Making smarter decisions with fresh, reliable data

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

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

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

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Get your DoubleClick Search Fundamentals Certification!

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

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

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





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

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

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

Posted by the DoubleClick Search Team

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Programmatic in the future: What publishers think

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

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

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




Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

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Attend an upcoming DoubleClick Bid Manager Training Webinar

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

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

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

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

Posted by Molly Larrison, DoubleClick Bid Manager Product Trainer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full case study here.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Manager

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Programmatic in the future: What publishers think

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

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

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

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Manager

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Google Tag Manager: Video and Q&A

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

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

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

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

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

Questions and Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

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