketing lists for DFA advertisers. All DFA remarketing lists are visible in DoubleClick Bid Manager without any data loss, leading to better reach and performance for remarketing campaigns.

Powerful targeting, based on years of expertise
Building on top of Google infrastructure means that we can now offer some of Google’s tried and tested advertising technologies, such as keyword contextual targeting and our proprietary conversion optimization engine. We can also reach more inventory from our exchange partners through the scale of Google’s infrastructure. Early results from these innovations show double digit performance gains over Invite Media across a variety of campaigns with CPC and CPA goals.

Cross-channel opportunities
Marketers have long known that running cross-channel campaigns can yield the best results, but increasing media fragmentation over the years has made it challenging to act on this seamlessly. Thanks to our unified DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager can be a seamless part of cross-channel marketing efforts. Display remarketing from search ads is an early proof point of how marketers can take advantage of powerful cross-channel features on our platform.

With this launch, DoubleClick Bid Manager is available globally—both to international advertisers and for media buying in 40+ countries. Some of our largest advertisers are already fully upgraded from Invite Media to the new platform, and we look forward to upgrading the remainder of our customers over the coming months.

We’re excited about programmatic buying, but also know that advertising is about more than just clicks and conversions. Relationships matter. Marketers want to craft compelling stories that resonate. While real-time bidding has fundamentally changed the transaction mechanism for display advertising, the importance of trusted interactions between buyers, their agencies and publishers is as critical as ever. With DoubleClick Bid Manager, we’re committed to bringing great efficiency and performance to this space by getting technology out of the way, so that buyers and sellers can focus more on the relationships that matter.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager

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Case Study: DoubleClick Ad Exchange helps NetSeer build brands at scale

Brand advertisers are shifting budgets to the programmatic advertising channel to find perfect viewers for their campaigns across the web. But great brands won't put their ads just anywhere so advanced media buyers like NetSeer come to DoubleClick Ad Exchange to find safe, high-quality content for their clients.

Finding Scale
NetSeer’s technology uses a proprietary 'concept graph' of over 50+ million concepts and over two billion relationships derived from deep analysis of the web. Using concepts instead of keywords, NetSeer scans the content of web pages to understand their true meaning to find the best ad placements for brand campaigns across the web. No wonder clients like AT&T, General Mills, BP and Dell have asked NetSeer to help them promote their brands in the programmatic advertising channel.

To implement their ‘concept graph’ technology, NetSeer chose Ad Exchange because it has the largest pool of premium brand-safe inventory. "To scale any kind of brand targeting, you need a lot of volume and a lot of diversity," notes Sanjiv Ghate, NetSeer’s VP of Product. "Once you have diversity plus quality, you can build a great campaign across any vertical."

Branding in action: New Orleans
The New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation and their agency, eBrains asked NetSeer to help bring more visitors to their website, particularly those who would consider New Orleans as a tourist destination. Using its ‘concept graph’ technology, Netseer created a brand-building solution with relevant programmatic channels for a wide variety of target audiences, and AdX provided the quality inventory.

The results "really blew all our expectations," says Ghate. A Vizu study showed an overall lift of 58.3%, and a lift of 69% for those saying they were "very likely" to consider New Orleans as a vacation destination. A campaign based on music and nightlife reached a lift of an impressive 96.8%.

Read the full NetSeer story here.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Manager

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Attend an Upcoming DFA Training

Start your fall off right and join us for a DFA training. Visit the DFA Help Center to enroll in any upcoming DFA classroom sessions or our recently launched DFA Basics for Traffickers eLearning which allows you to go at your own pace and navigate to the topics you want to learn.

Classroom Training
DFA Fundamentals: This full-day course (10am-5pm) is for new DFA users looking to understand the fundamentals of third-party ad serving including best practices for campaign trafficking, serving ads and pulling reports.

• Los Angeles - October 23
• Chicago - October 24
• Minneapolis - November 5
• San Francisco - November 8
• Dallas - November 14

DFA Trafficking Lab: Get more practice trafficking campaigns. These sessions cover the basics such as assigning landing pages to creatives, updating campaigns, setting up geo-targeting and using creative rotation.
Class Prerequisite: Attendees should have taken the DFA Fundamentals class in the previous two months or have less than two months trafficking experience.

• Los Angeles - October 24
• Chicago - October 25
• San Francisco - November 9

MediaVisor Fundamentals: Learn more about planning and creating campaigns, advertisers, site placements and IOs as well as how to send RFPs.

• Minneapolis - November 6
• New York - November 6

Webinar Training
DFA for New Users - October 30
Learn the fundamentals of trafficking in DFA from creating an Advertiser through exporting Tags.

Be sure to check back with us on this blog for upcoming trainings. We look forward to seeing you in class.

Posted by Amanda Gangl, DFA Product Trainer

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Enabling Smarter Media Buying with DoubleClick Verification

Today's marketers and agencies are looking for tools to help them navigate the complex digital landscape and make smart decisions about their media buys. It's with this in mind that we're investing in DoubleClick Digital Marketing, to give them a holistic picture of how all their digital marketing works together.

A few weeks ago we shared the latest updates to DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the continuous investments we are making in our products, such as Attribution Modeling in DFA, as we build a unified platform.

Today, we’re introducing another powerful tool for agencies and marketers -- DoubleClick Verification, an ad verification solution built directly into DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA).

We think this will benefit our partners in a few key ways:

• Accessible. It’s as simple as signing in to DFA and navigating to the reporting interface to start using DoubleClick Verification. There’s no need to implement another tag or sign another contract to get started.
• Holistic. DoubleClick Verification not only provides a seamless experience for clients, it’s enabled across all ad impressions and campaigns in DFA today. In the future, as part of DoubleClick Digital Marketing, it will cover the entire scope of your display buy across the platform.
• Actionable. The information in DoubleClick Verification helps you to reconcile the terms of your media buy with your media partners. It answers the questions of did my ads serve as they were intended?

Currently, DoubleClick Verification offers site content monitoring to help highlight potential content issues with your ads. Our system analyzes content at the URL level for each page that your ad serves on and employs 18 classifiers for “unsafe” content categories -- such as gambling, adult, drugs, profanity -- across 11 common languages.

In addition, we also allow you to customize content profiles so you can define for yourself the kinds of sites that are okay or not safe, and place them accordingly on a white list or flagged list. Geo verification is available to help identify ads serving outside your preferred geo. For more information on current features, download our fact sheet.

More to come
We’ll continue to invest in verification tools in the months and years to come. We’re actively working on the best approaches to incorporate other verification service lines as defined by IAB guidelines. To learn more about our philosophy on building verification features in the ad server, download our white paper, Smarter Media Buying with Ad Verification, here.

Register for our upcoming webinar, Introducing Ad Verification with DoubleClick, on October 17, 2012 at 1:00 pm EDT/10:00 am PDT to find out more about the current set of features and what’s under development. We look forward to hearing your feedback and questions during the webinar.

Posted by Aaron Nelson, Product Manager

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The Great Programmatic Debate

On Tuesday, October 2nd, Neal Mohan, Google's VP of Display Advertising, moderated a presidential-style debate about programmatic buying and building brands online at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference. He was joined on-stage by Jon Suarez-Davis, VP of Global Digital Strategy and North America Media at Kellogg’s, and Curt Hecht, Chief Revenue Officer at The Weather Channel, who represented the advertiser and publisher sides in this debate.

When it first emerged, programmatic buying promised to transform how digital media was bought and sold. However, some publishers equate programmatic with the loss of advertiser connections and the death of premium inventory. This leaves the industry to confront key questions: Can the whole industry benefit from this transformation? How should publishers and advertisers work together in this new world order? This debate emphasized the importance of transparency to grow the industry for both advertisers and publishers. The lively discussion emphasized the need for marketers and publishers to partner not just for inventory but also for better data and audience analyses.

Posted by Emily Wright, Product Marketing Manager

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New cross-channel opportunities with DoubleClick Search

Last week, we gave an update on the progress we’re making with DoubleClick Digital Marketing to help marketers run cross-channel campaigns seamlessly in an increasingly complex digital landscape. Today, we’re shining light on one of the key features we mentioned - display remarketing from search ads - which allows agencies and advertisers using DoubleClick Search to use search ad clicks as a signal in display campaigns, re-engaging users through display ads when it’s most effective. Read more about this exciting new feature in the DoubleClick Search blog.

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Digital marketing made (much) easier: Introducing Google Tag Manager

Originally posted to the Google Analytics blog

Over the past few years, we’ve seen massive improvements in digital marketing sophistication and capabilities. Today there’s a rich suite of tools allowing marketers to gain better insights, reach audiences in new ways, and develop improved marketing campaigns so users have better web experiences. Yet many modern marketing tools—like web analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing, and more—depend on adding "tags" to your website.

Website tags help enable today’s sophisticated digital marketing technologies

Tags are tiny bits of website code can help provide useful insights, but they can also cause challenges. Too many tags can make sites slow and clunky; incorrectly applied tags can distort your measurement; and it can be time-consuming for the IT department or webmaster team to add new tags—leading to lost time, lost data, and lost conversions.

We’ve been hard at work to help take the pain out of tagging for everyone. That’s why today, we’re announcing our first release of Google Tag Manager. We’re launching globally in English, and the product will soon be available in many other languages.

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface. You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks. Take a quick look at how easy it is to set up an account and manage your tags:

Google Tag Manager is built to handle your tagging needs, and it works with Google and non-Google website tags. We’ve packed in lots of great features, including:

• Asynchronous tag loading—so your tags can fire faster without getting in each other's way, and without slowing down the user-visible part of the page
• Easy-to-use tag templates, so marketers can quickly add tags with our web interface, as well as support for custom tags
• Error-prevention tools like Preview mode (so you can see proposed changes before implementing them), the Debug Console, and Version History to ensure that new tags won’t break your site
• User permissions and multi-account functionality to make it easy for large teams and agencies and clients to work together with appropriate levels of access
• Plus we have exciting plans to add great new features over the next several months

We’re also happy to announce our tag vendor program: If your company provides tag technology and you’d like Google Tag Manager to include a template for your tag, please contact us here to become a tag vendor.

Dozens of companies have already begun using Google Tag Manager and have seen great results. Ameet Arurkar, Director of Search Engine Marketing at QuinStreet, reports:

“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process. What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day—sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves.”

“Google Tag Manager just makes business sense. Why would we want to manually add hundreds of tags for our pages?”

Setting up Google Tag Manager is quick and easy—you create an account, add one snippet of code to your site, then start managing tags. If you want more help, contact a Google Certified Partner—they’ve been carefully vetted and meet rigorous qualification standards.

Get started today at www.google.com/tagmanager.

Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

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