Introducing an all-new DFA: DoubleClick Campaign Manager

The phase of adolescence is a transitional one, and this year, on the 15th anniversary of DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) we find ourselves celebrating a big milestone: an entirely rebuilt campaign management platform for marketers and agencies, the coming of age of DFA. In June, we announced that DoubleClick Campaign Manager would be available to all advertisers in the coming months, and today I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched globally.

DoubleClick Campaign Manager is at the core of our DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. It re-imagines how marketers and agencies manage the entire scope of their digital marketing efforts - from planning and executing, to measuring and optimizing their campaigns.

Intuitive workflows that give you back time. With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we started by building new, time-saving features into a noticeably more beautiful and responsive user interface. This means the time gained from speeding things up can free up opportunities for you and your team to work on higher-value activities.

A new trafficking interface loads up to 5 times faster than before, and ads and ad changes now go live in just 2 minutes. You can also view campaign information centrally from a single page, rather than flipping across tabs. With in-line and bulk editing, we’ve greatly reduced the number of clicks to perform common trafficking tasks.

Easy tagging. Floodlight, DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag is integrated with Google Tag Manager. Now, you can push Floodlight tags directly from DoubleClick Campaign Manager to Google Tag Manager (and your site), reducing the time it takes to implement tags from weeks, to minutes.

Programmatic and reservations in one place. With one unified UI and reporting system across DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, you get access to accurate, de-duplicated conversion data. Creatives and tags are shared, and remarketing lists are synced so you can engage your audience seamlessly across every part of your buy.

Seamless support for mobile/HTML5, video, and rich media formats. DoubleClick Campaign Manager makes it easier to produce, scale, and traffic creative formats - from mobile and video, to rich media and dynamic.

A mobile-first approach. Mobile is built into the fabric of our platform. Support for IAB-compliant HTML5 creatives means a single creative can render on any device and help you take advantage of the engaging, rich-media capabilities of HTML5. We’ve ensured that your tags work everywhere too. There is no longer a separate mobile tag, and mobile targeting and reporting dimensions are automatically available in all served tags.

Powerful video features. An intuitive approach to video trafficking allows you to share and re-use companion ads across videos, and get a detailed performance breakdown. And support for the next wave of video formats - including interactive video and dynamic VPAID - helps you deliver more engaging videos. Additionally, you can now track your YouTube TrueView campaigns alongside all your other placements, allowing for more holistic insights.

Easier Rich Media. Integration with DoubleClick Studio allows you to easily sync creatives into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, saving you time and effort. New preview functionality allows you to test and QA creatives without relying on your creative agency. And you can create ads that are tailored to your audience with dynamic creative that optimizes the best combination of variables to serve the “perfect ad” for every impression.

New audience features help you surface key insights and optimize campaigns for better performance.

Create powerful remarketing lists based on custom Floodlight variables. Your lists are automatically shared with DoubleClick Bid Manager and updated in real-time, helping you establish second contact with your audience quickly.

New audience reporting gives you strategic insights. Audience is now a new dimension in standard reporting, so you can understand the segments with which your message best resonated. If you use DoubleClick Bid Manager, audience composition reporting shows you how your first party lists overlap with your third party lists. We will be bringing this capability to all customers soon.

Enhancements in reporting for better decisions. Reporting has always been the backbone of the DoubleClick platform, with de-duplicated reporting across channels. We built on this foundation last year with Report Builder, Multi-Channel Funnels, and DoubleClick Verification. Now, with DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we bring you even more insightful reporting tools:

Powerful attribution with Multi-Channel Funnels helps you better understand your customers’ journey from initial interaction to final conversion and more accurately credit the channels and touchpoints that contributed to your conversions. With the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can choose from several basic models of assigning credit for impressions and clicks, or you can create your own model in a way that makes the most sense for your business.

Integration of Wildfire’s social technology platform with the DoubleClick attribution suite means you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in driving social conversions. Additionally, social ad impressions and clicks can be tracked directly in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, allowing you to measure your social programs alongside the rest of your efforts.

When DoubleClick for Advertisers was founded in 1998, we invested in the promise that digital can forge connections and bring value to advertisers, publishers and users. Today, as we celebrate its 15th anniversary, we’re excited to be investing in the next wave of digital marketing where we are even more connected than ever before.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

Payam Shodjai

Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick Campaign Manager

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Next Week! Join us for a Hangout On Air: Moving at the Speed of Retail

From managing inventory levels, to juggling promotions and tackling catalog churn -- online retail moves quickly, and so should you.

To help you go faster and act smarter with a rapidly-changing retail landscape, we invite you to join our Hangout on Air: Moving at the Speed of Retail. Come hear search leaders from iProspect, Performics, and DoubleClick discuss the latest industry trends, challenges and use cases in retail SEM today. Some of the topics we’ll cover include:

• Tying inventory levels and promotions to search campaigns, in real-time
• Boosting performance with retail-specific bid optimization strategies and best practices
• Finding more cross-channel opportunities through remarketing tactics

Participants:

Jessica Dearien, Account Leader, iProspect

Dave Strong, Group Account Director, Performics

Matthew Eichner, Head of DoubleClick Search

Dan Arwady, DoubleClick Search Account Manager

Register here to attend the Hangout on September 25th, 2013 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST. Tune in for the session, and interact with the panel via Hangouts-enabled Q&A.

We hope to see you there!

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Get customized, role-based training with DFA Academy

When you’re in display advertising, school is always in session. And now is is the perfect time to build your skills!

We’ve heard from DFA users that they need more customized learning based on how they use DFA. For example, if you’re an ad trafficker, you might need a broad understanding ranging from the basics all the way to troubleshooting. If you’re an analyst, you might not need to know all the details a media planner might be responsible for but you might still like to know how conversion data is tracked and counted.

To help you learn through a more established, role-based curriculum, we’ve launched DFA Academy, an easy-to-use, self-paced learning path designed to guide you through core help articles and online training courses.

DFA Academy includes these checklists:

• Basics for new users: The core curriculum, including DFA Fundamentals eLearning and certification
• Implementation guide: Learn how to implement a new DFA account or advertiser
• QA and troubleshooting: It’s not shop class, but you’ll learn all about QA’ing tags, creatives, and more
• Advanced topics: Become an expert through DFA Personal Trainer for Advanced Users, learn about integrations with DoubleClick Bid Manager, Google Tag Manager, and other topics
• Rich Media: When Rich Media isn’t an extracurricular activity, learn tips and best practices for trafficking DoubleClick Rich Media in your DFA account

Since DFA Academy covers a lot of material, we've set it up in checklist format so you can track progress by checking the boxes at the end of each step. Your progress will be saved so if you have to take a break, you can come back anytime and pick up where you left off.

Whether you're a freshman ad trafficker new to display, an analyst on the Dean’s list, or a Media planner feeling like a 5th year student, you can find customized training based on your role to help you ace DFA.

Keep in mind, the DFA Help Center is only available to current DFA users so you'll need to sign in with the Google account you use for DFA.

Want extra credit? Be sure to also sign up for the DoubleClick Digest to get the latest DoubleClick news, research, events and product updates.

Posted by Sarah Payne, DFA Product Trainer

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Now on Mobile - The DoubleClick Ad Exchange Deals Interface

DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) launched the first Preferred Deal in 2012 and the first Private Auction in 2013 to help publishers and advertisers create greater opportunities with programmatic buying. Since the beginning of this year we’ve seen the number of Preferred Deals double, the number of Preferred Deals impressions grow by 2.5X, and Private Auction impressions explode from nothing to millions per day. As these programmatic deal types become more important for our partners, they started asking for the ability to negotiate deals on the go. So today, we’re excited to launch a Mobile version of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange Deals interface.

Negotiate on the go
The new DoubleClick Ad Exchange Deals interface for mobile allows buyers and sellers to check the status of a Preferred Deal or Private Auction on any device. When you sign into the Deals interface on your phone or tablet, the mobile site will load automatically. From there, buyers and sellers can view, edit, accept, or stop existing deals.

If at any time you need to access other features, you can switch to the classic version of the Deals UI by clicking on the Desktop link at the bottom of the screen.

We built this mobile interface to help DoubleClick Ad Exchange partners continue their deal negotiations while away from their desks and it’s available now for all users. To access it, just visit www.google.com/adxbuyer/uploader from your mobile browser and visit our Help Center for buyers or Help Center for sellers to learn more.

Posted by Michael Smith, Product Manager 

Built by Brandon Krieger, Software Engineering Intern

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Continuing to invest in a clean, open exchange

Cross post from the DoubleClick Publisher Blog

Recently there has been a great deal of discussion about applications that inject or overlay ads on sites without the express approval of users and those sites, and then monetize the inventory as their own. We believe that this kind of activity is bad for end users and damages the integrity of the advertising industry. In order for the programmatic marketplace to achieve its full potential and help as many marketers and publishers as we think it can, there needs to be trust between advertisers, publishers, and users.

We’ve invested, since the beginning, in strong policies and a system of checks and filters to ensure that the inventory on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange is the highest quality in the industry. Here’s a quick summary of what we do to stop invalid injected inventory from entering our exchange.

We don’t support spammy applications. Period.

Both the Google Platforms program policies and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) Seller Program Guidelines strictly prohibit the use of systems, including toolbars, that overlay ad space on a given site without express permission of the site owner. In addition, we have numerous processes and technologies in place to review publishers’ inventory as well as advertisers’ ads to maintain a high standard of quality for how advertising is transacted on our platforms. 

In light of the increased concerns on this subject, many publishers have asked us for guidance on what to ask the exchanges or networks they work with. Here are three suggested questions any publisher partner should be able to answer in regards to protecting against injected inventory:

• Does your platform work with or supply advertising for clients who inject display ads in browsers?
• Do your program policies prohibit the use of systems to inject display ads in browsers, without first having obtained user consent or consent from the site affected?
• Please provide me a report of all the inventory partners on your platform serving my domain?

We do, and will always, support our publisher partners. 

Finally, I’d like to thank the millions of publishers who use the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, large and small, that day in and day out, provide amazing value both to their users and their advertisers. We welcome a broader discussion with our partners and with the industry about how to collectively solve this issue and others. Together, we can all ask the tough questions, hold each other accountable, and ultimately create the web we all want, where publishers, users and advertisers all thrive.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management

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Online training for DoubleClick Ad Exchange buyers launched

As more brands adopt programmatic technology, there's a growing need to train buyers on how they can deliver greater ROI by simplifying their media buying and audience targeting with DoubleClick Ad Exchange. To help buyers take advantage of these new buying opportunities, we've launched DoubleClick Ad Exchange eLearning and Certification, a free, self-paced online eLearning and certification that teaches key AdX concepts to new exchange buyers.

We recommend that any media buyers, real-time bidders, and developers who plan to buy inventory from AdX, take our fundamentals training to learn AdX, understand our policies, and get an introduction to programmatic media buying and real-time bidding (RTB).

The course covers:

• What the Ad Exchange is and how it works
• AdX policies and supported creatives
• How to navigate the user interface
• Creating campaigns and ad groups
• An overview of RTB and how to create RTB campaigns
• How to review, create and report on the different programmatic buying solutions

AdX Fundamentals also includes a 30-question certification exam, and a score of 80% or greater is required to pass. When you pass, you’ll get a printable certificate of completion.

Enroll in DoubleClick Ad Exchange Fundamentals and demonstrate your proficiency today.

Keep in mind, this course is only available to current DoubleClick AdX buyers. To access this course, you'll need to sign in with the Google account you use for DoubleClick AdX.

Posted by Anna Solinap, Ad Exchange Product Trainer

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Go back to school, DoubleClick style: 5 ways to ace the test with DoubleClick Bid Manager

Earlier this week, the DoubleClick Search team highlighted how retailers can make the grade on the second-biggest annual consumer spending event -- Back to School shopping season.1 But before parents can snap that obligatory first-day photo, we also wanted to take this opportunity to show you how DoubleClick Bid Manager can help you engage your audience during this peak season, and beyond.

One of our star students, Lisa Markou, Associate Director of Planning at Audience on Demand, explains how the Publicis trading desk uses DoubleClick Bid Manager across many different initiatives: "At VivaKi, we’ve leveraged DoubleClick Bid Manager for a variety of campaigns and have found success with its auto optimization feature, which has helped us more effectively prospect and retarget audiences, as well as enhance demographic filtering capabilities. We've also seen the DFA integration with DoubleClick Bid Manager help streamline workflow for advertisers' audiences, improving planning and activation work stream, as well as the ability to be nimble in providing different 'test' scenarios to our clients."

So how can you can make the mark this school year? Below, we’ve outlined some of our most powerful features from DoubleClick Bid Manager to get you through the Back to School season, and set you up for success for the upcoming holidays.

Highlight what’s important with contextually-relevant ads Let’s face it: we all made it through school by perfecting the “skim and highlight” reading method. But it’s not just for textbooks. With DoubleClick Bid Manager, you can highlight your advertising message based on page content that’s meaningful to your audience. Keyword contextual targeting helps you engage shoppers as they browse content related to your products and services. Based on over 10 years of expertise in semantic targeting technology, our contextual targeting scans eligible web pages, and extracts relevant concepts and themes to match to advertisers’ messages -- and do it all in real-time. Pinpoint potential customers across the web with audience targeting Like the cheerleaders of your high school football team, you may already know who your brand loyalists are. And with robust third-party data segments in DoubleClick Bid Manager, you can identify new supporters who have purchase intentions similar to your existing customers. And if you need help finding your brand's likely consumers, you can use look-alike modeling in DoubleClick Bid Manager for recommendations on new data segments to try. Brush up on your geography skills with location targeting Online and in-store shoppers alike, college students conduct online research as they stock up for the year. Geo-target your campaigns down to the country, region, city or even zip code level to connect with shoppers. Then use DoubleClick Bid Manager’s reporting suite and in-product visualizations to optimize based on the best-performing locations. Secure your brand’s message with powerful display and cross-channel remarketing Don’t let potential consumers stray away. Re-engage shoppers who have left your site with DoubleClick Bid Manager’s powerful remarketing capabilities. And set-up is so easy, you can even spend more time in recess! For DFA users, remarketing lists collected by the DFA Floodlight tag are shared seamlessly with DoubleClick Bid Manager -- improving cookie fidelity and potential reach. And if you’re not using DFA, we’ll provide full pixel creation, implementation and tracking capabilities. But seamless remarketing extends beyond just display. Break barriers between your search and display campaigns with display remarketing from search ads in DoubleClick. As we announced in April, this feature allows advertisers to use insights from paid search clicks to remarket to audiences across ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager -- all with a seamless, tagless workflow. In fact, VivaKi was the first to trial this cross-channel tool by launching a global campaign for a leading insurance company. As described in this video testimonial, with their search and display campaigns on a unified platform, they used search ad clicks as a signal to re-engage users with display ads across billions of ad impressions available via DoubleClick Bid Manager... and saw corresponding performance uplift. Ace your “report” card with better measurement from DoubleClick Don’t wait until the end of the semester to see how well you did. Throughout your campaign’s flight, measure campaign success with DoubleClick’s robust reporting suite: Planning reports: Leverage look-alike modeling to find new users whose online behaviors are similar to your customers. Or find your campaign’s potential impression volume and unique user access with inventory availability reporting. Performance reports: Learn how your your campaign is driving conversions on the fly. You can break down campaign performance metrics by audience segment, geo-parameter, keyword, ad positioning, and more. These deep campaign insights can help you optimize your campaign in real time to maximize performance. Fresh, accurate data across your buy. For DFA users, DoubleClick Bid Manager counts conversions based on the attribution modeling your advertiser has set in the ad server. This means that conversions are de-duplicated across any other partners on your media plan -- no correlation modeling or back end data matching necessary, saving you valuable time and effort..

Before lunch boxes are packed and pencils are sharpened, earn an A+ for your bottom line. To find out how to add DoubleClick Bid Manager to your class schedule, visit www.doubleclick.com/bidmanager.

1. NRF. “2012 Back-to-School Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey” BIGResearch. July 2012

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