DoubleClick Publisher Blog

The DoubleClick Ad Exchange delivers revenue uplift to EMEA Publishers

2012-02-01T07:47:00.000-05:00

Exchange-based buying has experienced huge growth over the past several years as advertisers focused on improving the targeting and effectiveness of their buys. Most large agencies have set-up dedicated “trading desks” to focus on this method of buying and in tandem, many publishers have aligned their strategies to profit from these trends.

Since the launch of the Ad Exchange, we’ve heard inspiring stories from our European publishers about the revenue uplift they’ve experienced when using the product. Today we’re pleased to share exciting research results which shows the impact of the Ad Exchange on European publishers’ revenue.

The results published in this whitepaper show that when publishers make ad space available in the Ad Exchange, and the Ad Exchange wins the auction, the revenue is 73% higher than if the Ad Exchange hadn't been used. This takes into account competing sales channels such as direct sales teams, other networks and backfills.

And what about inventory that would have gone unsold? The DoubleClick Ad Exchange demonstrated significant success in monetizing these ads. For inventory for which there was no other demand, it delivered a fill rate of greater than 90%.

Many of the tools we roll out are designed to help publishers maximize revenue across their multiple channels. Most recently we introduced minimum CPMs and pricing recommendations. These followed the introduction of private ad-slots and direct deals. We believe that these new tools will continue to help our Ad Exchange publishers make the most out of their inventory.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Product Management Director

Now playing: Flixster on Upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers platform

2012-01-31T12:11:00.000-05:00

‘PubTalk’ is a new program highlighting publishers’ perspectives on display products and industry trends. In our first installment, we spoke with Billy Shipp of Flixster on managing ad operations in the face of rapidly changing technology.

If you love movies, you’ve probably visited Flixster or RottenTomatoes on your desktop or mobile device. Every month, over 30 million people visit Flixster communities to post comments, read reviews and watch movie trailers. Managing ad operations across these sites for different devices and formats is complex. Billy Shipp, Director of Ad Operations at Flixster, is always on the lookout for solutions that increase his team’s operational efficiency. Accordingly, Flixster recently upgraded to the next generation of the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform.

For Flixster, many aspects of DFP increased productivity, including improved user interfaces that are familiar to users of other Google products, faster reporting and better forecasting. “A lot of this business is built around emerging platforms and emerging ad formats”, says Billy. Having to use multiple ad serving platforms to manage ads across devices created a lot of inefficiency. DFP helped Billy solve this problem by seamlessly integrating with DFP Video and DFP Mobile.

“Not having to go to a separate interface to manage inventory, to set up campaigns, to pull reports, to optimize campaigns - having all of that in a single workflow makes it so much easier for ad operations folks to be effective,” remarks Billy. “It gives them that global view of how a campaign is performing, without having to manually download reports and aggregate them.”

40% in time savings with DFP Video
The Flixster team reduced the time spent managing video campaigns by 40% after switching to DFP Video. “We can just take a video file, upload it to DFP and throw in any third-party tracking. You guys encode it in all the various formats and have it just work across different browsers and plugins and we don’t even have to think about the connectivity of the user - you guys will handle all that. With other video ad serving solutions I’ve used in the past, there’s usually a lot more effort that goes into setting up video ad campaigns,” says Billy. “When we’re reporting on campaigns that have video line items as part of the IO, you can see the whole IO - display and video - in one set of reporting.”

Operations scale easily with DFP Mobile
Although Flixster is currently in the process of migrating more of its mobile inventory to DFP, Billy isn’t too worried about the move. “Because we’re using a single trafficking interface for mobile in the overall DFP workflow, that enables us to train new folks on a single process and have them intuitively know what to do,” says Billy.

As advertising continues to expand to new formats and devices, ad ops teams need a solution that can evolve with their needs. For Billy Shipp, that solution is DFP. “The upgrade platform allows, from my experience, for a faster cycle of iteration and development, and really will be the platform for the future of ad delivery.”

Read more about Flixster’s experience with DoubleClick for Publishers here.

About Flixster:
Flixster is the leading online destination for movie enthusiasts with over 30M unique visitors per month and 2 billion movie ratings. In addition to Flixster.com and RottenTomatoes.com, Flixster also operates the leading movie applications on iPhone, Google TV, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Manager

What’s new in DoubleClick for Publishers

2011-12-20T17:42:00.000-05:00

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). We’ll be periodically posting lists of the highlights to this blog to help you stay up-to-date with all of the latest DFP developments. The list below contains some highlights. For a more complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and Small Business:

'As Many As Possible' Improvements: We've updated the 'As many as possible' creative display feature to prevent creatives from serving part way down a page if another line item has delivered in the first ad unit (i.e. if another line item serves to the top banner spot, we won't serve the 300x25 to the mid page since the roablock would be broken)
User Interface Improvements: We know your time is valuable, and we’re always working on new ways to make the DFP interface as quick and efficient for you as possible. To help with this goal, you can now quickly navigate between different tabs within DFP without requiring the page to reload.
Yield Reporting: The new Yield Report type makes it easier for publishers to understand their overall yield -- how your impressions and revenue breakout by deal type. This new report displays revenue and impression data for direct and indirect sales, helps you easily uncover unfilled impressions, and enables you to compare the performance of each ad type from within a single report.

Available in DFP:

DFP Mobile: Capture opportunities beyond the desktop with DFP’s full service mobile ad serving module to deliver dynamic, interactive ads across your mobile web pages and applications. Read more.
DFP Tag Troubleshooter (TagShooter): The new DFP TagShooter allows you to easily view the real-time decision making process DFP is using to determine which ad to serve. With this information, you'll be well equipped to quickly identify why an ad isn't delivering or why another ad is appearing in its place. Try it now.
Enhancement to Sponsorship Line Items: For Sponsorship line items, you can now set an impression goal in order to monitor progress of impressions you’ve contractually sold with the progress bar.
Multi-level Ad Unit Reports: There are now three different options for viewing data in ad unit reports. These new views are particularly useful for multi-level ad units, and will help you view data for all of your ad units at once rather than just parent or child ad units.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

+1 Button in DFP: Leveraging Social Recommendations in Your Display Ads

2011-12-05T10:36:00.000-05:00

Last March, Google introduced the +1 button on search results to make it easier for people to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching. And then in October, the +1 button and social annotations were made available to display ads from AdWords that win in the Ad Exchange auction.

Today, we’re excited to expand this capability to publishers who sell their ad space directly to advertisers using a new creative template available in DART for Publishers and the new DFP. Using the Image or Flash with Google +1 custom creative template, you can now add the Google +1 icon to your ads so that people can share your advertisers' offers with people across the web.

As results become more personal and relevant, we believe that users are not only more likely to click, but they're more likely to act as well. Personalized annotations bring you pre-qualified users, who are not only actively looking for your content, but are actively engaged after seeing recommendations from friends and contacts. In fact, 71% of shoppers say that recommendations from friends and family impact their purchasing decisions (Harris Interactive, June 2010). This powerful combination may result in more conversion and deeper engagement with your business overall.

The +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads.

For more information on how to incorporate the +1 button into your ad, please visit the DART or new DFP Help Centers.

Posted by David Flinner, Product Manager

Take a walk on the sell-side

2011-12-02T11:41:00.000-05:00

(Originally posted on the Official Google blog)

In June, we announced that we are acquiring Admeld, a New York-based company that helps large publishers (also known as the “sell-side” by people, like me, who live and breathe display advertising) maximize their revenues from online advertising. We’re pleased that the U.S. Department of Justice has today cleared this deal. We’ll close the acquisition in the coming days and then start the real work—building improved products and services that help our publisher partners to make more informed decisions across all their ad space, and to grow their revenues.

The opportunity for major online publishers is huge...and growing. People are spending more and more time consuming online content across numerous devices, advertisers are running more online and mobile campaigns to reach them; and ads continue to get more engaging and relevant. This represents an unprecedented moment for publishers. We believe that improved technology and services can help publishers seize it and make online advertising work much better.

For now, it’s business as usual—Admeld’s products will operate separately to Google’s existing solutions (such as DFP and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange). But over time, there are opportunities to bring the best of both businesses together in a variety of ways; and to develop entirely new solutions, too.

As we do this, Admeld and Google are guided by some core shared beliefs:

We want to give publishers more control over their ad space, and offer more flexible ways to manage and sell it. Publishers’ businesses should influence the technology they use; not the other way around
We believe that publishers can make better decisions to maximize their revenues when they have better insights at their fingertips
We envisage a much simpler system that enables publishers to manage and sell their ad space—across desktop, video, mobile, tablets and more

The content produced by Google’s and Admeld’s publisher partners is the lifeblood of the Internet. We can’t wait to start building the next generation of tools and services that will help them grow their businesses.

Update December 6, 2011: Our acquisition of Admeld has now closed.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

Making the operations match the strategy with DFP Mobile

2011-11-30T11:41:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, we announced DFP Mobile, our new mobile module for the DFP ad serving platform. DFP Mobile gives publishers access to an expanded set of mobile features including extended mobile rich media capabilities, advanced targeting options, better support for feature phones, and tighter integrations with Google AdSense, AdMob, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and mobile ad networks.

To learn more about DFP Mobile, join us at OPS Mobile, AdMonsters' mobile advertising conference, which will be held December 7, 2011 in New York. Register today to hear Marcel Gordon, DFP Mobile Product Manager, and Chris LaSala, Director of Mobile Partnerships, speak about how you can capture opportunities beyond the desktop with DFP Mobile.

You can also view Marcel’s recent Q&A with AdMonsters about DFP Mobile here.

Posted by Stephen Kliff, Product Marketing Manager

Capture the mobile opportunity with DFP Mobile

2011-11-29T14:11:00.000-05:00

Mobile devices offer many new and exciting opportunities for businesses. But mobile devices are not simply smaller versions of the desktop - these devices, and the mobile ecosystem as a whole, are unique. In order to succeed in this ecosystem, businesses must build specifically for mobile. Our recent 'GoMo' campaign has helped businesses develop websites that are optimized for mobile.

Similarly, there are mobile-specific challenges for publishers who want to serve ads on smartphones and tablets. There are thousands of different mobile devices running on multiple platforms on the market today, and a lack of technical standards as to how to serve ads across all these different phones and tablets. Publishers need technology that helps them navigate the complexities of the mobile ads marketplace, but that also connects to the rest of their ad operations, so that they can operate as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.

To help our publisher partners solve these challenges, we have rolled out an extended set of mobile features with the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Mobile, designed to complement the core mobile ad serving functionality released this summer.

DFP Mobile gives publishers access to an expanded set of mobile features. This includes extended mobile rich media capabilities, with built-in support for rich HTML5 ads such as video interstitials and templates for you to include your own more complex ad formats in a scalable way. DFP Mobile also offers advanced targeting options, better support for feature phones, and tighter integrations with Google AdSense, AdMob, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and mobile ad networks.

We've heard from our publisher partners that they want to be able to manage their mobile campaigns using the same tools that they use for the rest of their ad serving. For example, Billy Shipp, Director of Ad Operations at Flixster said “Not having to go to a separate interface to manage inventory, to set up campaigns, to pull reports, to optimize campaigns - having all of that in a single workflow makes it so much easier for ad operations folks to be effective because it gives them that global view of how a campaign is performing. The fact that we can use a single ad server and have all that information available in one place is a big win for us.” DFP Mobile is fully integrated with the DFP ad serving platform to help publishers streamline operations, create sales efficiencies, and leverage the power of DFP for their mobile business.

Publishers will also have more options when working with third parties. DFP Mobile can fetch mobile rich media ads directly from integrated rich media partners, decreasing latency and reducing discrepancies. Leading mobile rich media vendors such as Celtra have already integrated with DFP Mobile to help streamline operations for their partners. “The combination of DFP with Celtra’s innovative ad formats and analytics gives our premium publisher and ad network partners more rich media options to maximize mobile revenues and user engagement” said Grant Stratemeyer, VP of Business Development at Celtra.

Plus, later this week, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be rolling out the ability for publishers to opt-in mobile web inventory using the newly supported 320x50 banner size. With this functionality, publishers will have a range of options for monetizing their inventory, and can reach new pools of demand, potentially improving their returns.

This DFP Mobile release complements last month’s launch of DFP Video, to give publishers a truly unified experience for all screens, formats, and devices. With DFP, we’re committed to building best-in-class ad serving products for all channels within a single platform that works seamlessly across desktop, video and mobile.

To learn how you can begin selling across all screens with DFP Mobile, please contact us.

Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

Enhanced advertiser-level controls and insights in DoubleClick Ad Exchange

2011-11-22T17:57:00.006-05:00

Today, we’re happy to announce the roll-out of a new advertiser classification system that automatically scans and classifies each creative using sophisticated machine learning technologies to determine the associated advertiser or advertisers. This means that publishers can more easily and reliably block specific advertisers across all campaigns and buyers.

We focused on an algorithmic solution to this complex challenge, versus a more manual “self-declared” approach for buyers, which can often lead to inaccuracies such as misspellings or misclassifications. This quarter we are introducing this feature with coverage for the top 50 advertisers with a large expansion in advertiser coverage planned soon.

Further taking advantage of this new advertiser-level data, we’re now also able to give our publishers better insights into individual advertiser spending, CPMs and performance to help inform their overall sales efforts. Ad Exchange’s existing multi-dimensional reporting tool now includes an “advertiser” field dimension. This new field will allow publishers to slice and dice their data and see which advertisers are driving the most revenue by geography, domain, channel and a variety of other criteria.

Current Ad Exchange publishers can learn more about this new feature in the help center. If you’re not using Ad Exchange, you can contact your DoubleClick account representative to learn more about all of the ways we’re helping publishers profit from non-guaranteed sales on their terms.

Posted by Drew Bradstock, Product Manager

Grow your audience with Google+

2011-11-10T11:22:00.000-05:00

(Originally posted on the Inside AdSense blog)

At Google, we help grow your audience by connecting you with new users. We introduced the +1 button so your site would stand out on search and your users could easily share your content on Google+. But, sometimes you want to join the conversation and post content directly to where people are sharing.

Today we’re introducing Google+ for Business, a collection of tools and products that help you grow your audience. At the core of this is Google+ Pages, your site’s identity on Google+.

Google+ Pages: Have real conversations with the right people
To get your site on Google+, you first need to create a Google+ Page. On your page, you can engage in conversations with your visitors, direct readers back to your site for the latest updates, send tailored messages to specific groups of people, and see how many +1’s you have across the web. Google+ Pages will help you build relationships with your users, encouraging them to spend more time engaging with your content.

Google+ Pages are at the heart of Google+ for Business

Hangouts

Sometimes you might want to chat with your users face-to-face. For example, if you run a food blog, you may want to invite a chef to talk about her favorite recipe, or if you manage a fashion review site, beauty specialists might want to hold how-to sessions with makeup tips. Hangouts make this easy, by letting you have high-quality video chats with nine people with a single click. You can use Hangouts to hold live forums, break news or simply get to know people better, all in real time.

Hangouts let you meet your customers, face-to-face

Circles

Circles allow you to group followers of your Page into smaller audiences. You can then share specific messages with specific groups. For example, you could create a Circle containing your most loyal readers and offer them exclusive content.

The Google+ badge: Grow your audience on Google+
To help your users find your page and start sharing, there are two buttons you can add to your site by visiting our Google+ badge configuration tool:

The Google+ icon, a small icon that directly links to your Page.

The Google+ badge, which we’re introducing in the coming days. This badge lets people add your page to their circles without leaving your site, and allows them to get updates from your site via Google+.

Extend the power of +1, stand out in Google search
You can also link your site to your Google+ page so that all your +1s -- from your Page, your website, and search results -- will get tallied together and appear as a single total. Potential visitors will be more likely to see the recommendations your site has received, whether they’re looking at a search result, your website, or your Page, meaning your +1’s will reach not only the 40 million users of Google+, but all the people who come to Google every day. You can link your site to your Page either using the Google+ badge or with a piece of code. To set this up, visit our Google+ badge configuration tool.

Bringing Google+ to the rest of Google

Our ultimate vision for Google+ is to transform the overall Google experience -- weaving identity and sharing into all of our products. Beginning today, we’re rolling out a new experimental feature to a small group of eligible publishers,Google+ Direct Connect -- an easy way for your audience to find your Google+ Page on Google search. If you’ve linked your Page to your site and you qualify, when someone searches for your website’s name with the ‘+’ sign before it Direct Connect will send them directly to your Page. For example, try searching for ‘+YouTube’ on Google. Users will also be prompted to automatically add Pages they find through Direct Connect to their circles.

Direct Connect suggestions start populating as you type on Google.com

Just the beginning
We want to help you get your site on Google+ as soon as possible, so we’re opening the field trial for Google+ Pages to everyone today. Creating a Google+ Page only takes a few minutes. To get started, you’ll need a personal Google+ profile. If you don’t have a Google account, it’s very quick and easy to join. And if you’re looking for inspiration, check out some of the sites that are already starting to set up their Pages:

To learn more about how Google+ works for your site, check out the Google+ Your Business site. We’re just getting started, and have many more features planned for the coming weeks and months. To keep up to date on the latest news and tips, add the Google+ Your Business page to your circles. If you have ideas on how we can improve Google+ for your site, we’d love to hear them.

Posted by Dennis Troper, Product Management Director, Google+ Pages

Bringing AdMob Mobile Inventory to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange

2011-11-07T13:15:00.000-05:00

(Cross posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog)

In 2009, we launched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange as a way to simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, drive performance for our advertiser and publisher partners, and open up the display marketplace. In the two years since, exchange-based trading has taken off -- we’ve seen the volume of trades on our own exchange grow by more than 150% in the past year. At the same time, display, as a medium, has evolved.

Display started as just banner ads on websites, but has grown to include a range of formats as diverse as the web itself -- rich media ads that bring a page to life, in-stream ads that play before your favorite online video, and ads that run in the mobile version of your daily newspaper. To reflect this growing diversity, we have been expanding the types of formats in the Exchange. We support the most popular types of rich media ads, including units that run in-page with video, or expand when you click or mouse over them. It’s also possible to buy ads across the mobile web. Earlier this year, we announced that in-stream video formats were coming to the Exchange, and we’ve seen huge demand since launch: the number of buyers for in-stream video has tripled over the past quarter.

Today, we are announcing another step forward -- in the coming weeks, AdMob developers will be able to make their in-app inventory available on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Initially, a small number of pre-qualified buyers will be able to compete for this inventory. Over time, we'll be rolling it out more broadly. Ultimately, this will give app developers and publishers access to a wider pool of buyers like demand-side platforms and agency trading desks, improving their potential returns, and helping grow the overall mobile web economy. And marketers on our Exchange will be able to buy, in real time, ads that run inside people’s favorite mobile games, news apps and more. With this important addition, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be truly cross-format...and will become the first exchange to support this full range of ad formats.

VivaKi, one of our key partners on the Exchange, is gearing up to start buying in-app ads on the Exchange. “We are delighted to be working with Google as they open up the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to include AdMob in-app inventory, and to deliver this opportunity to our clients,” says Kurt Unkel, Senior Vice President, VivaKi Nerve Center. “We anticipate this experience will help us bring mobile to scale to our partners, and will provide insight into the operational elements and the creative assets that work best in this environment.”

A cross-format exchange is just one of the ways we’re looking to simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, but one we think will create tremendous value for advertisers and publishers. We will continue to work with our partners to help them get the most out of what the evolving display market has to offer -- today, tomorrow, and in the years ahead.

Posted by Chip Hall, Director, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

GoMo: Helping businesses create a mobile friendly website

2011-11-02T13:12:00.000-04:00

(Originally posted on the Google Mobile Ads Blog)

On a crisp fall day, a young person uses his smartphone to find a store that sells scarves. He searches, finds your site, and clicks-thru, prepared to browse your inventory of scarves, or find your store nearby and buy one. But, after he clicks to your site he runs into trouble - it doesn't load fully, and he spends more time zooming-in and squinting than he does looking at scarves! Frustrated, he gives up and looks for another scarf store. You lose a potential customer.
This happens hundreds, even thousands of times every day because most businesses’ websites don’t work well on smartphones. The most important thing you can do to grow your business using the mobile web is to create a mobile-friendly website. So today we’re launching an initiative called GoMo that helps businesses “Go Mobile”.

What’s a mobile-friendly site? It’s a website designed specifically for mobile users and mobile devices. It’s fast to load and easy to use—no pinching and zooming required. Some great examples are right here.

Every day more and more of your customers are looking for you…on mobile devices. If you don’t have a site that works for mobile, you’re missing out. 61% of users are unlikely to return to a site that’s not mobile-friendly.1 On the other hand, customers embrace sites that are built for mobile--consumer engagement increases by 85% with a website designed for mobile devices.2

So, are you ready to Go Mo? Visit howtogomo.com where you’ll find the resources you need to learn about what makes a good mobile site and to start building one.

See how your site performs on mobile phones with the GoMoMeter.

Here’s what you’ll find at howtogomo.com:

See what your customers see. Enter a website address into the GoMoMeter and see what your site looks like on a mobile phone. The GoMoMeter will analyze your site and give you customized recommendations on how to make your site more mobile friendly. You can even download a free customized report!
Learn about why mobile matters: Cool infographics and the latest data will help you learn more about mobile trends and why mobile-friendly sites really matter.
Get inspired by great examples: Look at the mobile sites of businesses who are doing it right and learn how to make your site better with our ten mobile site best practices.
Find a mobile site builder who can help: Check out our list of mobile site developers who can help you build your mobile website.

Check out this video to learn more about howtogomo.com and how it can help your business.

You can register for our webinar “Making Mobile-Friendly Websites: Best Practices in Action,” which will take place on November 10 at 11 am PST/ 2 pm EST. And check this blog all week; we’ll be featuring lots of great mobile site tips and new case studies.

Mobile is critical to your business, and now GoMo makes it easy for you to make your mobile-friendly site. So, no more excuses! Check out howtogomo.com and Go Mobile!
1,2Compuware and Brand Anywhere and Luth Research

Posted by Jesse Haines, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

Introducing Minimum CPM Recommendations on DoubleClick Ad Exchange

2011-11-01T14:12:00.001-04:00

With the growth of exchange-based buying and real-time bidding, media buyers are becoming increasingly sophisticated at optimizing their bids. In tandem, we’ve heard from our publisher partners that they would like to better manage their minimum CPM, sometimes called the reserve or floor price, which dictates the minimum price at which buyers can purchase their inventory.

But setting the best minimum price can be tricky. Setting it too high can price publishers out of transactions, while setting it too low can sometimes leave money on the table. Many publishers optimize their minimum CPM using a trial and error approach, which can be time consuming and potentially costly.

Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of Minimum CPM Recommendations for DoubleClick Ad Exchange publishers. This feature automatically recommends an optimal minimum cpm for each eligible ad slot in the Ad Exchange auction. It also automatically generates a graph that provides better visibility into how different floor prices might affect a publisher's bottom line.

To deliver these recommendations, we created an algorithm that analyzes all historical transactions for each publisher's ad slots, also taking into account factors like traffic patterns, to better understand and predict supply and demand trends. As always, we are also careful to ensure that individual advertiser bids are not exposed and that the integrity of the Ad Exchange auction is protected. Initial results with early beta testers indicate an average 20% revenue lift for adopted recommendations.

Ad Exchange publishers can take advantage of these insights today directly from the My Ads tab. If you’re not already using Ad Exchange, contact your publisher sales representative to learn more about all of the ways that DoubleClick Ad Exchange can help you profit on your terms.

Posted by Nemo Semret, Software Engineer

Bringing the benefits of TrueView to our video publishers

2011-10-31T15:41:00.000-04:00

(Originally posted on the Inside AdSense blog)

It’s no secret that I watch a lot of video ads. It’s one of the perks (or pains!) of working in the video advertising business. And yet, I was surprised to see that my younger cousins were gathered around a laptop showing each other their favorite ads over the weekend. Maybe it runs in the family. More likely, people just love watching great content and engaging ads. Every statistic we’ve seen shows that sharing and watching online videos has become a part of everyday life, and that the gap between video ad spend and audience attention is slowly narrowing. At Google, we’re always trying to improve the experience of watching video ads. With that in mind, we’re rolling out a new ad format called TrueView to our network of video publishers.

TrueView ads, pioneered on YouTube, differ from traditional video ads in two main ways. First, they give viewers choice - for example, the ad may be skippable or present a choice of ads to watch. Second, TrueView ads are sold through a Cost Per View (CPV) basis. You may be familiar with Cost Per Click (CPC) where the advertiser pays when someone clicks on their ad; similarly with CPV ads, advertisers are charged when a viewer chooses to watch the ad.

For example, say you're about to watch an interview with the makers of a new movie on The Hollywood Reporter. A TrueView in-stream video ad will start to play and a counter will appear giving you the option, after five seconds, to skip the ad and continue watching the video.

We believe TrueView is a win for users, publishers and advertisers. Users have more control over the ads they see. Advertisers get to combine the engagement of video with the precision of online advertising. And publishers see higher returns, since advertisers value a truly engaged audience.

A small group of our AdSense for video publishers are already using TrueView ads on a portion of their video inventory, and have seen RPMs equal or better than standard pre-roll ads, while dramatically improving the user experience. TrueView video ads also help to decrease audience drop-off rates by 40% on YouTube Partner sites when compared to regular in-stream ads, which means more viewers are continuing to watch videos.

One of our partners The Hollywood Reporter has been experimenting with TrueView ads and has already seen a significant increase in viewer retention. Product Manager Reed Halstrom tells us, “We’ve seen video views increase by 21% and viewed minutes increase by 17% since we started using TrueView ads.”

If you have existing video content on your site and are interested in gaining access to TrueView video ads through AdSense for video, please leave your details by completing our online form. We’re committed to improving the overall online video viewing experience and will continue to work with our publishers and advertisers to make that happen - which should come as no surprise.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Lead Product Manager, Video Monetization

Introducing the next generation of the DFP ad tag

2011-10-25T15:32:00.000-04:00

For websites that sell display advertising, the ad tag is the essential link between a publisher's ad server, such as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), and website content. An ad tag is a snippet of code that is inserted into the source code of a web page in order to display ads.

Properly implementing your ad tags is a vital piece of your ad operations since it directly affects your visitor's experience to your website and bottom-line. Tagging errors can prevent the correct ad from being displayed, or prevent ads from displaying altogether. Slow loading ads can also slow down the loading of content, resulting in long wait times for your site's visitors.

This is why we're so excited to introduce the next generation of the DFP ad tag: The Google Publisher Tag. The new tag provides publishers with several key benefits including:

Speed:

We've designed the new tags with speed in mind since we know that long load times can lead to a poor user experience and lost revenue opportunities. The new tags can deliver your ads asynchronously, meaning that your web page will render creatives as they are received from DFP so slow loading ads will not slow down your content.

Flexibility:

The Google Publisher Tag supports all formats and devices, simplifying ad delivery to your web, mobile, and video content. The tag also supports:

HTTPS Environments: Deliver ads into secure HTTPS environments.
E-mail Ad Serving: Non-JavaScript tags available for use in email or other environments that don't support JavaScript rendering.
Passbacks: Tag can be used in a third-party ad server.
Asynchronous ad refresh: Refresh ads in environments that don't require page reloads.
Single-Request Mode: Fetch and deliver all creatives simultaneously.
Interstitial (out-of-page) creatives.
Guaranteed roadblocks. Sign up for early access here.

For publishers using the premium edition of DFP, the new tags allow you to segment your inventory using five levels of hierarchy, enabling you to better map your inventory to your sales strategy.

Efficiency:

If you've found yourself navigating through your website in efforts to get your ads to show with no success, the Google Publisher Console is here to help.

The Publisher Console can be used on any webpage you manage that contains the Google Publisher Tag, and allows you to easily view the real-time decision making process DFP uses to determine which ad to serve, the time DFP took to generate each ad, and information about missing or incorrect ad tags.

To take advantage of the new functionality introduced above, you will need to re-tag your pages using the new tag. If you're already using any of our older ad tagging formats, you won't be required to re-tag any of your pages to continue using DFP.

We're committed to providing ad tags that are easy for publishers to implement, and provide the best possible experience for end users.

Posted by Ajay Surie, Product Manager and Phil Lee, Software Engineer

What’s new in DoubleClick for Publishers

2011-10-20T17:57:00.000-04:00

Targeting presets: If you frequently traffic your campaigns using the same set of targeting criteria, entering the same targeting criteria across multiple campaigns can become a repetitive process. To help make this process quicker and more efficient for publishers, we’ve introduced the ability to save a set of targeting criteria to reuse across your other campaigns and availability forecasts. Learn more.
Sequential creative rotation: Sometimes advertisers want to display a set of creatives to the user in sequence in the same ad unit. This is called storyboarding and it allows the advertiser to control a user’s experience of an ad campaign across multiple views. Now you can "storyboard" a series of creatives by serving them sequentially to a user as they click through your site. Learn more.
Mobile Reporting Filters: To help make it easier to identify ad impressions delivered to your mobile web content or applications, you can now easily filter your reports to see only “web” or “mobile” line items.

Available in DFP:

Line item grace periods: Imagine you’re working with one of your most valued advertisers and you want to ensure their campaign delivers in full, even if this means extending the campaign beyond its original flight date. You can now indicate a line item grace period in order to allow critical line items to deliver after they’ve passed their end date in order to meet their goals. Learn more.

Posted by Beah Burger, DFP Product Specialist

A new approach to video advertising for publishers of all sizes

2011-10-19T12:16:00.000-04:00

Watching a funny video ad is one of the special pleasures of life. Trafficking that same video ad is considerably less amusing. In fact, it can take publishers longer to traffic a video ad than it takes to get a root canal. And that’s often the least painful part of growing a video advertising business. We decided to embark on an ambitious project: to build an entirely new video ad server that is both powerful and simple to use. We listened carefully to feedback from over a hundred video publishers and designed our solution around the complex needs of broadcasters, video portals and the world’s largest sports, entertainment and news sites. They told us about the need to traffic a variety of video ad formats, across all devices, governed by complicated syndication agreements and changing business rules.

From the start, we focused on clean design, efficient workflow and scalability to meet the needs of large video publishers, such as YouTube. We then spent hundreds of hours carrying out usability studies with publishers as we refined the user experience, meticulously reducing clicks, eye movement and manual inputs. We also took advantage of Google’s infrastructure to offer the scalability and reliability that publishers expect. Finally, we made sure that every feature has a direct impact on revenue or cost savings, so that publishers would immediately see the impact on profitability.

DFP Video

Today, we’re happy to announce that DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Video is available to publishers globally. By offering a truly video-centric approach to ad serving in DFP, publishers can now manage their entire display advertising business with video at its core through one platform. No longer do publishers need to deal with the operational complexity of splitting off their video inventory into a separate ad server. We’ve signed up dozens of beta publishers for DFP Video and our impression volume has grown 55% month-over-month for most of this year. The feedback we’ve received has been encouraging: the simplicity and power of DFP Video has reduced costs and increased revenue. For Alex Boyce, GM of The Hollywood Reporter, DFP Video has improved the efficiency of his ad operations team by 25%. Peter Slaughter, Director Advertisement Operations of the Financial Times has told us, “We expect the new system to drive significant improvements to our ad operations workflow, and believe that this may prove to be an effective tool with which to deliver incremental revenue benefit from our video offering."

Here are some more reasons why publishers have made DFP Video the cornerstone of their video advertising business:

Video Content at the Center
By synching to video Content Management Systems (CMS), fresh content automatically appears in DFP for targeting, providing real-time insight into video inventory. We’ve made the process of connecting to a CMS so turn-key, that The Hollywood Reporter was able to ingest their extensive library in a matter of minutes, without any custom set-up or coding.

Trafficking in Minutes
We’ve made trafficking as simple as sending an email attachment: Set the targeting, drag and drop the video ad creative into the browser, and watch it get transcoded in real-time into outputs that work on iOS, Android and other platforms. All in just a few minutes. We’re also getting a hand from YouTube’s massive infrastructure for hosting and transcoding the creatives, which means that ads are delivered as fast and reliably as the billions of daily YouTube video views.

Syndication Simplified
The majority of videos are consumed on distribution sites, and DFP offers a comprehensive partner and financial terms module to manage syndication relationships. Whether publishers are syndicating their content to distribution sites such as YouTube or monetizing videos that belong to different content owner, DFP allows them to set revenue shares and takes care of all the accounting.

Business Rule Flexibility
DFP Video allows publishers to define the ad experience for any section of their inventory. For example, ad rules can set pre-rolls for clips, define pods and bumpers for long-form content, and turn off monetization entirely for subscribers - without making a single player change.

To learn more about DFP Video, contact your account manager or drop us a note.

DFP Small Business Video (Beta)

We also learned a lot from publishers that are just starting off with video, and we’re thrilled to announce a set of beta video features in DFP Small Business that make it easy to get started with video ads.

Turn-key and Free
First, we’ve lowered the barrier to entry by partnering with the folks at Brightcove and LongTail to provide a turn-key video player and CMS integration with DFP Small Business. Publishers can get up and running with a video player, a CMS, hosting and ad serving in about 20 minutes. No SDK integration, no custom coding, no extensive testing. Best of all, ad serving is free (including hosting!) up to a certain volume of impressions, and we’ve negotiated great deals for video player and hosting packages with our partners that range from free to a low monthly fee.

Designed Around the Essentials
Next, DFP SB publishers get all of the reliability and scalability of DFP through an interface that exposes only the video features they need. Whether it’s booking a campaign or using AdSense to fill unsold inventory, publishers can set up line items in a matter of minutes. The path to the full-featured version of DFP Video is seamless and publishers can continue to manage their entire display advertising business in one platform.

We think video ad serving has never been this easy. As we open up this feature to more publishers, we’ll be reaching out to those who have filled out their details here.

Our commitment to learn from every publisher, every conversation and every use-case will continue as we develop DFP Video and add video functionality to DFP Small Business. In just a few years, video advertising spend is expected to reach $10B globally and we’re excited to partner with publishers as they make this happen. Here’s to more enjoyable video ads.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Lead Product Manager, Video Monetization

Save time with targeting presets in DFP

2011-10-17T10:23:00.000-04:00

Imagine you’re a national news site with a section of your site that is popular with advertisers: a sports section reaching adult males on the West Coast. Since this is a segment that you frequently sell, and thus regularly target your DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) campaigns to, entering the same targeting criteria across multiple campaigns can become a repetitive process.

To help make this process quicker and more efficient for publishers, we’re excited to introduce the ability to save a set of targeting criteria to reuse across your other campaigns and availability forecasts.

Using the example above, the news site would define a set of targeting criteria, in this case a targeting package that includes the site’s sports inventory targeted to adult male users from the West coast, and then save the package “West Coast Sports”.

For future campaigns where the news site wants to reach the same audience, they can simply select the “West Coast Sports” targeting preset that they’ve defined, and all of the criteria selected above will automatically be added to their new line item or forecast.

Your time is valuable and we’re committed to helping publishers complete routine trafficking tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Posted by David Ramos, Software Engineer

Questions about the mobile consumer? Our Mobile Planet has answers.

2011-10-05T15:12:00.000-04:00

(Originally posted on the Google Mobile Ads Blog)

Good data on the smartphone user is hard to come by. Good data that enables companies to make data driven decisions on how to engage with consumers on their smartphone is even harder to come by.

Today we are launching a new resource to address that need. Our Mobile Planet www.ourmobileplanet.com is a new web site featuring an interactive tool that anyone can use to create custom charts that will deepen their understanding of the mobile consumer and support data driven decisions on their mobile strategy.

The site gives anyone access the full set of data from the “Global Mobile Research: The Smartphone User & The Mobile Marketer” we conducted earlier this year (March & July 2011) with Ipsos and in collaboration with the Mobile Marketing Association.

Example of a presentation ready chart on ourmobileplanet.com

Need to know the smartphone penetration in Singapore? It’s 62%. Trying to figure out if more consumers in France or Germany have made purchases via their smartphone? It’s France. Want to know if consumers in the UK visit a store after doing a local search on their smartphone? 41% of them do.

Now anyone - marketer, app developer, tech geek, big or small - can answer these questions and many more by drawing on one of the the most extensive, far reaching standardized surveys on smartphone user behavior ever conducted. Not to mention, this is the first time a study this extensive has been made available for free.

We commissioned this survey and have made the data available for free because we believe the shift to mobile is so fundamental that we need to do everything we can to help businesses adapt immediately.

Posted by Nicole Leverich, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

My publisher takeaways

2011-10-04T13:28:00.000-04:00

I recently had the opportunity to participate in two publisher industry events in New York. The first was a roundtable discussion with thirty of the brightest minds in the business, from major media brands to up-and-coming digital content players; the second was a live-streamed Q&A with 200 leading publishers and media companies at the paidContent Advertising Conference. Both events reinforced how publishers continue to be a leading force in creating value in display, and I wanted to share a few common themes from my conversations:

Friction leads to waste. As we all have experienced, selling ad space is a complex business. A significant portion of every advertiser dollar is eaten up in transaction costs that add very little value. So it was great to hear more and more examples of where publishers are leading the charge in connecting with new buyers, finding inefficiencies and increased CPMs through real-time display buying and Direct Deals on the Ad Exchange.
Beyond the banner. Display is not just graphical - successful publishers are using video and mobile not just as added inventory, but by offering truly integrated campaigns that reach audiences across all screens. As you've heard, we continue to invest in helping publishers succeed in this goal. Publishers continue to be optimistic about direct sales, predicting that ad format and audience targeting innovations will spur most of their future growth. Today display is roughly a $25B industry - we think it could be $200 billion.
The user comes first. One way that we’re working towards combating ad blindness is by incorporating social signals in display. Many publishers mentioned that they’re on board with the notion of ‘fewer but better’ ads, and are actively developing methods to change audience perception of online advertising. That’s good news for us all.

I’ve said that the future of display advertising is both smart and sexy, and publishers who produce the quality content that powers this ecosystem contribute to this bright outlook. Thanks to everyone who participated in the events in New York, or who tuned in online. If you missed my Q&A, you can watch it here.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

+1: Now making Display ads more relevant

2011-09-21T16:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, we announced several exciting new additions to Google+, including open signups. We’d like to announce one more addition for our DoubleClick Ad Exchange publishers, +1 on display ads from AdWords.

Starting in October, the +1 button and social annotations will begin to appear on display ads from AdWords that win in the Ad Exchange auction. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections. We believe that these recommendations could lead your audience to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

For example, take Susan, who sees an ad for a good deal on flights. She +1’s the ad, thinking her friends might value this deal. Now, when Susan’s friends and contacts are signed in to their Google accounts, they’ll be able to see Susan’s picture across the bottom of the ad, with a note saying she +1’d it.

The +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads.

Susan’s friends and contacts will also be more likely to see the ad. While the dynamics of the AdWords and Ad Exchange auctions aren’t changing, the +1’d ad will now be included in AdWord’s bid on the Ad Exchange for the pages Susan’s friends visit, as we know that recommendations from friends can be a strong signal of an ad’s relevance.

All eligible ads from AdWords and other networks will continue to compete in the ad exchange auction, and we’ll continue to show the ones that have the highest CPM. +1 button clicks are not counted as clicks on ads. Although you won’t receive any revenue for +1 button clicks, +1’s will help Ad Exchange to deliver more useful AdWords ads to your users.

On mobile, the +1 button will replace the existing ‘g’ logo and recommendations will appear for several seconds, then fade out.

If you’d prefer not to see the +1 button on ads that AdWords delivers, you can opt out by contacting your account manager.

Display ads become much more powerful when people can see which of their social connections have chosen to endorse them, leading to a better advertising experience and higher returns for you.

If you’d like to learn more about the +1 button on AdWords display ads served via the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, please visit the Ad Exchange Help Center.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Product Manager

Better support for non-English characters in DFP

2011-09-21T12:45:00.002-04:00

Publishers from hundreds of countries use DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) to help them manage and deliver their advertising across their content.

The DFP interface is fully localized into 32 languages so whether you speak Français, Español, or Português, publishers have been able to traffic and report on their campaigns in their native tongue.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’re expanding our international character support to ad tags, ad unit, and custom targeting naming, enabling publishers to now use all aspects of DFP in any language.

We hope our expanded support for international characters makes managing your inventory and tagging even easier for our global publishers.

Posted by Hennadiy Leontyev and Harish Pratapani, Software Engineers

What’s new in DoubleClick for Publishers

2011-09-19T17:53:00.000-04:00

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). We’ll be periodically posting lists of the highlights to this blog to help you stay up-to-date with all of the latest DFP developments. Today, we wanted to look back over the last few months and call out some of the great new features that we’ve released in that time.

The list below contains some highlights. For a more complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Trafficking enhancements:

Postal code targeting: Advertisers spend more money on campaigns that reach the right audience. Plus, users find targeted ads more relevant and useful. We’ve added a new level of granularity to geo-targeting and you can now target your campaigns by zip or postal code allowing you to precisely reach users in specific markets.
New flash creative options: Now you can easily create flash expandables and flash pushdowns using our built in templates.
Test impression reporting: We know that publishers like to test their ads to ensure everything is working properly prior to pushing a campaign to their live site. The creative preview tool enables publishers to verify the look and feel of a creative on their site before it’s live, but until now, publishers have not been able to test if impressions and clicks are being properly recorded. Now, when DFP receives an impression or click that it does not count because the traffic source was not a visitor to your site (for instance, an impression that you create on a test page), you'll now see a "Test impression received" or "Test click received" indicator in the trafficking screens to help you verify data is being collected.

Reporting enhancements:

Additional export formats: In addition to CSV, TSV, and XML, you can now export your reports directly to XLS and XLSX formats.
Improvements to sharing and scheduling reports: You can now invite users or contacts to view a report via email. Having a DFP account is no longer a requirement to share or view reports with your contacts. Scheduled reports can now also be sent as an email attachment and include a personalized messages to your recipients.
New breakdown options: We've added the ability to create a delivery report with impressions for ad units broken out by creative size.

Usability enhancements:

Faster and smarter search: Needless to say, search is a huge focus at Google. The same has been true for DFP where search has always been one of our most heavily used features. With our revamped search on DFP we're making it easier to find orders, line items, ad units, and placements using the search box at the top left of any screen.
Improved report navigation: The rows in your reports now remain fixed in place as you scroll across columns, making it easier to view and identify information when a report contains a large number of columns. Columns are now grouped into higher-level headings that make them easier to identify (for example, Ad server, Order details, AdSense, or Ad Exchange).
New breakouts in competing line items table: When viewing a list of competing line items, your listis now broken out into two categories to help you better understand the effect the line item has on its competition. Your view is now broken out by: (1) the impressions lost to competing line items and (2) impressions gained from competing line items.

Posted by Beah Burger, DFP Product Specialist

New tools to help publishers maximize their revenue

2011-09-15T13:59:00.000-04:00

(Originally posted on the Official Google Blog)

What do a celebrity blog, a video interview on a newspaper site and a cable channel’s smartphone app have in common? They’re all supported by advertising...and they’re all examples of how the lines between media formats are blurring.

These increasingly blurry lines are not only resulting in highly engaging forms of content for users, but many new revenue opportunities for publishers. A wave of innovation and investment over the past several years has also created better performing ads, a larger pool of online advertisers, and new technologies to sell and manage ad space. Together, these trends are helping to spur increased investment in online advertising. We’ve seen this in our own Google Display Network: our publisher partners have seen spending across the Google Display Network from our largest 1,000 advertisers more than double in the last 12 months.

With all these new opportunities in mind, we’re introducing new tools for our publisher partners—in our ad serving technology (DoubleClick for Publishers) and in our ad exchange (DoubleClick Ad Exchange).

Video and mobile in DoubleClick for Publishers
Given the changes in the media landscape, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen incredible growth for both mobile and video ad formats over the past year: the number of video ads on the Google Display Network has increased 350 percent in the past 12 months, while AdMob, our mobile network, has grown by more than 200 percent.

Before now, it’s been difficult for publishers to manage all their video and mobile ad space from a single ad server—the platform publishers use to schedule, measure and run the ads they’ve sold on their sites. To solve this challenge, we’re rolling out new tools in our latest version of DoubleClick for Publishers that enable publishers to better manage video and mobile inventory. Publishers will be able to manage all of the ads they’re running—across all of their webpages, videos and mobile devices—from a single dashboard, and see which formats and channels are performing best for them.

A handful of publishers have already begun using the video feature and it appears to be performing well for them: we’ve seen 55 percent month-over-month growth in video ad volume in the last quarter. In other words, publishers are now able not only to produce more video content, but to make more money from it as well.

Direct Deals on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange
Another way publishers make money is to sell their advertising via online exchanges, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, where they can offer their ad space to a wide pool of competing ad buyers. This has already proven to generate substantially more revenue for publishers, and as a result we’ve seen significant growth in the number of trades on our exchange (158 percent year over year).

However, publishers have told us that they’d also like the option of making some of their ad space available only to certain buyers at a certain price—similar to how an art dealer might want to offer a painting first to certain clients before giving it to an auction house to sell. So we’re introducing Direct Deals on the Doubleclick Ad Exchange, which gives publishers the ability to make these “first look” offers. For example, using Direct Deals, a news publisher could set aside all of the ad space on their sports page and offer it first to a select group of buyers at a specific price, and then if those buyers pass on the offer, automatically place that inventory into the Ad Exchange’s auction.

Looking back at that blog, news site and app, we’d like them to have one more thing in common—being able to advantage of new opportunities to grow their businesses even further. These new tools, together with the other solutions we’re continuing to develop, are designed to help businesses like them—and all our publisher partners—do just that, and get the most out of today’s advertising landscape.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

Introducing Ad Exchange Direct Deals

2011-09-15T12:10:00.001-04:00

The rise of Ad Exchanges has made it easier for buyers and sellers to connect, using technologies such as real-time bidding (RTB) to help unlock more value for every impression. Exchanges have also provided a number of efficiency benefits such as the elimination of Insertion Orders and trafficking headaches for every transaction and the ability for publishers to manage controls across a broad set of buyers. Increasingly, publishers have been innovating on this platform by making exclusive tiers of inventory available to select buyers via exchanges, a model typically known as a “private exchange”. Private exchanges allow publishers to better leverage their brands and sales relationships and provide buyers with enhanced access to premium inventory.

While we’ve offered the ability for sellers to list inventory privately in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange auction for more than a year, it was clear that the industry was also ready for yet another evolutionary step in exchange buying. Both buyers and sellers wanted even more flexibility, control and pricing certainty for select transactions, while continuing to manage all of their exchange deals in an integrated fashion. In response, we’ve continued to evolve DoubleClick Ad Exchange to meet these needs by rolling-out a new solution called Ad Exchange Direct Deals.

This new type of exchange deal allows publishers to offer inventory on DoubleClick Ad Exchange to specific buyers at a fixed price, instead of determining the price via auction. This inventory is also offered on a pre-auction basis, which means that publishers can give these select buyers “first look” access, while still making the ad impression available in our open exchange if it remains unsold. Publishers typically negotiate these fixed price exchange deals directly with sophisticated exchange buyers, such as large agencies or ad networks buying in real-time.

Direct Deals allows publishers to forge relationships with new, data-driven, buyers and benefit from the efficiency of an exchange transaction, such as “insertion-orderless” buying and automated clearing of payments. At the same time, publishers can use standard Ad Exchange protections from unwanted data collection, restricted advertiser categories, malware and latency. Advertisers gain more seamless access to high quality publisher inventory and pricing certainty.

Premium publishers, such as The Washington Post and About.com, have been early testers of this feature working with leading exchange buyers such as Criteo, who specializes in expanding search budgets into display. For Criteo, this feature has meant new opportunities to connect with publishers. “Working directly with publishers has always been critical for Criteo, as a way to access the best inventory and deliver the highest CPMs to publishers. We are delighted to be using Direct Deals as a new way to achieve this, with all the advantages of a real-time mechanism,” said Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer at Criteo.

Direct Deals joins a number of other sales models supported by DoubleClick Ad Exchange, including branded, anonymous and private auctions. Sellers using the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) platform for direct sales can also benefit from dynamic integration with DoubleClick Ad Exchange to ensure that the most profitable impression is delivered for every impression. We are excited to introduce this new level of flexibility to Ad Exchange to help buyers improve the effectiveness of their campaigns and sellers profit from real-time display buying on their terms. DoubleClick Ad Exchange advertisers and publishers can contact their account manager to join the Direct Deals beta program.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management

Postal code targeting now available in DFP

2011-08-31T11:56:00.000-04:00

Advertisers spend more money on campaigns that reach the right audience. Plus, users find targeted ads more relevant and useful. To help you ensure that ads reach a specific audience and increase the value of your inventory, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) offers multiple targeting options that enable you to more precisely control when, where, and to whom, ads appear.

DoubleClick’s technology can recognize a number of factors that can be used in deciding which ads to serve: the visitor's location (country, region or state, metro, and city), day and time, user's domain, user's operating system, browser, browser language, and bandwidth.

Today, we’re excited to release a new addition to this list with zip and postal code targeting. Postal code targeting allows you to take your geo-targeted campaigns a level deeper to precisely reach users in specific markets. For example, you can now target users on Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood (10023, 10024, 10025) instead of geo-targeting the entire New York metropolitan area.

DFP currently supports targeting to U.S. zip codes and Canadian postal code prefixes. To get started, simply click the 'Postal code' tab in the targeting picker and paste in a comma-separated list of postal codes or prefixes. As with other geo-targeting, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns by using 'postal code' as a dimension when generating reports.

We look forward to adding the ability to target postal codes in additional countries in the future, and hope that with the expansion of postal code targeting, you’ll be able to reach your audience more effectively.

Posted by Alok Sheth, Software Engineer