What’s new with the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report 2009 Year-in-Review

We published the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report in 2009 to give advertisers and agencies a resource to measure their display campaigns’ performance against industry norms. As a result of feedback and interest from our clients and others in the industry, we’re pleased to offer this year’s edition with a couple of updates:

• Data on impressions served through DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) by creative type. Simple flash is the dominant ad format accounting for close to 70% in the U.S. and 85% in the EMEA region. Static image ads was the next most common format representing 20% of the volume through DFA in the U.S. and 10% in the EMEA region.
  
• The availability of a benchmarks report with detailed EMEA region metrics. Last year we included worldwide overall click-through rates and rich media metrics in the report. Now we are pleased to introduce a separate EMEA Benchmarks Report which covers in-depth display benchmarks across a subset of countries in the EMEA region.
  
• Comparison between overall 2008 and 2009 benchmarks. You will also find in this latest report, a month-by-month comparison of benchmark data for click-through rates, interaction rates, expansion rates and interaction time for the years 2008 and 2009.

When reviewing the data we noticed some interesting trends:

• In 2009, the overall click-through rate for the U.S. did not change from 2008 (0.10%) and what’s more is in a month by month comparison of click-through rates (CTRs) from 2008 to 2009 we saw that CTRs were very consistent throughout the year with a minor spike in January -- possibly a result of the post-holiday sale season.
  
• When it comes to CTR, interaction rate, average interaction time and average display time, we did not observe a great difference between U.S. (see page 2) and EMEA (see page 2) benchmarks.
  
• Consistent with last year’s report, we continued to find a correlation between ad size and clicks and interaction rates -- that is, the larger the ad size, the higher the rate. This finding holds true for both U.S. and the EMEA region.

As with last year’s report, the data for these benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DoubleClick for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. The report covers benchmarks for the entirety of 2009 by ad format, ad size and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions.

For greater detail on the benchmark data, download the U.S. report here and the EMEA region report here. More in-depth benchmarks by industry are available exclusively to DoubleClick clients so contact your account manager to discuss further.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

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What’s new in the Ad Planner 1000

In May we introduced the Ad Planner 1000, a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. It’s a great reference for checking out the most popular sites on the web and observing interesting trends in this latest list of the top 1,000 global sites from month to month. Here are some of our observations from the latest Ad Planner 1000 sites for May 2010.

‘Tis the Season
April showers might bring May flowers but it also brings an end to the tax season. So not surprisingly we saw a precipitous drop (-62%) in the number of unique users going to irs.gov from April to May 2010.

May also spells the end of the television season. Could that be the reason behind the rise in traffic to online video sites as viewers are scrambling to keep up with their favorite shows’ season finales? In the list of top 1,000 May 2010 sites we saw increases in traffic to top video sites vimeo.com (+22%), hulu.com (+20%) and netflix (+13%) and saw nbc.com entering the top 1000 as well.

Games that People Play
The World Cup comes once every four years so the build up to the event makes it no surprise that fifa.com broke the Ad Planner 1000 in May, coming in at 441 on the top 1,000 list. Not to mention goal.com which was already on the Ad Planner 1000 and experienced a 21% increase in unique visitors.

But soccer is not the only game in town these days, at least not here in the U.S. Playoff season is here and naturally the NBA is reaping the benefits. Basketball fans are flocking to nba.com and as a result the number of unique visitors is up 22% this month. We can’t say the same for hockey, however, as unique visitors to nhl.com went down 11% from April. Perhaps this signals waning interest from hockey fans whose teams failed to make the playoffs this season?

While people were playing games outdoors, plenty were staying in. Zynga.com, a popular online gaming site, rose 22% in the month of May.

So that was just a taste of trends for May - check out the latest Ad Planner 1000 and observe interesting trends for yourself.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

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DFA AnalyticsBeta Now with Conversion Reporting

When we launched DFA Analytics in beta in November 2009, our goal was to provide users new, powerful reporting and visualization tools to better analyze campaign performance data.

With DFA Analytics you can evaluate account performance at-a-glance with easy-to-understand charts and graphs. You’re able to drill down through reports and view performance by multiple dimensions such as geography, browser, operating system and connection speed, regardless of whether targeting was implemented during campaign set up.

Now with this latest release of DFA Analytics, we’re adding another dimension -- conversion reporting -- to make for an even more robust reporting solution.

A new “Conversions” tab in the DFA Analytics interface provides data on conversion totals, click-through and view through conversions. And advertisers using sales conversion tags can see revenue data in an easily understandable format

Highlights of the new feature include:

• Filtering: A new filtering option by Spotlight conversion tag lets you see view conversion reporting by one or more Spotlight activities at a time.
  
• Pivoting: Tailor reports for more in-depth analysis with the new pivoting feature which allows you to compare one or two metrics at a time across two different dimensions, including geography.
  
• Frequent updates: Currently conversion data is updated several times a day. As we continue development we expect to provide more even more frequent updates of data in the future.
  
  
• Security permissions: The permissions set during the trafficking process, such as the “View Revenue Data” permission, carry over seamlessly to reporting in DFA Analytics. This ensures that sensitive information in your conversion data is kept in the right hands.

We’re working hard to add new reporting features to DoubleClick for Advertisers so expect to see frequent improvements to DFA Analytics in the coming months. To find out more about these new features in DFA Analytics, check out the articles in the Help Center (login required).

Posted by Allyson Taylor, Product Manager

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An Important Step Towards Reducing Discrepancies

It is often noted by industry observers that transaction costs for online display media remain unnecessarily high. Discrepancies are a big part of the problem. Every month advertisers and publishers share ad serving reports and go through an arduous reconciliation process, often revealing campaign errors that could have been fixed earlier and kept advertiser budgets and publisher revenues on track.

In response, the IAB introduced the Impression Exchange standard last year. The Impression Exchange facilitates the exchange of ad serving data between publishers and third-party ad servers, providing publishers with daily updates on discrepancies to help flag potential issues. The use of the Impression Exchange is also central to the IAB and 4A’s new standard terms and conditions released earlier this year.

DoubleClick is proud to announce that we are the first advertising technology provider to achieve end to end compliance with the Impression Exchange. Additionally, we are working with our colleagues throughout the industry to ensure interoperability as they also adopt this new standard.

The Impression Exchange offers a number of benefits for advertisers. It reduces the amount of time spent resolving discrepancies and eliminates the need to manage multiple reporting sign-ins for publishers. Also, the IAB and 4A's new terms and conditions state that if a publisher using the Impression Exchange is working with an advertiser who has the solution available but is not using it, then the publisher's numbers will be used for billing.

The Impression Exchange is available today in DoubleClick for Advertisers and DART for Publishers, with integration of our full suite of DoubleClick publisher products planned for the future. In fact, DoubleClick is currently the only solution to adopt this standard. To take advantage of this, make sure you enable this feature in DFA to help fight discrepancies and make display buying more efficient for everyone.

Ari Paparo, Director of Product Management

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Investing in Exchange Bidding

We’re happy to announce that we’ve acquired Invite Media, an innovative start-up based in New York and Philadelphia.

The team at Invite Media has developed technology that enables advertisers and agencies to use “real time bidding” to buy display ad space, and to optimize display ad campaigns, across multiple advertising exchanges, all in a single interface.

As we’ve regularly said lately, we’re investing significantly in the display advertising ecosystem and are seeing great momentum. We’ve developed, and are continuing to develop, tools that help both publishers and advertisers take advantage of the opportunities that display advertising offers. These investments are really bearing fruit: publishers are getting improved returns from our suite of publisher solutions; and advertisers and agencies are running effective and creative display campaigns with Google across the web.

Real time bidding technology is an important part of this ecosystem. It enables advertisers and agencies to tailor their bids on an impression-by-impression basis, based on their own data, when bidding on websites that choose to make their ad space available through an advertising exchange. Exchanges that enable real time bidding to all, or some, of their buyers include the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, along with a number of other exchange platforms.

For example, using real time bidding, a retailer running a display ad campaign for a shoe sale can bid $5 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) for ad impressions on a particular news website, but specify that it will bid $10 CPM and show an ad for running shoes if it knows that browser has previously visited the athletics part of its website. Details of the ad impression are passed to the retailer’s bidding platform in real time by the exchange, and the auction takes into account the retailer’s increased bid. This technology lets advertisers and agencies continuously tailor and hone their display ad campaigns, and alter their bids and ads, to reach potential customers they want to attract.

We’re big believers in the benefits and future of this type of display ad buying. But we’re all just at the beginning. It can, and will, be much bigger than it is today, which will benefit the entire ecosystem - advertisers and agencies who can run more effective campaigns, demand-side platforms who offer real-time bidding services to advertisers and agencies, publishers who will get higher prices and more competition for their ad space (while controlling what space they make available, and to whom), and users who will see more useful ads that load faster.

For those who are involved in display advertising, you’ll know that there’s a lot of momentum and buzz in this particular area. In recent months, many agencies and advertisers have been asking us to make a bidding platform available directly to them, as they want to take advantage of the opportunities that real time bidding presents. We’re going to continue to invest significantly in improving Invite Media’s technology and products as a separate platform and, in time, make it work seamlessly with our DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) ad serving product. DFA enables advertisers and agencies to effectively plan, target, serve and measure display ad campaigns across the web. Integrating Invite Media’s technology will help DFA’s clients to easily buy ad space across multiple ad exchanges, as part of managing their broader display ad campaigns. Invite Media’s platform will of course continue to be available to any agency or advertiser, whether they use DFA or not.

Invite Media enables ad space to be bought across multiple exchanges and platforms, with its clients in control of where their ad dollars are spent. It’s going to continue that way. Think of Invite Media as just like DFA itself - technology that delivers ads across multiple websites.

One final note about how this fits in with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Just as Invite Media works across multiple exchanges, this announcement changes nothing about the operation of the Ad Exchange - it will continue to provide exactly the same open and neutral access to ad space for multiple buyers, partner support and API availability as it has always done.

We’re excited by the huge potential of real-time bidding and display advertising. Together with other participants in the industry, we’re working to help them both grow significantly in the years ahead.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

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Announcing the Ad Planner 1000 and Greater Integration with AdWords

Today, we are introducing several new features that integrate DoubleClick Ad Planner data with other Google advertising solutions. These features help streamline the process of planning and building online ad campaigns while offering advertisers access to better data for more informed media planning decisions.

Ad Planner Top 1,000 Most Visited Sites

The Ad Planner 1000 list is a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. Published monthly, this list details the number of unique visitors, page views and reach for each site for the top 1,000 sites globally. It’s a great way to quickly reference the most popular sites on the web.

This latest resource represents yet another step in the evolution of Ad Planner in providing reliable traffic and audience information for websites. In conjunction with our Ad Planner 1000 list, the Google Content just released an Ad Planner 1,000 targeting feature. These two features combined provide an example of how Google is working to provide more actionable data for online display advertisers.

Exporting Google Content Network Placements to AdWords
Many Ad Planner users are also AdWords users, and one of the top requested features is to provide a simple and easy way to buy Google Content Network placements advertisers find through Ad Planner. The newly launched Export to AdWords feature enables advertisers to simply export Google Content Network placements from Ad Planner into AdWords. These exported placements will be set up as a new campaign or ad group within AdWords.

For advertisers running text ads or display ads on the Google Content Network, this provides an easy way to build media plans of managed placements. Now translating the great audience research data in Ad Planner into your AdWords campaigns is easier than ever.

Creating Lists in Ad Planner
To help you create your own list of favorite sites to save and add your media plans, we also recently launched “Lists” in Ad Planner. With “Lists”, you can store sites and placements in lists for future use in media plans. To get you started, we’ve made the Ad Planner 1,000 list available to all Ad Planner user accounts for use as a handy reference or for download.

Our goal with the Top 1000 Sites and other recent updates is to deliver new tools for greater planning efficiency and data to make more informed advertising decisions.

Visit www.google.com/adplanner to check out our new features.

Posted by Rohit Kundaji, Software Engineer and Wayne Lin, Product Manager

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DFA WebServices API Beta Release on May 8

The latest beta release of the DFA WebServices API, version 1.10.2, will be released on May 8, 2010. Read the release notes (DFA sign-in required).

Posted by Ruben Perez, Customer Solutions Consultant

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