Tutorial Tuesday: Create interstitial and expandable ads

Thanks for following along with our Google Web Designer Tutorial Tuesday series over the past few weeks. In the series, we’ve covered a number of basics to get you started with the tool: we’ve taken a tour of the user interface, created animations, and learned how to use the CSS Panel. Today, for our last post in the series, we’ll be focusing on creating interstitial and expandable ads.

Interstitial ads

Interstitial ads give users a full page ad experience at natural transition points such as page changes or app and video launches. Interstitial ads are displayed in an iFrame that floats over a web page or app, and users can click or tap a close button to hide an ad from their screen. Many people using Google Web Designer will want to design interstitial ads with multiple pages, so we’ve created three step-by-step videos to help you do just that. 

Start with the first video>> 

Expandable ads

Expandable ads are small banner-size ads which expand when clicked. Expandable ads are displayed in an iFrame that's the size of the expanded page, and a user can click or tap a close button to collapse an ad to its original size. As with interstitial ads, we’ve created three step-by-step videos to help you design expandable ads using Google Web Designer. 

Start with the first video>>

Don’t let the learning stop here

While our Tutorial Tuesday series has come to completion, you can keep learning about Google Web Designer via our help center and YouTube Channel, and our user forum and Google+ page are additional outlets where you can both learn and share feedback about GWD. 

We’ll be sure to post about other exciting developments as we release them, so stay tuned to the blog for the latest information.

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Making Mobile Rich Media Front and Center in DoubleClick Studio

At the end of September, we announced the launch of Google Web Designer, Google’s new HTML5 authoring tool, and last week we propelled the conversation forward around Mobile and HTML5 in the industry with our iMedia article and our Digital Dialogue. Today, we want to give you the DoubleClick Rich Media perspective on building beautiful cross-screen creative and tell you about the investments we’re making to ensure you have what you need to create effective advertising across screens.

Our customers have made it clear that building for the cross-screen world continues to be a challenge. But in spite of these difficulties, we believe that adopting HTML5 is critical to success in today’s cross device world. To help creative agencies make this transition, we are focusing our efforts on the following areas of improvement within DoubleClick: 

1. Make it easier to build innovative mobile rich media formats
2. Center the DoubleClick workflow on HTML5
3. Make sure creatives built in DoubleClick can run everywhere

Make it easier to build innovative mobile rich media formats:

We have built a first-class integration between Studio and our recently launched HTML5 authoring tool, Google Web Designer (GWD). DoubleClick Rich Media creatives built in GWD will automatically include the Studio enabler and other metrics and can be uploaded seamlessly into Studio. We plan to enhance this integration with features that will ease the workflow between applications, such as an automated push of creatives from one tool to the other.

Further, to ensure we let our developers use the tools they prefer, we have released a number of templates that can be installed into Adobe Edge Animate. A developer can use these templates as a starting point for building a variety of mobile formats. The templates will automatically include the Studio enabler and automatically “polite-load” the creative, which is important due to the larger file sizes generally seen with HTML5.

Finally, we plan to release many more HTML5 Layouts as part of our Studio Layouts Gallery to add to the growing repertoire of available HTML5 formats available in our platform. 

Center the DoubleClick workflow on HTML5:

We’re making it easy to quickly add mobile features to your creatives to make them mobile-ready. We’ve built an HTML5 video player module that will work across browsers and operating systems. This will relieve developers from having to write many lines of code to deal with cross platform support. In November, we are also adding support for the new Expand-to-Full-Screen format for mobile web, which allows an in-page unit to expand to full screen regardless of the screen size. 

We’re also making it easier to upload your HTML5 creative into Studio. With our relative paths support, you’ll be able to upload HTML5 creative with nested folders and maintain that folder structure in Studio. You can also upload custom fonts with your creatives (the actual fonts, not the static images), improving workflow, file size and quality of the creatives.

With our Mobile Showcase App, you can push your creative preview to a mobile device. This means you can test and preview in-app and mobile web creative on the actual device where it will appear to an end-user, before you actually publish the creative. 

Make sure creatives built with DoubleClick can run everywhere:

In the desktop world, a lot of work has been done to ensure ads can run everywhere. Similar efforts are now being focused on mobile web and in-app environments. We are working to ensure our ads run on all major in-app networks, so you can be sure your creatives function properly across all desired inventory. In the coming months, we will build out support for MRAID v2, and you will see us push the boundaries on standards for serving in-app creatives.

We encourage all agencies, developers and designers to spend some time experimenting with all our new products and features. Making mobile work is one of our highest priorities at DoubleClick, and the features mentioned above are only the start of a long and exciting roadmap. We look forward to hearing your feedback and to working with you to push the industry forward!

Posted by Jordan Sumerlus, Product Manager, DoubleClick Rich Media

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Attend an upcoming Ad Exchange training webinar

If you're interested in gaining more expertise with DoubleClick Ad Exchange to improve your buyer experience, be sure to join our upcoming webinars. We offer online eLearning and certification, along with pre-recorded webinars. Register in the Ad Exchange Help Center (sign-in required).

Introduction to AdX Policy – 11/13
Join our live webinar to learn a general overview of Ad Exchange policies, the enforcement process, along with live Q&A. We'll also provide a list of policy resources to reference after the event.

What’s new with RTB? – 12/4
Come learn about what's changed in the past six months with Real-time bidder, as well as the great features that are coming out. The product management and engineering team will walk you through all the changes that have occurred and how you can take advantage of them to improve your use of RTB.

Pre-recorded webinar: Overview and trafficking
Watch this webinar to learn about setting up private deals with ad exchanges, what's needed to get started, and steps to launch. We recommend this webinar for users who want to learn more about accessing available inventory and direct deals.

• Watch

What's New with AdX? – Detect & Correct and REST API Updates – 10/23
Come learn about what new updates have been made to AdX, as well as the great features that are coming out. The product management and other cross-functional teams will walk you through policy updates and how you can take advantage of them to improve your use of AdX.

When you register for these webinars in our Help Center, be sure to read our latest product updates, too.

We've designed Ad Exchange training to arm you with the tools you need to optimize with Ad Exchange. If you're new to the Ad Exchange, these webinars are a great place to start.

Posted by Asha Balendran, DoubleClick Ad Exchange Product Trainer

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Join us for "Digital Dialogues: Making Mobile Work with HTML5" - 10/24 @ 10am PT

Following the recent launch of our Mobile White Paper, “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?”, this week we’re continuing the conversation around unlocking the mobile opportunity with a Digital Dialogues Hangout-on-Air.

There's no question that people are spending more time across screens, and the opportunity to reach them there is huge. Advertisers, media and creative agencies are still trying to figure out the best way to leverage mobile in their campaigns, optimize for it and build engaging multi-screen creatives. Publishers continue to strategize on ways to deliver and monetize engaging cross-screen consumer experiences.

Join us for a conversation on how technologies and solutions like HTML5 can make cross-screen creative and mobile advertising more accessible for the industry.

Speakers:

• Zach Chapman, VP of Digital Sales, ESPN.com
• Matt Cooper, Founder of Addroid
• Sissie Hsiao, Group Product Manager, Google

What: Digital Dialogues Hangout on Air: Making Mobile Work with HTML5

When: Thursday, 10/24 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET

Where: Think With Google G+ page.

RSVP here.

While you’re waiting, here’s some background reading:

• “Build Creative Campaigns Across Screens” -- Pete Crofut’s fourth iMedia article in his series “How Technology Makes Creative More intelligent”.
• “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?” -- DoubleClick/Illuminas Research White Paper and infographics

We hope you’ll be able to join us!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing

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Piston boosts ROAS by 51%, conversions by 50% for retail client using inventory-aware campaigns

A few months ago, we announced improvements to our inventory-aware campaigns feature, which automatically creates and optimizes a retailer’s search campaigns, based on updates made to their Google Merchant Center product feed. Since then, we’ve seen some impressive results across the board, showing that inventory-managed keywords more than doubled return on ad spend for heavy users(1).

Today, we wanted to highlight one of our success stories around this feature. The following story comes from Piston -- a bicoastal digital agency in the US, who helped their retail client maintain a “stylish profile” by keeping their campaigns relevant using inventory-aware campaigns.

After working around the clock to keep up with ever-changing product descriptions, prices, and landing pages during a busy holiday season, Piston turned to inventory-aware campaigns to scale their campaign management across their retail client’s 8,000+ products.

“When we’re looking for a solution, the key questions we ask are: can this save us time, can this save us money, and does it have features that can really help us impact our bottom line? And with DoubleClick inventory-aware campaigns, the answer was always ‘Yes’.” says Jennifer Johnstone, Senior Performance Marketing Strategist at Piston. “Inventory-aware campaigns allow us to save time from manually managing product inventory, enable us to spend our dollars on more efficient product level keywords, and help us drive more revenue than manual campaign builds.”

One quarter after adopting inventory-aware campaigns, Piston saw a 51% rise in ROAS, a 26% jump in CTR, and a 50% boost in conversion rate, compared to manually-managed campaigns. Additionally, inventory-aware campaigns allowed them to expand keyword coverage on both products and SKUs by 49% -- all while saving an estimated 38 hours over one quarter since implementation.

To get the full scoop on Piston’s success with inventory-aware campaigns, download the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog and Google+ page for even more customer success stories.

1. Google internal data, 2013

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DoubleClick Bid Manager Joins FBX, Facebook's Real-Time Bidding Exchange

Partnership has been key to Google’s success as a rising tide lifts all boats.  So we’re excited to announce a new way to help our clients succeed by working with Facebook to participate in FBX, their real-time bidding exchange. DoubleClick Bid Manager (formerly Invite Media) has been helping agencies and advertisers buy ad space on sites across the web for years.  We help clients access dozens of private and public exchanges in more than 75 countries, and continue to see double-digit quarter-over-quarter growth in spend – last quarter was our biggest ever.  We're continuing to invest significantly in our technology (you can read some of what we’ve been up to here) to help advertisers and agencies buy programmatically across all devices and formats. But we’re always looking at ways to serve our clients even better – starting in a few months, clients will be able to buy inventory on FBX via DoubleClick Bid Manager. We're looking forward to continuing our work to help our clients and partners.

-- Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager

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Creatives and media agencies: get trained online with DoubleClick Rich Media

Since launching our DoubleClick Rich Media Education Program, we've seen developers become more productive with ad creation and media agencies more effectively manage rich media creatives for display campaigns. But with increased adoption of HTML5 and the success of dynamic creative ad formats, we've heard from you that we need to both streamline training across products and customize it for the right user, while also adding more training content for advanced topics.

So, we've made a few changes to consolidate all training resources for each user, by role.

Rich Media and Studio training for creative agencies and developers

We've updated DoubleClick Rich Media Fundamentals eLearning & Certification to better align with Studio Certification. Focused toward creative agencies and developers, Rich Media Fundamentals eLearning provides an overview of DoubleClick Rich Media and Studio, and helps you ramp up on rich media basics at your own pace.

In Rich Media Fundamentals, you’ll learn how to:

• Build Flash and HTML5 creatives
• Publish to QA
• Use the API
• Build dynamic creatives and create/edit rules 
• Resolve common live issues

Rich Media Fundamentals includes a certification exam at the end of the course. Pass the exam and you'll get a printable certificate of completion you can use to show your proficiency.

Rich Media Fundamentals can benefit creative developers through faster creative builds, more efficient QA, and reduced turnaround times, and is a great introduction for Studio users who want to take Studio Certification to demonstrate expertise in building rich media ads.

Rich Media training for media agencies and marketers

1. We've revised DFA Academy to include a Rich Media Checklist (previously Rich Media Academy). If you're a media planner or ad trafficker, use the checklist to learn rich media during basic DFA training and be better equipped to know how rich media works in the context of display campaigns. (DFA Sign-in required) 
2. We've updated DFA Fundamentals eLearning & Certification to include an optional DoubleClick Rich Media module. Ad traffickers at a media agency might only need a higher level of training compared to a creative developer designing an ad, so we’ve added a rich media overview to DFA Fundamentals (Enroll -- DFA sign-in required) 
3. We've added a rich media live issues section to the DFA Help Center to help media agencies who manage rich media creatives in DFA to troubleshoot common issues. (DFA sign-in required)

Ready to get started? Sign up through the links above, and note any sign-in requirements.

Don’t forget to sign up to receive the latest news, product updates, features, tips, and research information from DoubleClick!

Posted by Hemmy Edge, DoubleClick Rich Media Product Trainer

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