What industry leaders value in a digital marketing platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Become a video expert: learn to create innovative, interactive video ads

Studio Certified developers, do you want to tell the world that you can create engaging in-stream video ads? With the new Studio Certification VPAID badge, you can do just that.

VPAID (Video Player Ad Interface Definition) is a hybrid creative format that runs as a pre-, mid-, or post-roll with the publisher’s content video. When watching in-stream ads, users can pause and resume videos, pull up options to learn about products, and more. For example, you can watch a video about a car, pause it, and learn more about the car right from the ad – without leaving the player on the publisher’s website. Check out the VPAID format in action.

VPAID gives brands a way to create a micro-site experience directly within an ad unit. Users can interact with the brand and learn more about the products without ever having to navigate away from the original page they were on. So it's good for the user, it's good for the web publisher, and it's great for the brand.

VPAID badge certification gives you:

• A badge that identifies you as a Studio Certified user able to create interactive in-stream ads
• Exclusive access to DoubleClick hosted events and workshops
• Early access to betas and product features
• Promotion as a Studio Certified user with a VPAID badge via DoubleClick Rich Media properties and associated sites

• Listing with other Studio certified users on the Rich Media gallery
• We'll announce your achievement via our Twitter account
• Promotion via Rich Media Gallery and marketing materials
• A badge you can use for self-promotion

Pass the exam and get the badge to demonstrate your expertise in creating rich, in-stream ads to boost user engagement. Take the VPAID exam and get certified.

Note: You must be Studio Certified in Core Flash or HTML5 to take the VPAID certification exam.

Not Studio Certified? No worries! Get Certified today. We have these Studio Certification badges available:

• Core Studio Certification exam for Flash developers
• Core Studio Certification exam for HTML5 developers
• Integrated QA certification
• Advanced badge certification for Dynamic creatives and YouTube Mastheads

Learn more about Studio Certification in the Rich Media Gallery.

Posted by Arnold Sealey, Program Manager, DoubleClick Studio Certification

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Insights on the fly: Introducing executive reporting from DoubleClick Search

Search marketers managing multiple campaigns across multiple accounts have to visualize their data in many different ways and tailor reporting for each group of stakeholders. Often, this means spending time pulling and aggregating reports, building macro-enabled spreadsheets, and wrangling your data into a specific format for a specific presentation -- only to do it all over again in a slightly different way the next time around.

DoubleClick Search believes in making search marketing faster -- and over the past year we’ve invested in time-saving features like bulk editing enhancements, new scheduling options, and automated rules. Today, we’re excited to announce executive reporting, a fundamentally new way to report on and share your search campaign data.

With executive reporting, quickly get to the insights you need. Take the data from all your search campaigns, segment as needed, present it in an easily consumable visual format, and share with team members and stakeholders -- all within the UI, without spending hours downloading, reconciling, and updating spreadsheets.


As we designed executive reporting, we worked closely with our clients to ensure our solution was built to address the unique needs of search marketers, agency account managers, and executives. Matt Grebow, Sr. Manager, Search Marketing at TSA, who participated heavily in our feedback sessions, shared his needs for richer export fidelity with the engineering team.

“Most reporting platforms let you export data in a raw format, but this means extensive formatting in Excel and a lot of coding. DoubleClick Search Executive Reporting is flexible enough to use across clients with different goals. We can create templates on the fly and export reports in a client-ready format.” 

Three ways to get started with executive reporting

1. Daily account management and stakeholder communication: As an account manager, you can easily pick the subset of data and the visualizations you need for each set of stakeholders. The reports will stay up to date, and you can have them ready for meetings, or download and share through email at a moment’s notice -- saving you time for strategy.
2. High-level team management and oversight: As a business leader, you can see an overview of your entire business in one place. If you’re needed for an escalation, you can quickly pull reports to understand account health and spot issues -- so you’re never unprepared.
3. Market insights for competitive advantage: Another advantage of seeing your entire business at a glance: if you manage a large volume of accounts, you can quickly analyze market-level data and see which account or campaigns are underperforming. Then, dig in to understand why and get them back on track. 

Keep an eye on the blog next week for a follow up “Success with DS” post on how the get the most out of executive reporting. In the meantime, give the new reports a try and let your account team know what you think. If you don't see the 'Executive Reports' tab in the DoubleClick Search interface, ask your account team to enable it for you.

Over the coming months, we’ll continue to invest in easy, flexible reporting options for DoubleClick Search. If you have a data warehouse, business intelligence tool, or visualization software and you’re interested in seeing your search data alongside other metrics for reporting purposes, check out our reporting API, currently in open whitelist.

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DoubleClick “Stocking Stuffers”: Festive strategies to lighten your workload this season

Running top-notch digital campaigns for the holidays can be a lot of work, and your to-do list can seem never-ending: on top of the festivities of the season, you’re juggling fleeting promotions, revising stale ads, and trying to balance your budget —all in hopes of reaching holiday shoppers at the moment they’re looking to buy. So how do you succeed online during one of the busiest times of the year, and reach the right people with the right message, at the drop of a (Santa) hat? 

This season, we wanted to share a few of our favorite digital marketing “stocking stuffers” to put the cheer back in your holiday and help you plan, build, manage, measure and optimize your campaigns with ease. We took our best time-saving features that you can apply across your search and display campaigns, so you can find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your toasty apple cider -- while we take care of the rest. 

Plan your media buys strategically:

Solve the cross-channel puzzle with display remarketing from search ads. It’s not a miracle on 34th Street: you can get your search and display campaigns connected and performing this holiday season, and beyond. Display remarketing from search ads will help you close the loop on those last minute shoppers who searched for your product or service but didn't convert. With this feature, set up search campaigns in DoubleClick Search and re-engage your audience with display ads across exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across Google Display Network - and do it all with an easy, tagless workflow.

Build your ad creative beautifully:

Schedule your asset swaps or make them on-the-fly with dynamic creative. Admit it: manually updating every ad unit with new logos or creative assets can leave you feeling like a Grinch. When you know you’ll have to change the assets for a campaign, use dynamic creative to schedule the updates in advance. The new assets will automatically replace all the old ones in your ads, and you’ll be singing fa-la-la-la-la all the way home.

Don’t get tangled up with your holiday designs. Google Web Designer lets you create beautiful HTML5 ads with ease, for free. Build cross-screen creative directly for DoubleClick Studio -- all the ad tags and rich media metrics are automatically built into the ad, so your designs can shine on every screen.

Manage your campaigns easily:

Do the work of a team of elves with automated rules from DoubleClick Search. Stay up 'til midnight waiting for Santa -- not your campaign updates -- with a little help from automated rules. Schedule changes to specific ads and keywords, based on criteria you specify, to ensure that your holiday search campaigns are in tip-top shape. That means you can spend less time on repetitive tasks, and more time setting up those reindeer traps.

Meet mobile under the mistletoe. As consumers turn to their devices to research and shop, you can turn to us to reach and engage them. Whether you’re running search or display, our system is device-aware. With DoubleClick Search support of AdWords enhanced campaigns, seamlessly reach your customers across locations and devices with custom mobile bid adjustments based on your Floodlight tag activities. With Bid Manager mobile-specific targeting and formats, we automatically detect if users are on a mobile device, so you can engage your audience on both mobile web and apps -- without any additional work. So cozy up with mobile this season!

Measure and optimize your campaigns successfully:

Get a new perspective on the year - and your performance - with data visualizations. While Santa eagerly awaits his midnight milk and cookies, you can treat yourself to “infosnacks” - data visualizations that give you a snapshot of your campaign performance - right from the DoubleClick Bid Manager UI. Infosnacks bring information that’s commonly viewed - like conversion and CPA - to your fingertips. In addition, you can see how these metrics are trending over time. So you’ll spend less time digging through data, and more time spreading the yuletide cheer.

Race to the top with real-time bid and campaign optimization. Looking for a solution that’ll help you go as fast as Rudolph? Put your best bid forward with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite and DoubleClick Bid Manager automatic campaign optimization. Both suites are designed to drive campaign performance through speedy, data-driven bid optimization. Our systems use instant conversion data to update bids in near real-time, and on DoubleClick Bid Manager, we automatically shift your budget to the best performing line items.

Do you have a DoubleClick tip or trick that gets you through the busy holiday season? Email it to us at dclk-holiday@googlegroups.com with your name and title. We’ll feature the best tips on this DoubleClick blog!

*Bonus* If you want even more product-specific tips, check out our DoubleClick Search and Rich Media Gallery blogs next week!

Posted by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

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Making Mobile Work Across the Advertising Industry

Throughout the month of October, we’ve sparked a conversation around mobile in our industry; we’ve uncovered some of the challenges preventing widespread mobile advertising adoption, and we’ve discussed potential solutions to invigorate cross-screen advertising in the ecosystem. Today, we’ll summarize our learnings and the solutions we’re working on to ease these issues.

Most people know that smartphone and tablet usage has increased drastically in the last few years. These new screens provide a golden opportunity for advertisers to place their brands in front of people through unique and personal experiences. But even though we recognize this opportunity exists, there are still many challenges throughout the industry that prevent the movement of advertising dollars onto mobile platforms.

According to our Mobile White Paper, “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?”:

• Creative agencies don’t develop more mobile creative because they believe there is a lack of demand from clients, they think re-using the desktop version works adequately and they think building HTML5 is too time consuming. There is also a high switching cost due to the fact that Flash is ingrained in their processes.  
• Media Agencies don’t buy more mobile impressions because they don’t think there are enough validation metrics from the networks, they find it too difficult to work across network vendors, and the target audiences for tablets in particular are not available.
• Only 1/4 of agencies build creative specifically for smartphones and only 1/5 build creative specifically for tablets, while 42% of agencies say they reuse their desktop creative on mobile devices.
• Because creative agencies aren’t building HTML5 creative and media agencies aren’t buying mobile impressions, publishers are unable to monetize their highly trafficked mobile websites with rich mobile ads.

      

To begin unlocking the mobile opportunity, we need answers for publishers, agencies and advertisers, and on our end, we’re actively upgrading our platforms to provide these solutions.

• To make HTML5 creation easier for creative agencies, we launched Google Web Designer, a free, professional-grade HTML5 authoring tool that provides drag and drop design elements as well as fully editable code. We also launched a number of features in DoubleClick Studio, including tight integration with both Google Web Designer and Adobe Edge Animate, to insure that developers are able to manage and run all their mobile rich media creative through DoubleClick.

• To make mobile reporting and metrics more available to media agencies, we launched DoubleClick Campaign Manager with built-in mobile capabilities, so even if you don’t target mobile metrics specifically, you can still report on standard metrics (such as connection type, mobile carrier, OS and device) as well as HTML5 rich media metrics (such as avg. display time, interaction time and expansion time.)
• To educate brands about the need for mobile advertising, we hosted our “Month of Mobile,” to uncover these issues and we provoked a dialogue with our Hangout on Air. We plan to continue this conversation throughout 2014 so that we can incite change and move the needle forward for mobile advertising adoption across the industry.

With continued dialogue and improved solutions, we can reach a point where mobile advertising is second nature to everyone in the industry and brands can take full advantage of the cross-screen presence of consumers today.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

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Tutorial Tuesday: Create interstitial and expandable ads

Thanks for following along with our Google Web Designer Tutorial Tuesday series over the past few weeks. In the series, we’ve covered a number of basics to get you started with the tool: we’ve taken a tour of the user interface, created animations, and learned how to use the CSS Panel. Today, for our last post in the series, we’ll be focusing on creating interstitial and expandable ads.

Interstitial ads

Interstitial ads give users a full page ad experience at natural transition points such as page changes or app and video launches. Interstitial ads are displayed in an iFrame that floats over a web page or app, and users can click or tap a close button to hide an ad from their screen. Many people using Google Web Designer will want to design interstitial ads with multiple pages, so we’ve created three step-by-step videos to help you do just that. 

Start with the first video>> 

Expandable ads

Expandable ads are small banner-size ads which expand when clicked. Expandable ads are displayed in an iFrame that's the size of the expanded page, and a user can click or tap a close button to collapse an ad to its original size. As with interstitial ads, we’ve created three step-by-step videos to help you design expandable ads using Google Web Designer. 

Start with the first video>>

Don’t let the learning stop here

While our Tutorial Tuesday series has come to completion, you can keep learning about Google Web Designer via our help center and YouTube Channel, and our user forum and Google+ page are additional outlets where you can both learn and share feedback about GWD. 

We’ll be sure to post about other exciting developments as we release them, so stay tuned to the blog for the latest information.

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Making Mobile Rich Media Front and Center in DoubleClick Studio

At the end of September, we announced the launch of Google Web Designer, Google’s new HTML5 authoring tool, and last week we propelled the conversation forward around Mobile and HTML5 in the industry with our iMedia article and our Digital Dialogue. Today, we want to give you the DoubleClick Rich Media perspective on building beautiful cross-screen creative and tell you about the investments we’re making to ensure you have what you need to create effective advertising across screens.

Our customers have made it clear that building for the cross-screen world continues to be a challenge. But in spite of these difficulties, we believe that adopting HTML5 is critical to success in today’s cross device world. To help creative agencies make this transition, we are focusing our efforts on the following areas of improvement within DoubleClick: 

1. Make it easier to build innovative mobile rich media formats
2. Center the DoubleClick workflow on HTML5
3. Make sure creatives built in DoubleClick can run everywhere

Make it easier to build innovative mobile rich media formats:

We have built a first-class integration between Studio and our recently launched HTML5 authoring tool, Google Web Designer (GWD). DoubleClick Rich Media creatives built in GWD will automatically include the Studio enabler and other metrics and can be uploaded seamlessly into Studio. We plan to enhance this integration with features that will ease the workflow between applications, such as an automated push of creatives from one tool to the other.

Further, to ensure we let our developers use the tools they prefer, we have released a number of templates that can be installed into Adobe Edge Animate. A developer can use these templates as a starting point for building a variety of mobile formats. The templates will automatically include the Studio enabler and automatically “polite-load” the creative, which is important due to the larger file sizes generally seen with HTML5.

Finally, we plan to release many more HTML5 Layouts as part of our Studio Layouts Gallery to add to the growing repertoire of available HTML5 formats available in our platform. 

Center the DoubleClick workflow on HTML5:

We’re making it easy to quickly add mobile features to your creatives to make them mobile-ready. We’ve built an HTML5 video player module that will work across browsers and operating systems. This will relieve developers from having to write many lines of code to deal with cross platform support. In November, we are also adding support for the new Expand-to-Full-Screen format for mobile web, which allows an in-page unit to expand to full screen regardless of the screen size. 

We’re also making it easier to upload your HTML5 creative into Studio. With our relative paths support, you’ll be able to upload HTML5 creative with nested folders and maintain that folder structure in Studio. You can also upload custom fonts with your creatives (the actual fonts, not the static images), improving workflow, file size and quality of the creatives.

With our Mobile Showcase App, you can push your creative preview to a mobile device. This means you can test and preview in-app and mobile web creative on the actual device where it will appear to an end-user, before you actually publish the creative. 

Make sure creatives built with DoubleClick can run everywhere:

In the desktop world, a lot of work has been done to ensure ads can run everywhere. Similar efforts are now being focused on mobile web and in-app environments. We are working to ensure our ads run on all major in-app networks, so you can be sure your creatives function properly across all desired inventory. In the coming months, we will build out support for MRAID v2, and you will see us push the boundaries on standards for serving in-app creatives.

We encourage all agencies, developers and designers to spend some time experimenting with all our new products and features. Making mobile work is one of our highest priorities at DoubleClick, and the features mentioned above are only the start of a long and exciting roadmap. We look forward to hearing your feedback and to working with you to push the industry forward!

Posted by Jordan Sumerlus, Product Manager, DoubleClick Rich Media

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Attend an upcoming Ad Exchange training webinar

If you're interested in gaining more expertise with DoubleClick Ad Exchange to improve your buyer experience, be sure to join our upcoming webinars. We offer online eLearning and certification, along with pre-recorded webinars. Register in the Ad Exchange Help Center (sign-in required).

Introduction to AdX Policy – 11/13
Join our live webinar to learn a general overview of Ad Exchange policies, the enforcement process, along with live Q&A. We'll also provide a list of policy resources to reference after the event.

What’s new with RTB? – 12/4
Come learn about what's changed in the past six months with Real-time bidder, as well as the great features that are coming out. The product management and engineering team will walk you through all the changes that have occurred and how you can take advantage of them to improve your use of RTB.

Pre-recorded webinar: Overview and trafficking
Watch this webinar to learn about setting up private deals with ad exchanges, what's needed to get started, and steps to launch. We recommend this webinar for users who want to learn more about accessing available inventory and direct deals.

• Watch

What's New with AdX? – Detect & Correct and REST API Updates – 10/23
Come learn about what new updates have been made to AdX, as well as the great features that are coming out. The product management and other cross-functional teams will walk you through policy updates and how you can take advantage of them to improve your use of AdX.

When you register for these webinars in our Help Center, be sure to read our latest product updates, too.

We've designed Ad Exchange training to arm you with the tools you need to optimize with Ad Exchange. If you're new to the Ad Exchange, these webinars are a great place to start.

Posted by Asha Balendran, DoubleClick Ad Exchange Product Trainer

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Join us for "Digital Dialogues: Making Mobile Work with HTML5" - 10/24 @ 10am PT

Following the recent launch of our Mobile White Paper, “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?”, this week we’re continuing the conversation around unlocking the mobile opportunity with a Digital Dialogues Hangout-on-Air.

There's no question that people are spending more time across screens, and the opportunity to reach them there is huge. Advertisers, media and creative agencies are still trying to figure out the best way to leverage mobile in their campaigns, optimize for it and build engaging multi-screen creatives. Publishers continue to strategize on ways to deliver and monetize engaging cross-screen consumer experiences.

Join us for a conversation on how technologies and solutions like HTML5 can make cross-screen creative and mobile advertising more accessible for the industry.

Speakers:

• Zach Chapman, VP of Digital Sales, ESPN.com
• Matt Cooper, Founder of Addroid
• Sissie Hsiao, Group Product Manager, Google

What: Digital Dialogues Hangout on Air: Making Mobile Work with HTML5

When: Thursday, 10/24 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET

Where: Think With Google G+ page.

RSVP here.

While you’re waiting, here’s some background reading:

• “Build Creative Campaigns Across Screens” -- Pete Crofut’s fourth iMedia article in his series “How Technology Makes Creative More intelligent”.
• “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?” -- DoubleClick/Illuminas Research White Paper and infographics

We hope you’ll be able to join us!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing

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Piston boosts ROAS by 51%, conversions by 50% for retail client using inventory-aware campaigns

A few months ago, we announced improvements to our inventory-aware campaigns feature, which automatically creates and optimizes a retailer’s search campaigns, based on updates made to their Google Merchant Center product feed. Since then, we’ve seen some impressive results across the board, showing that inventory-managed keywords more than doubled return on ad spend for heavy users(1).

Today, we wanted to highlight one of our success stories around this feature. The following story comes from Piston -- a bicoastal digital agency in the US, who helped their retail client maintain a “stylish profile” by keeping their campaigns relevant using inventory-aware campaigns.

After working around the clock to keep up with ever-changing product descriptions, prices, and landing pages during a busy holiday season, Piston turned to inventory-aware campaigns to scale their campaign management across their retail client’s 8,000+ products.

“When we’re looking for a solution, the key questions we ask are: can this save us time, can this save us money, and does it have features that can really help us impact our bottom line? And with DoubleClick inventory-aware campaigns, the answer was always ‘Yes’.” says Jennifer Johnstone, Senior Performance Marketing Strategist at Piston. “Inventory-aware campaigns allow us to save time from manually managing product inventory, enable us to spend our dollars on more efficient product level keywords, and help us drive more revenue than manual campaign builds.”

One quarter after adopting inventory-aware campaigns, Piston saw a 51% rise in ROAS, a 26% jump in CTR, and a 50% boost in conversion rate, compared to manually-managed campaigns. Additionally, inventory-aware campaigns allowed them to expand keyword coverage on both products and SKUs by 49% -- all while saving an estimated 38 hours over one quarter since implementation.

To get the full scoop on Piston’s success with inventory-aware campaigns, download the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog and Google+ page for even more customer success stories.

1. Google internal data, 2013

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DoubleClick Bid Manager Joins FBX, Facebook's Real-Time Bidding Exchange

Partnership has been key to Google’s success as a rising tide lifts all boats.  So we’re excited to announce a new way to help our clients succeed by working with Facebook to participate in FBX, their real-time bidding exchange. DoubleClick Bid Manager (formerly Invite Media) has been helping agencies and advertisers buy ad space on sites across the web for years.  We help clients access dozens of private and public exchanges in more than 75 countries, and continue to see double-digit quarter-over-quarter growth in spend – last quarter was our biggest ever.  We're continuing to invest significantly in our technology (you can read some of what we’ve been up to here) to help advertisers and agencies buy programmatically across all devices and formats. But we’re always looking at ways to serve our clients even better – starting in a few months, clients will be able to buy inventory on FBX via DoubleClick Bid Manager. We're looking forward to continuing our work to help our clients and partners.

-- Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager

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