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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What’s on Neal Mohan’s Mind for thinkDoubleClick? Social, Native Formats and More

Ahead of our thinkDoubleClick digital advertising summit on June 4th, we caught up with Neal Mohan, Google’s Vice President of Display Advertising, to hear what’s on his mind heading into the conference.

The theme for thinkDoubleClick this year is “Connect & Accelerate.” Why did that resonate with you?

I get asked all the time why I'm so bullish about the future of digital media. It's a long answer, but if I had to boil it down, it comes down to two things. First, I think there’s a $200 billion opportunity as brand spend shifts online that I think will help grow the pie for everyone. Second, digital has an unparalleled ability to connect the things that will help marketers and publishers address that opportunity - their businesses, their partners and their customers. We'll be talking about this at the conference, as well as how technology can help accelerate our partners’ growth.

What discussions are you looking forward to at thinkDoubleClick?

I’m looking forward to some honest conversations about brand-building in today’s connected world, how marketers are re-thinking their marketing mix, and how publishers are embracing new models, like native formats.

We really hope that people walk away from this event with actionable insights from our fantastic lineup of speakers featuring Coca Cola’s Wendy Clark, Omnicom Digital’s Jonathan Nelson, and CBS Interactive’s Jim Lanzone.

Will there be any announcements?

I’m not going to give away too much, but I think what might surprise people is that we’ll be talking about social’s role in the customer journey, as well as the growing importance of native formats to our publisher partners at a level of detail we haven’t to date. I hope everyone tunes in next week to learn more.

thinkDoubleClick is being live-streamed publicly on June 4th from 9am - 12:30pm PDT.  If you haven’t done so already, you can register here.

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Display Insights Series: Insight #1

Just a reminder that, on Tuesday, June 4th, we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

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Last week, we announced the launch of our DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool -- a tool that lets you pull benchmarks on the ad industry to help you better understand your own display campaigns. Today, we’re kicking off a series of posts that will dive into the insights we’re finding with the tool. 

Today’s insight: rich media engagement metrics have been increasing since last summer, indicating that users are engaging with ad content more frequently and for longer amounts of time. 

One of the great things about rich media formats is that they provide built-in engagement metrics that allow agencies to understand consumer’s interaction with brands, beyond the simple click. Our benchmark data suggests that since the summer of 2012, rich media engagement metrics have been consistently increasing.

Since the summer of 2012: 

• The frequency with which people interact with an ad when they see it on the page has grown ~60%. 
• The time that people spend interacting with an ad has grown ~21%. People are spending on average 10 seconds of time interacting with an ad. 
• The frequency with which people expand an ad has grown ~50%. On average, people spend ~19 seconds with the ad in the expanded state.
• The frequency with which people complete a video has grown ~24%.  
• The average amount of time that an ad is displayed on the page has increased by ~23%. 

The take-away: 

Consumers interact, expand, and watch ads when advertisers take advantage of engaging rich media formats and provide ad content that allows users to engage. So consider incorporating these types of ads into your campaigns -- instead of a static banner ad, make a rich media ad with a video, or an ad that expands or lets users engage. By making your ad creative more engaging, you’ll entice consumers to interact with your brand online. 

Tune in next week for our second installation of the “Display Data Insights Series.” And in the meantime, check out our new DoubleClick Display Benchmarks tool to find interesting tidbits on your own.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing - DoubleClick

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

Just a reminder that, on Tuesday, June 4th, we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

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What are some of the big questions about search that keep you up at night?

That’s what we asked search marketing leaders from top agencies in a series of interviews, to understand what excites them -- and challenges them -- about the state of search today.

We caught up with Eric Papczun, US President of Performics, Erica Barth, VP of Products and Partnerships at Resolution Media, Jeremy Hull, Associate Director of Paid Search at iProspect, and Sean McDonald, VP and Group Director at Digitas to learn about their perspectives on those “big questions” and how DoubleClick Search fits in. And overwhelmingly, we heard three key themes: the need for search marketers to streamline workflows and act faster, to make smarter decisions with all of their data in one place, and to drive performance for better results. We’re highlighting their perspectives on these themes of faster, smarter, and better with a series of videos -- starting today with Search Marketing is Now Faster.

This video explores how search marketers must keep pace in a digital marketing landscape that's moving faster than ever before, and highlights how the right tools can help search teams work more efficiently to maximize their marketing campaign results.

 
As Eric Papczun notes, “The ability to change a campaign -- modify a strategy, in the moment -- is what speed is all about.” At DoubleClick Search, we’re investing in features that give search teams a simple, intuitive way to manage their accounts at scale across engines. Many of our newest features, including bulk editing enhancements and new scheduling options help eliminate tactical or repetitive tasks across as many as 150 million keywords in a single day(1), while instant conversions offer up-to-the-minute feedback on campaign performance to let marketers quickly act on real-time feedback. 

Agile, responsive tools are just one piece of the puzzle. Marketers also need the right tools to help make smarter decisions within search, as well as across other online channels. Next week, we’ll hear from our thought leaders on how platforms are critical in enabling smarter decisions in digital, with our second video: Search Marketing is Now Smarter.

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

1. Google internal data, 2013

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Reminder: register for thinkDoubleClick

Just a reminder that, on Tuesday, June 4th, we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

Hear executives from advertising, agencies and publishers discuss some of the big questions in digital such as:

• How do creatives leverage, but not be overwhelmed by, technology to deliver next-generation consumer experiences?
• What unique experiences are publishers developing that add value to consumers and advertisers alike?
• How do CMOs best use social with other marketing channels to build strong brands?  

For more details on our thinkDoubleClick leadership summit, visit our earlier blog post here. 

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Cutting Complexity, Adding Value: Unified Ad Tech Efficiencies Could Save Marketers 33%

Digital marketing delivers powerful results for advertisers -- but running digital campaigns has become too complex. Google commissioned The Boston Consulting Group to better understand the potential to improve efficiency for marketers and create more value in digital campaigns.

Using “lean” methodology to map and measure the end-to-end process of 24 digital campaigns across 15 digital marketers in Europe, here’s a summary of what BCG found:

• Campaign teams were spending on average only 1 day in 5 on ‘value-creation’ activities, with 80% of their time spent on low-value activities such as trafficking.
• Using a unified ad technology stack (a combined solution from a single vendor) generates resource-productivity improvements on average of 12% and up to 33% across the campaign lifecycle.
• Marketers realise further productivity gains by combining a single ad technology stack with wider organizational change -- which frees up talent for higher-value activities, such as strategy development, analysis and creativity.
• These are still “early days,” and marketers achieved these gains with even an early version of the unified technology stack. Further gains are possible as technology continues to advance.
• Increased efficiency means better performance. Marketers that re-invested efficiency gains into value-creating activities created an important competitive advantage in campaign performance.
• It takes a pragmatic approach. Marketers should use a step-by-step lean approach to address pain points in processes, structure and technology.
• It also takes an ecosystem. Advertisers, agencies, publishers and technology providers, working together, all have a role in cutting complexity and adding value to the overall industry.
  
  
  

We’re releasing the full report today.

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