4 ways to win in retail this 4th of July with DoubleClick Search

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)

Ah, the 4th of July: a time for day-long picnics at the park, fishing trips by the lake, night skies filled with fireworks -- and of course, shopping. If you’re a search marketer focused on retail, you know that holidays like the upcoming 4th of July can be an enormous opportunity to capture additional traffic from shoppers looking for the best deals online. So while you’re planning your annual hot dog eating contest, we want to help you start a new tradition this year to win in retail, using integrated solutions from DoubleClick Search. Today, we’re offering up a few retail-ready features to make sure you kick off your holiday search campaigns with a bang:

Manage your product inventory, along with your barbecuing. There’s no need to step away from the grill: with inventory-aware campaigns, create and update your search ads, keywords, and bids automatically, based on your product inventory. And seamless integration with Google Merchant Center means you can leverage your existing feeds, with no extra work, at no extra cost. Set up rules that let you:

• Expand your reach by automatically creating new ad groups, ads, and keywords based on product availability. And with deep coverage across your product catalogues, we’ll generate those highly relevant long-tail keywords that can be a chore to manage manually. In fact, we’ve seen that inventory-managed keywords more than doubled return on ad spend for heavy users(1).
• Cut out the repetition in managing existing campaigns, by tying the behavior of ads and keywords to your inventory levels. For example, you can pause keywords when a related product is out of stock, and reactivate them when it’s back in stock, or update ad copy to align with promotions and style changes. You can also change landing page URLs when the links in the feed change.
• Express rich customization with ad templates that enable granular product-level messaging at scale. We’ve seen that this rich customization delivers higher conversion rates by attracting only the most qualified clicks.

Plan a PLA picnic: you bring the fruit salad, we’ll bring the richer search ads. With our fully integrated solution, DoubleClick Search makes creating and managing Google Shopping Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaigns as easy as apple pie. Incorporate product-rich information and measure, optimize, and report on PLA performance using the same familiar workflow you use with the rest of your ads:

• Integrate with Google Merchant Center to easily view Merchant Center feeds in the DoubleClick Search UI, and to preview exactly what products fall under a product target.
• Save time and upload product targets in bulk, using our standard upload sheet workflow to quickly create product targets for your highest revenue-generating products.
• Analyze PLA campaign success with existing reporting features from DoubleClick Search. For example, track budget and key KPIs for PLA campaigns using our budget pacing reports. And with full PLA integration, your reports reflect the same Floodlight or Google Analytics conversion data you use for the rest of your campaigns, to give you a more accurate view of attribution.

Light up your most fiery landing pages through A/B testing. Which landing page is worthy of a fireworks show? With DoubleClick Search landing page testing, identify and drive traffic to the highest ROI landing pages; then, calculate the exact impact of your landing page optimizations and update your ads immediately to boost results:

• Easily split your search ads traffic across multiple landing pages to get just the insights you’re looking for. In addition to evenly splitting traffic across your search ads, you can define custom traffic splits (for example, a 90-10 split).
• Analyze and compare through historical reporting from previously completed tests to help you determine the exact impact of your landing page changes.

Host a cross-channel block party, get search and display talking. It’s the perfect opportunity to mingle with the neighbors. With display remarketing from search ads -- a cross-channel feature from the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform -- use paid search clicks from DoubleClick Search to show consumers display ads across major ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across the Google Display Network, all with an easy and tagless workflow. With this feature, you can:

• Quickly take advantage of new opportunities before they're gone, with a turn-key setup on one integrated platform. Set up your remarketing lists in 4 easy steps, and begin remarketing to users to quickly deliver the right message to the right consumer, soon after they’ve left your site. And with instant conversions, immediately report on the impact of your remarketing efforts, and fine-tune your approach to improve performance.
• Convert browsers to buyers. Re-engage consumers who visited your website, but left without making a purchase. For example, you can reach consumers who placed a pair of sparklers in their shopping cart, but did not complete the checkout process.
• Increase loyalty or reinforce brand messages. Re-engage consumers by introducing new product categories from the same brand. For example, show a display ad for Brand X lawn chair to someone who previously purchased Brand X outdoor umbrella after clicking on the brand’s search ads.
• Up-sell to converted audiences. For example, after a consumer purchases tickets to an amusement park in Anaheim, CA, show him/her display ads for hotel deals in Anaheim.

Don’t miss a beat this year. With solutions from DoubleClick Search, connect to in-market audiences with the right messages, and report on it all in real-time to capture even more seasonal opportunities. Now that’s certainly something to celebrate!

1. Google internal data, 2013

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Display Insights #4: It's prime-time for programmatic video

Video is the rising star of digital advertising. As we discussed in last week’s post, our new research, “Video Advertising Momentum,” found that brand advertisers are upping their video campaigns to reach their audiences across the web. In this installment, we uncover another rising trend: advertisers are increasing their video budgets in programmatic channels.

We’ve seen quite an uptick in video ads across the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, with volume tripling in the first quarter of 2013 compared to last year. The stars of programmatic video are Automotive and Retail advertisers. They were the top two video advertiser categories overall, and both of them quadrupled programmatic video spend in Jan - March compared to last year. But growth seems to be occurring across the board - nearly every advertiser category posted double-digit growth in spend and impressions. Take a look at the full research New ways of buying and selling video ads: The programmatic channel in “Video Advertising Momentum”. 

Why would an advertiser or publisher consider video advertising on the Ad Exchange? The reasons are numerous, but we’ve distilled it down to four:

• Efficiencies: The Ad Exchange streamlines workflow between advertisers and publishers, with campaigns running across multiple sites and viewing devices.
• Emerging technology: Advertisers can now optimize their buys across destinations using advanced bid controls and analytics. The Ad Exchange brings new formats such as skippable video ads and comprehensive methods of measuring campaign performance to more advertisers and publishers.
• Expanding audiences and revenue: Programmatic video buying through AdX helps advertisers extend their reach and gain frequency to new audiences. Publishers can expand their demand sources and gain increased revenue for their video inventory.
• Evolving video advertising: As digital video gains even more momentum, publishers and advertisers are forging new ways to create shared value, including private exchanges and preferred deals.

For a discussion about programmatic video from both advertiser and publisher perspectives, check out the Q&A between TubeMogul and Silver Chalice “What’s the value in programmatic video?”. Next week, we’ll take a look at how choice is changing the way we think about video advertising.

Posted by Mel Ann Chan, Product Marketing

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Celebrating 10 years of shared success

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were. 

Fast-forward ten years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include over two million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned over $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning. Like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides -- all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10am PDT (5pm GMT) on the AdSense +page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki 

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DoubleClick Search industry perspectives video series: Search marketing is now smarter

Last week, we heard leaders from top agencies talk about the need for their search teams to streamline workflows using fast, responsive tools that allow more time for strategy in a constantly evolving search landscape. But as digital marketing increasingly becomes multi-channel, multi-screen, and multi-faceted, marketers today have more opportunities to connect with their audiences across a variety of digital touchpoints, beyond search. 

In addition to fast tools, we heard that marketers also need integrated technologies to help make smarter decisions across the breadth of their digital marketing. Our next video, Search marketing is now smarter, explores how unified platforms can help surface deeper insights through a holistic view of online marketing activity -- within search and beyond -- and how DoubleClick fits in.

 

As Jeremy Hull, Associate Director of Paid Search at iProspect notes: “Paid search doesn’t live in a vacuum. It interacts with every other channel that you work with, online and offline...understanding those interactions is going to allow you to optimize it, and see how it fits in with your overall marketing efforts.” With this in mind, we built DoubleClick Search to natively integrate with our display ad server, demand-side platform, and our rich media and analytics platforms -- all a part of DoubleClick Digital Marketing -- to help marketers drive deeper insights from one, unified view of their customer:

• Holistic view: DoubleClick’s proprietary conversion tracking pixel, Floodlight, lets marketers measure and report on deduplicated conversions across search and display for more accurate reporting.
• Powerful attribution: DFA attribution tools allow marketers to create and apply custom attribution models to better understand how their marketing efforts are working together to drive conversions.
• Offline conversions: Because online advertising often fuels offline conversions, marketers can also connect the dots with the DoubleClick Search Conversions API, factoring in conversions that occurred offline (through in-store transactions and other offline activities) for transactions that started from interactions with online search ads.

Having a single view of the consumer allows marketers to better understand the interplay between channels, without the mashing up and reconciling of different data sources -- but beyond just having access to data, what seamless opportunities do marketers have to take action on those insights and drive results for their business? Join us next week in the final post of our series, where we’ll discuss how top agencies use platforms to improve performance from untapped cross-channel opportunities in our video: Search marketing is now better.

To learn more about DoubleClick Search, visit our YouTube channel and stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog.

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Display Insights Series: Insight #3 - Lights, Camera, ACTION for Video Advertising

[cross-posted from the DoubleClick Publishers Blog.]

When we think about the multi-billion dollar future of digital advertising, we believe that much of that growth will be driven by video. Video advertising is a very compelling way to connect and grow an audience, especially when we layer on technology’s creative possibilities. What’s driving its astronomic growth?

Last Thursday we walked through our second display insight, around selecting the right creative formats to match your campaign goals. Our “Display Insights” Series continues today, where we’ll begin to explore the opportunities in video advertising. 

We took a look at video ads across DoubleClick’s advertising platforms to identify areas of opportunity for advertisers and publishers, and shared these areas of growth in a three-part research collection: “Video Advertising Momentum”. We exclusively analyzed in-stream video ads that played against video content, and focused on ads served on sites globally, excluding Google owned and operated sites like YouTube. We’re going to unpack the findings over the next two weeks, kicking it off with this infographic:

Digital video advertising is essential for brand campaigns.

• Advertisers are getting into digital video in a big way: two out of five video ads on the DoubleClick advertising platforms came from advertisers new to digital video in 2013 - and many of them were large brand advertisers.
• 68% of video ads in the last 12 months came from four advertiser categories dominated by large brand advertisers. The top video advertiser categories were Automotive and Retail, with Consumer Packaged Goods and Technology advertisers rounding out the top four.
  
  

Publishers are growing audiences and revenue with more video.

• News publishers are redefining the way they deliver the news. As they increase their focus on video news content, they’re running 3 times more video ads this year than last.
• Video content is coming from all across the web - not just from TV or entertainment publishers. Sites that have benefit from increased video spending include Automotive & Vehicle, Sports, Computers & Electronics, and Shopping sites.

For video, the opportunity is clear: brand advertisers are using video to reach their audiences across the web, and publishers are powering their content strategy with more video. We can’t wait to see how video rockets digital advertising to new heights. 

Stay tuned for next week’s edition of Display Insights, as we dive into how programmatic video has hit its prime-time. And if you can’t wait that long, check out the full Video Advertising Momentum collection to explore them on your own. 

Posted by Mel Ann Chan, Product Marketing 

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Calling all Studio Certified Users: Enter the Studio Certification Awards Contest to Win a Nexus 7!

Are you a Studio Certified user? Do you design and build Rich Media ads in DoubleClick Studio? Then enter our Studio Certification Awards Contest and you could win a Nexus 7! 

How to Enter:

Submit your best rich media ad via this form between June 10th and July 31st, 2013. 

The Prizes: 

The contest is divided into three regions: EMEA, APAC, and Americas. One winner and one runner-up will be selected from each region. 

The Winner from each region will receive: 

• 1 new 32GB Nexus 7 (retail value $199) or equivalent.
• Gold Award Badge
• Creative featured in exclusive blog post

The Runner-up from each region will receive:

• Silver Award Badge

Judging Criteria:
Our jury will look for work that highlights the following:

• Innovation - How have you used innovative features to create something that’s never been done before?
• Creativity - Is your ad uniquely new or creative?
• Design - Does your ad design maximize our innovative rich media features?
• Autonomy - Was your ad built using our self-help resources and with minimal or no guidance from our support teams?

Who is Eligible?

All Studio Certified users in these countries: 

• EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa): United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, Finland, Russia and Netherlands. 
• APAC (Asia Pacific): Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand
• Americas: United States, Canada (Except Quebec), Brazil, Mexico and Argentina

Find the contest rules for your region here: EMEA, APAC, Americas.

Our contest will kick off our new Studio Certification Awards Program, in which we’ll recognize the best and brightest Rich Media designers with special awards in our Studio Certification “Hall of Fame.”

Not Studio Certified? No worries! Get Certified here. 

We’ve added brand new badges to the certification program: 

• New Core Studio Certification exam for Flash developers
• New Core Studio Certification exam for HTML5 developers
• New Dynamic Badge certification
• New, integrated QA certification

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick 

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Display Insights Series: Insight #2

Last Tuesday, we presented our first display insight from the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool around increasing engagement and interaction rates. Today, we’re continuing our “Display Insights” series with our second nugget: 

Different types of rich media ads are better suited for different campaign goals. 

While you may ideally want to have high engagement rates and times for every ad you create, there are most likely times when you care more around getting people to engage frequently and other times when you care more about getting them to engage for a long time. The data from the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool suggests that different rich media formats may be better suited for different campaign goals. 

If you’re goal is to maximize:

• Click-through rate: use mobile ads, or larger ad sizes
• Interaction rate: use expanding formats, or larger ad sizes
• Interaction time: use in-page ad formats
• Video completions: use in-page ad formats

In general, larger ad sizes and expanding formats lead to a higher frequency of interaction, while in-page ad formats lead to a longer interaction time. In addition, mobile ads seem to be the best type of ad format at driving click-through rate: the average click-through rate for mobile display ads is between two and six times greater than that of the other formats. 

So what?

By understanding which types of ad formats and sizes work best for which metrics, you can better optimize your creative strategy so that you’re maximizing the metrics you care about. For example, for an ad unit that is primarily meant to generate brand awareness, you might care mainly about getting as many people to interact with the ad as frequently as possible. If there isn’t a ton of ad content for them to engage with, you don’t need them to spend a ton of time on the ad. In this case, you might use an expanding rich media ad in a large size, like the billboard or skyscraper ad size, since these units maximize interaction frequency.

However, you might have another ad unit that includes multiple panels of information about your brand as well as a demo video of your product. In this case, you care about people spending time on your ad and engaging with all of your content. So for these ads you might want to use the rich media in-page format which maximizes interaction time. 

Both of these examples illustrate how you can optimize your creative strategy and output to align with the goals you’re hoping to achieve for each part of your campaign.

Join us next week for the third installation in our “Display Insights” series, where we'll begin to explore the opportunities in video advertising, and check out the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool to experiment with the data yourself.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

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thinkDoubleClick: Connecting digital, accelerating growth

This morning, I’ll be kicking off thinkDoubleClick, our annual industry event where we discuss the future of digital media. At this same event last year, we unveiled DoubleClick Digital Marketing, the unified platform we’re building to help advertisers and agencies manage the entire breadth of their digital marketing efforts.

Our goal with this year’s event is to take a deeper look at how digital helps us forge deeper connections within organizations, with our partners and with consumers. We also have several exciting pieces of news to share about investments that will help our advertiser and publisher partners make the most of these connections.

Connect your business

At the core of of digital media is its ability to build connections, and we’ve seen that it can be incredibly valuable in helping our partners connect across their business, offering a holistic picture of how all their marketing efforts work together. This was the vision behind DoubleClick Digital Marketing, and today we’re making two key improvements:

• A new DFA: DoubleClick Campaign Manager. We’re excited to announce a brand new version of DFA, which we are calling DoubleClick Campaign Manager. In the biggest upgrade to our core ad server in the 15 years since its inception, DoubleClick Campaign Manager completely re-imagines the ad management and ad serving process. DoubleClick Campaign Manager will be available to all advertisers globally in the coming months. 
• DoubleClick goes social. Today’s digital platforms play a critical role in helping marketers adapt to constantly evolving formats and channels. Today, social is a good example of that; it has changed the way we communicate, share and interact. And not just with our loved ones -- 80% of consumers say social interactions with brands influence their purchase decisions. It’s why we acquired Wildfire last year, and today, we’re happy to announce that we’re taking steps to integrate Wildfire into the DoubleClick platform. Now, marketers can address a critical part of the customer journey, and do it alongside search, display, rich media, video and mobile as part of the broader DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. This is just the beginning of how we’re incorporating Wildfire’s technology. There are more exciting things to come in this area.

Connect with your partners

Technology is also about connecting you with your partners - bringing buyers and sellers together at scale. We’re introducing a few new ways to make this happen as well: 

• Shared sales with YouTube in DoubleClick for Publishers. For our publisher partners, we’re hearing that video, and YouTube in particular, is becoming an increasingly important part of your selling strategy. But when you have a partner like YouTube that is also selling this inventory, we’ve heard that the process of booking these shared sales was incredibly cumbersome. So I have some news: in the coming months, we're introducing a new feature called Cross-Sell in DoubleClick for Publishers, to automatically and easily manage joint sales for our YouTube partners. Our goal is to let your sales team work hand-in-hand with ours to maximize every sales opportunity and to give you extra time to focus on your advertiser relationships. 
• Making native native... to DoubleClick. Recently, “native formats” have emerged as an important new model. They provide new types of brand experiences, like sponsored stories, that are unique to each publisher. We want to support formats like this that connect advertisers and publishers in a meaningful way, while also creating real value for users. We're already testing this capabilities with a handful of publishers and will be looking to expand in the coming months. Our goal is to make this technology seamless for publishers who want to have flexibility in implementing native formats and making the most of them on their properties. 
• Making a viewable standard a reality with Active View. To help publishers tap into the accelerating brand opportunity, we’re focused on unlocking new ways of measurement with the rollout of Active View in our core publisher products: DoubleClick for Publishers, AdSense and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Publishers using these products will be able to measure what inventory is viewable. In early tests, we’ve found that Active View can help uncover “gold below the fold.” Click-through rates double for viewable inventory below the fold - in other words, users that are engaged with the content are also engaging with the ads. Active View complements our other investments in making digital an effective medium for brand marketers and their awareness-building campaigns, like Lightbox ads and TrueView in AdMob and games. These efforts appear to be paying off for brand advertisers: we saw a 65 percent increase last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools. We think these investments will be mutually beneficial for publishers, their advertiser partners, as well as users. 

Connect with consumers

The third (and in my mind most important) type of connection that digital helps create, though, is with consumers. As you all know, we are now living in a multi-screen world. Consumers are effortlessly shifting from screen to screen. In fact research has found that 90% of multiple device owners switch between screens to complete tasks. We’re investing in helping advertisers and publishers connect with them across screens as well:

• Google Web Designer. To help advertisers and publishers more seamlessly unlock the potential of cross-device programs, we are investing in a new HTML5 creative development tool - Google Web Designer. Available in the coming months, Google Web Designer will empower creative professionals to create cutting-edge advertising as well as engaging web content like sites and applications - for free. Google Web Designer will be seamlessly integrated with DoubleClick Studio and AdMob, greatly simplifying the process of building HTML5 creative that can be served through Google platforms.

No other medium builds connections like digital - it’s one of the reasons I remain so bullish on this industry. But digital is not just a medium. It’s the bedrock which enables connections between advertisers and publishers, within our own organizations, as well as brands and consumers. That’s why we’ll continue to invest in helping build these connections - between re-imagined creative tools, reinvented measurement solutions, and revamped ad buying platforms - that will accelerate and propel digital advertising into a $200 billion industry that funds and supports great content.

And this is just some of what we’ll be discussing today at thinkDoubleClick, I encourage you to tune in to our live stream to check out the entire program running from 9 am to 12:30 PDT today.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

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