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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Making better decisions: Attribution Modeling comes to DFA

Attribution modeling, even with the Path to Conversion report, can be a daunting task, with the data inputs required and the approaches varying greatly depending on one’s level of experience. Countless hours can be spent manipulating and setting up data before you can even think about gleaning insights on your campaign.

Last week we first introduced the Attribution Modeling Tool, and today we’re pleased to announce its availability to all DFA users. No additional setup is necessary to get started, since the modeling data is pulled from your advertising campaigns running in DFA.

The Attribution Modeling Tool, accessible from within Multi-Channel Funnels, includes six standard models plus the ability to create custom models:

1. Floodlight, the standard DFA model, is based on a last-click wins model which gives 100% of credit to the last click, or to the last impression if no click is present in the path. It’s useful as a baseline for comparison with other models. 
2. Last Interaction gives the last touch point 100% of the credit for the conversion. 
3. First Interaction gives the first touch point 100% of the credit for the conversion. It can help you understand which campaigns create initial awareness for your brand or product. 
4. Linear gives each touch point in the conversion path equal credit for the conversion. An advertiser might use this model if campaigns are designed to maintain contact and awareness with the customer throughout the entire sales cycle. 
5. Time Decay gives most of the credit to touch points that were closest in time to the sale or conversion. It can be useful for campaigns with short sales cycles, such as promotions. 
6. With Position Based, 40% credit is assigned to the first interaction, 20% credit is assigned to the middle interactions, and 40% credit is assigned to the last interaction. It can be used to adjust credit for different parts of the customer journey, such as early interactions that create awareness and late interactions that close sales. 

You can further answer specific questions by creating custom models with rules based on interaction type, position, time, DFA data (site, placement, etc.), and DoubleClick Search data (campaign). This lets you adapt the models to better account for your campaign objectives.

So start exploring different attribution models with the data in your DFA campaigns. You’ll learn how to quickly build, customize, and compare models and derive new insights on the customer journey to conversion from the different touch points of your campaign.

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 at IAB MIXX in NYC, Oct 1-2

There’s been some buzz in the industry this week around our big bets in display advertising and digital marketing technology, with coverage in Forbes of the progress made on DoubleClick Digital Marketing and articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times about recent eMarketer predictions of Google’s future in display. As Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising at Google, told The Wall Street Journal, "We're seeing strong growth in our brand business. Measurement and creative formats are top of mind for clients these days."

On the heels of this coverage, Neal will be going deeper into these topics with a keynote at the IAB MIXX conference in New York City on Oct 2. He will be joined on-stage by Jon Suarez-Davis, Kellogg’s Senior Director of Global Digital Strategy, and Curt Hecht, Global Chief Revenue Officer at The Weather Channel, who will be representing the advertiser and publisher sides in a lively debate about programmatic buying and brand-building online. Be sure to check it out!

When the Irresistible Force of Technology Meets the Immovable Object of Brand - Paradox, Big Bang or Non-Start?
How the Science of Automation plays into the Art of Brand Building
Tuesday, Oct 2, 3:15-3:45pm

When it first emerged, programmatic buying promised to transform how digital media was bought and sold. Its ability to deliver precise connections, scale, and efficiency attracted performance marketers, but the value to brand campaigns was less clear.  As technologies evolve to better target and engage audiences and measure campaign effectiveness, brands are beginning to funnel dollars into online spend and embrace the programmatic trend. 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? Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising at Google, will explore these tensions with senior brand marketers and their publishing partners, taking this debate out of back rooms and onto the big stage.

Posted by Emily Wright, Product Marketing Manager

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Constantly innovating: the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform

Earlier this summer we announced we were bringing together DoubleClick’s advertising technology products into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing (DDM) platform for advertisers and agencies.  

Over the coming months we’ll be giving you regular updates on this journey as we launch upgrades of the DoubleClick products, implement cross-product integrations, and deliver innovative, new features within the individual products.

We’ve had a busy summer, and are excited to share the following details:

• Platforms upgrades -  An important first step to delivering on the vision of DDM is upgrading the individual DoubleClick products to take advantage of Google’s technology. Today we’re highlighting the progress we’ve made upgrading two platforms: DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio.

DoubleClick Bid Manager -- Google acquired the Invite Media demand-side platform in 2010, and since then we have completely rebuilt the platform.  We announced during the summer that Bid Manager was going into beta and now, with a notable volume of traffic flowing through the system, we’ll be making this new version available to all customers in October.  Customers using the new Bid Manager to target, optimize, and buy display media have seen improved performance, including seeing 16% more inventory due to infrastructure improvements that reduce our latency with exchanges.

DoubleClick Studio version 2 -- We have also upgraded our rich media production tool, DoubleClick Studio, which facilitates a streamlined workflow between media and creative agencies for the web’s most engaging ad formats. Almost 80% of creative agencies using DoubleClick Studio have already transitioned to the new version, which delivers a faster and more responsive UI and integrated dynamic content capabilities.

Upgrading the individual platforms also gives us the opportunity to make sure that they work better together to unlock even more opportunities for our customers.

• Streamlining cross-product interactions:  When we asked leading agencies and advertisers how much time their staff could save by working in an integrated ad platform, they estimated they could save about a third of hours spent per week -- or about an extra month every year each team member could invest in other activities -- just by reducing manual processes and working in a single system.

With the DoubleClick Bid Manager upgrade and its integration with DDM, buyers can now access cross-channel opportunities that are only available through a unified system.  For example,  we’re excited to announce the ability for agencies and marketers using DoubleClick Search to show consumers display ads via DoubleClick Bid Manager based on their interactions with paid search ads. Marketers have struggled to coordinate their search and display marketing efforts, and this new integration makes it easier, with no new site tags and no new products to learn.  

Another subtle step toward cross-product interaction is the rollout this week of a new universal navigation bar and application switcher for users of DoubleClick Search, DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio. While a simple change, we believe this new UI will facilitate seamless switching between DoubleClick products, saving time for marketers who are using our platform to manage their campaigns across multiple channels.   

• Innovation across the platform:  In addition to integrating our platforms, we are continuing to invest in our existing products.  As an example of this, we’re excited to announce the launch later this month of Attribution Modeling in Multi-Channel Funnels in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

Advertisers use a variety of channels, messages and ads to engage customers. Determining which of these efforts is most effective in converting customers can be difficult (see related post here).  Attribution analysis can help identify what is driving customers, but until recently it’s only been practical for the most sophisticated advertisers.  By the end of September, we’re making attribution modeling available to anyone using DFA -- for free.

Some benefits of this approach include:

1. Ready to use data -- the attribution modeling data will live within DFA, so there’s no delay between when you want to run an analysis, and when you can actually start.
2. Flexible, customizable, transparent models -- you can take advantage of five standard attribution models in DFA, or build your own custom model tailored to the needs of your business
3. It’s free -- no need to build your own system for this kind of analysis. We’re giving it to you as part of DFA, with your data loaded and ready to go.

We're rapidly delivering on our vision for a fully integrated experience and common workflows across DoubleClick solutions -- from ad serving to buying and analytics.  We’re excited to be on this journey with our customers and believe that by delivering an integrated experience, we can help the industry truly unlock the full potential of digital marketing. Stay tuned for more updates, there’s a lot more to come!

Posted by: Jason Miller

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