This is part three of a five-part series introducing the creative process for data-driven campaigns as outlined in our new guide: The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

A major shift is occurring in the way agencies work together to design and develop digital creative campaigns. Previously, teams were siloed: the media agency used data to determine ad types and sizes, and served the creative production agency with a spec sheet off of which to build executions.

Today, we’re moving toward a model in which all teams work together, using sophisticated digital tools for increased efficiency. In the model we put forth in our new guide for marketers, the brand and media team now share data with the creative production team, which uses it to create a strategy for the campaign’s creative based on audience insights and real-time environmental and media triggers.

We explored the topics of gathering data signals and getting all teams on board in previous blog posts. Here, we’ll talk a bit about how creative production agencies are using tools for increased flexibility, efficiency, and control in building dynamic creative.

What is dynamic creative?

Dynamic creative allows for variables such as copy, imagery, font, and color to easily change based on data signals, such as who is viewing the ad, where they’re viewing it, and when. It consists of two complementary pieces: the creative template, and the dynamic creative feed.

The creative template

Much like the blueprint for a house, this serves as the structure of the ad unit. When you use a blueprint, variables such as the type of flooring and color of the exterior may change, but the “bones” of the house will remain the same.

Similarly, the creative template provides parameters for variables such as:

• Character counts for copy
• Length of animations
• Size and location of images

Within those parameters, the team can experiment with different headlines, images, and types of animations, as well as other factors.

The dynamic creative feed

This houses the creative assets that will get plugged into the creative template, as well as the logic that dictates which assets will be served to which viewers based on your data signals and campaign strategy. Using a feed to control your dynamic campaign strategy gives you maximum flexibility, allowing you to quickly and easily make changes to your creative on the fly.

The template and feed in action

When we worked with L’Oreal on a campaign for their Vichy sunscreen brand, the team selected several dynamic creative elements that would change based on data signals, including lifestyle imagery, product image, and call-to-action. Additionally, messaging driving to the nearest store could populate based on the user’s postal code.

The design team created a simple yet elegant template that accounted for all of these variables, and the dynamic creative feed signaled which variables would appear to which users based on their data signals.

To see examples of the creative from this campaign and learn more about best practices for data-driven campaigns, please visit our marketers’ guide to data-driven creative campaigns.

We’re also hosting a hangout on air on Tuesday, April 5th at 12pm ET, to discuss the research and provide some key takeaways from the guide. RSVP here.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

This is part two of a five-part series introducing the creative process for data-driven campaigns as outlined in our new guide: The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

Anyone who’s managed an ad campaign knows that there are two kinds of success. The first is executional: hitting KPI’s. But there’s a second metric that can be just as important, and may even influence your numbers: how everyone feels when the campaign is over. Is the team bursting with new learnings and toasting a job well done, or reaching for the Advil while muttering: “never again”?

To help ensure that your campaigns run smoothly from start to finish and end in beers instead of tears, we recommend incorporating a single, crucial step into your process: the all-hands-on-deck collaborative brief.

We recently tested several methodologies for executing data-driven creative campaigns, which we explore in detail in The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers. We universally found that including a collaborative digital brief-building session can lead to more positive results, setting the stage for a campaign that runs smoothly from start to finish.

The new all-hands kickoff

You’ve probably had an all-hands kick-off before: one in which you gathered all of your agencies and gave them their marching orders. This is different. Instead of briefing your media, creative, and production agencies, you’re soliciting their expertise.

This briefing process may seem more open-ended, collaborative, and cyclical than the process you’re used to. Consider that involving your agencies in developing a collective digital brief changes the approach from: “here’s what I want you to do” to “here’s what I’m thinking, what are your thoughts?” It enables you to take advantage of the knowledge on your team and creates a stronger sense of investment from everyone involved.

Meet in person if possible and use this time to review project goals and start building the digital brief. We also encourage extensive whiteboard usage. Writing down all the data signals you gathered in Phase 1 can help everyone visualize the campaign map and generate ideas together.

When we worked with Royal Bank of Canada on their campaign for a premium credit card, the team successfully used the collaborative briefing meeting to bring together marketing, media buying, creative and data analysts. As a group, we discussed the brand’s overall goals for the campaign, the target audience, and the data signals that could be used to reach that audience. We also decided on the creative strategy that would be used for the campaign.

Check out phase two of “The Creative Process for programmatic: A guide for marketers” to learn more about RBC’s approach and how you can follow suit.

We’re also hosting a hangout on air on Tuesday, April 5th at 12pm ET, to discuss the research and provide some key takeaways from the guide. RSVP here.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

This is part one of a five-part series that will walk through the creative process for programmatic campaigns, which is outlined in The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

If there’s one thing the programmatic revolution has undeniably given us, it’s data. We know more about how to reach the right people and understand how they respond to campaigns than ever before. But even as we’re drowning in data, we don’t always know what to do with it.

Data can play a powerful role in running more effective campaigns only after we learn to harness and apply it strategically. Recently, we teamed up with several brands and agency partners to do just that, and last week we launched our findings.

Today, we’ll explore Phase 1 of our five-phase creative process. Phase 1 is all about gathering data, sifting through the dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of data signals available and using them to inform your creative strategy.

So what’s a data signal?

A data signal is information about your audience or their context that can influence your campaign. These can include demographic or behavioral information, information about the properties on which your ads might appear, or external factors such as the weather or market performance that may influence how people are feeling when your advertising reaches their eyeballs.

Once you understand the data signals available, you can design creative strategies that take advantage of those signals, with messaging or imagery that is relevant based on the audience, media, or environment where your ad will show up.

For example, in our research project, our brand partner L’Oreal used audience targeting lists from their programmatic buying tool to segment their audience into women and women with children, and show each segment a relevant sunscreen product coupled with relevant imagery. Another brand partner, Gilt, used top-performing keywords from previous campaigns to decide which merchandise to feature in their creative units for each of their audience segments.

Take a deep-dive into these case studies and learn more about how audience insights and data signals can help inform your creative strategy.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics Blog

An enterprise-class solution for a multi-screen world

Our lives are filled with micro-moments: intent-rich moments when we turn to the nearest device to find a store, buy a product or look for answers to all kinds of wants and needs. In these moments, today's consumers decide what to do, where to go, and what to buy.

If you're in marketing or analytics, you know this consumer behavior brings new opportunities to reach your customer in the right moment with the right message. At the same time, it's harder than ever to get a complete view of the consumer journey and then make sense of it all.

That’s why we’re introducing the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers. It all starts with understanding consumer behavior in the moment — getting the right insights, and then making your brand useful to consumers.

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite gave us the really big ah-­ha moment. When we launched our mobile app, it provided insurance quotes. But after looking at the data, we saw people were attempting to buy insurance. So, we shifted our mobile strategy to offer ecommerce. Google gave us that insight.”
-Pawan Divakarla, Analytics Leader, Progressive

Modern measurement tools that are simple to use

Sophisticated marketers who use analytics platforms are three times more likely to outperform their peers¹ in achieving revenue goals. It’s no wonder enterprise-class marketers have been telling us they need more from their marketing analytics tools. Many toolsets can't cope: They're too hard to use, lack sufficient collaboration capabilities, are poorly integrated, and require hard-to-find expertise.

Several years ago, Google engineers set out to simplify marketing analytics in the same way we simplified web search with Google.com. With infrastructure that allows us to handle billions and billions of daily search queries — generating answers before users even finish typing — we set out to give enterprise marketers the same utility.

As we built the system, enterprise marketers shared what they needed with us:

• See the complete customer journey: Marketers require full visibility and context to see what’s really happening across all customer touchpoints, devices, and channels.
• Useful insights, not just more data: Marketers need enormous computing power, data science and smart algorithms, all working together to quickly make sense of data for them. In other words, built-in intelligence to do the heavy lifting for marketers and make insights easy to see.
• Enable better sharing within your organization: Marketers seek to put insights into everyone’s hands and get the whole company on the same page — resulting in stronger cross-functional goals and smarter decision-making.
• Deliver engaging experiences to the right people: Marketers want to make their brand immediately useful to consumers. With integrations across multiple Google technologies, the suite products not only work well together, but also with other products, including AdWords, DoubleClick, and 3rd-party platforms — enabling marketers to take immediate action and drive business impact.

The Google Analytics 360 Suite is built to address these needs. Its powerful set products are unified, providing a consistent user experience and cross product data integrations, plus services. Simply put: it’s a complete measurement platform.

“Using the integrations in the Google Analytics 360 Suite, we are able to manage everything in one seamless platform.”
-Khoi Truong, Director of Analytics and Media, L'Oréal Canada

Loaded with six products, four of which are brand-new, the Google Analytics 360 Suite offers easy-to-use tools that enable sharing of data and insights throughout an organization.

• Google Audience Center 360 (beta): This powerful data management platform (DMP) helps marketers understand their customers and find more like them across channels, devices, and campaigns. It offers native integration with Google and DoubleClick, plus it's open to third party data providers, DSPs and more.
• Google Optimize 360 (beta): This website testing and personalization product helps marketers deliver better experiences. Marketers can show consumers multiple variations of their site and then choose the version that works best for each audience.
• Google Data Studio 360 (beta): A new data analysis and visualization product that integrates data across all suite products and other data sources ― turning it into beautiful, interactive reports and dashboards. Built-in real-time collaboration and sharing is based on Google Docs technology.
• Google Tag Manager 360: Built from our industry-leading tag management product, it empowers enterprise marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. It offers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code) and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows.
• Google Analytics 360 (formerly known as GA Premium): will roll out exciting new capabilities throughout the next couple of months as investments continue to grow. It will serve as the measurement centerpiece by analyzing customer data from all touch-points and integrating with our ad products to drive marketing effectiveness.
• Google Attribution 360 (formerly known as Adometry): has been rebuilt from the ground up to help advertisers value marketing investments and allocate budgets with confidence. Marketers can analyze performance across all channels, devices, and systems to achieve their most effective marketing mix.

Achieve more with your Google media

The Google Analytics 360 Suite offers integrations with many third party data providers and platforms. It also plugs right into Google AdWords and DoubleClick Digital Marketing, our core ad technology. That means marketers can turn analytics into action by combining their own data from multiple sources ― website data, audience data, and customer data (e.g. CRM) and more ― and using it to make ads more relevant for people.

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite has a native integration with DoubleClick — that’s a game-changer. Now I can personalize my media based on website user behaviors, such as what they purchase.”
-Khoi Truong, Director of Analytics and Media, L'Oréal Canada

When will the Google Analytics 360 Suite launch?

The new products -- Audience Center 360, Optimize 360, Data Studio 360, and Tag Manager 360 -- are available today in limited BETA. If you're a Google Analytics Premium or Adometry customer, you will see the products renamed in the coming months, and we'll let you know when you're eligible to join the new betas.

This is just the beginning of our ongoing innovation in enterprise marketing analytics -- we can’t wait to share more. In the meantime, visit our website for more details or hear from directly from our customers below.

Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the capabilities and benefits of all the new products on the newly refreshed and renamed Google Analytics Solutions blog, and on our Google+ and Twitter pages. We’d love your feedback.

Posted by Paul Muret Vice President of Analytics, Display, and Video Products, Google

^{1: Forrester Research, Inc. Discover How Marketing Analytics Increases Business Results
*Launching March 15, 2016}

As 2016 marketing strategies kick into high gear, there’s one word on everyone’s mind: programmatic. Global programmatic ad spend is expected to reach $21.6B in 2016, and account for 67% of all digital display ad sales¹.

Programmatic advertising allows brands to reach more valuable audiences with messages tailored to their interests and mindsets in the crucial moments when decisions are made. As such, it’s not just changing how we buy and sell media—it’s also transforming the way we strategize, design, and develop creative.

At DoubleClick, we saw a need to define best practices for developing and implementing creative strategies for programmatic campaigns. In partnership with the digital creative studio, Fancy Pants Group, and the management consulting company, Accenture, we tested several approaches with three global brands: Gilt Groupe, L’Oreal Vichy, and RBC Royal Bank of Canada.

Over the course of these tests, we identified a new creative process for programmatic campaigns. Today, we’re debuting that process and the research behind it in a comprehensive guide for marketers.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

^{1 eMarketer}

Last June at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit, we introduced Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager as a way to help you discover, negotiate and manage premium publisher inventory from a single destination.

Since June, we've seen strong engagement from our testers and have worked to incorporate their feedback and improve the product. We're excited to announce that Marketplace is now available in an open beta, offering all Bid Manager customers an easier way to find and execute deals. Here's what some of our early testers are saying about Marketplace:

“Marketplace has enormously streamlined the process of setting up private inventory deals by providing comprehensive publisher information with splits by audience segment. The efficiency and level of detail it provides simplifies the negotiation process and speeds up getting deals live".
-Liz Rutgersson, the Head of Programmatic, Periscopix

"Marketplace helped out a great deal when we needed to find and manage programmatic deals within multiple markets outside of Germany. The information given in the profile of the publishers has been helpful to evaluate whether or not the inventory would be a good fit for our client. The negotiations and execution are very straightforward and intuitive. It’s been a great experience thus far."
-Kristina Craig, Group Manager Investment & Accountability, Omnicom Media Group Germany

Connecting buyers and sellers

Marketplace is a shoppable storefront where you can browse all kinds of premium inventory from top publishers for your programmatic campaigns. It also helps you save time and overhead because you can negotiate and manage your deals directly from Marketplace.

• Discover great inventory: Looking for video or mobile inventory on top news sites in Spain or Singapore? Marketplace lets you search for deals by publisher, format, geography, audience, vertical and much more. You can find all Programmatic Direct deals including private auctions, preferred deals and programmatic guaranteed.

• Streamline negotiations with publishers: With Marketplace, it's easy to contact and transact directly with publishers. Marketplace also keeps track of all deal negotiations, so your communications are organized and easily accessible. You can learn more about the available inventory and complete your media buy without ever having to pick up the phone.
• Get a single view of all your deals: Once you’ve reached an agreement, your new deal is automatically added to your Marketplace inventory library. Here you’ll get a single view of all your deals transacted in Bid Manager.

Marketplace in Bid Manager is now open to everyone

Today, all Bid Manager accounts are eligible to participate in Marketplace (beta).

We hope you'll find Marketplace just as useful for finding and buying premium inventory as our early testers have.

Reach out to your DoubleClick account team to get started today.

Posted by Roshan Khan
Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager

Consumers see a lot of different ads as they make buying decisions. Some ads have a huge impact on the final purchase, others help the process along, and still others contribute absolutely zero. The trick, of course, is knowing which ad does what.
Today we’re introducing Data-Driven Attribution to all DoubleClick accounts. It's a new tool that helps you give the right credit to each and every advertising touch point ― and shows you the optimal combination for your marketing.
Powered by Google Attribution 360, Data-Driven Attribution uses a modeling methodology developed by Google engineers and grounded in advanced statistics and economic principles. It assigns credit accurately and automatically to all your digital media ads served through DoubleClick.

Turbocharge your campaigns

DoubleClick Digital Marketing already has a strong attribution foundation with Multi-Channel Funnels and the Attribution Modeling Tool. Now it's even easier to make decisions about how to best allocate your digital media budget. Data-Driven Attribution is:

• Actionable: The contribution made by each marketing channel is clear (in both converting and non-converting paths), so you can make better data-driven marketing decisions.
• Accessible: Just choose your goals (such as e-commerce transaction or email signups) and Data-Driven Attribution will show you the contribution made by each of your digital campaigns.
• Comprehensive: No need for new tags, just turn on the feature and you’ll see data for your campaigns.

There’s no room for guesswork in attribution ― and when you’re not guessing, you’ll see greater ROIs and better performances.

“Mindshare helps brands get the most of their digital marketing. To do that we need meaningful insights on the consumer path to purchase across both display and search. We have been testing Data Driven Attribution in DoubleClick and we have seen tailored recommendations that allow us to take fast action for greater impact and better ROI. In some campaigns we have been able to improve budget allocation and have seen CPA improve by 25%.” -Karen Nayler, CEO, Mindshare Canada

How to get started

You'll find the Attribution interface in the Reporting and Attribution section of your DoubleClick account. You can activate Data-Driven Attribution for all your floodlight tags and once you start collecting data, you'll see a new recommended model appear after seven days.

Learn more about Data-Driven Attribution.

Posted by Luke Hedrick Product Manager, DoubleClick

Valentine's Day is the #2 holiday for last-minute gift shopping¹, and consumers are increasingly turning to their smartphones to help them plan their celebration.

In our personal lives, we write the perfect message in a card and attach it to the perfect gift. In our professional lives as search marketers, we try to write that perfect message in our ad copy and attach it to the right landing page, but this hasn't always been easy. That’s why we are excited to share our latest enhancements to DoubleClick Search which will help you quickly find the ad copy and landing page that your customers will love - this Valentine's Day and beyond.

Find the perfect message

Using search, 50% of consumers lookup brands they’ve never purchased². Being there with useful information can help you win the love of new customers. Ad copy testing in DoubleClick Search helps you test new ad copy in order to make sure your campaigns are having their greatest impact. Ad copy testing works by normalizing the variables that can impact campaign performance such as flight dates, device type, and display frequency, and measuring the performance of what matters most - the ad copy.

Testing ad copy in DoubleClick Search requires just three quick steps:

• Step 1: Write your new ad copy
• Step 2: Choose a test goal such as click-through rate, action rate or revenue.
• Step 3: Measure results.

When your test is over, you can make changes to your campaigns directly from the testing interface.

"Ad copy testing is a task all SEM managers know to be absolutely necessary and a pillar of a successful account. Previous to DoubleClick Search ad copy testing, we would have to rely on in-house scripts or expensive and clunky 3rd party tools to get the job done. Now that we can take direct action inside of DoubleClick Search, we’re able to save several hours every week putting together and reporting on our testing data and use that time more effectively to help strategically drive our clients’ business forward.” -Kyle Petzinger, Lead, Paid Search, iProspect

To learn how to use ad copy testing in DoubleClick Search, watch our training video or read about it in the Help Center.

Mobile insights on landing page performance

With so much last minute shopping, brands that find ways to be useful to consumers in the moments when they are seeking information for their purchases will win. So, when a consumer clicks one of your search ads, which page should you show? A promotional page? A product details page?

A DoubleClick Search landing page test helps answer this question by randomly splitting ad traffic among multiple landing pages on your site. For AdWords engine accounts, we’ve added the ability to specify the device(s) consumers used to reach your landing page in order to ensure you have the most actionable insights about your page performance, no matter what device a consumer used to get there.

We're excited to see DoubleClick Search customers use the mobile landing page test to optimize the journey for their customers from mobile search to mobile landing page to action.

To learn how to start a landing page test, visit the Help Center.

Meeting all your search marketing needs

Ad copy testing and improved landing page testing in DoubleClick Search are just two of the many ways we are enhancing DoubleClick Search to help save you time and boost your performance. If these features make a difference for your business, let your account manager know. We'd love to hear about your success.

Posted by Amit Varia
Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

^{1 Google Trends, January 2013-December 2015, United States.
2 Google, “The Role of Mobile on the CPG Purchase Journey” study, United States, September 2015. n=371}

When Netflix launched its new series Narcos¹ in August of 2015, it faced a big global marketing challenge.
Narcos is a realistic look at the rise of the Cocaine Highway as told through the lives of legendary kingpin Pablo Escobar and the American DEA agents tracking him. It's a passionate story of crime, drugs, money, honor and politics, set in the late decades of the 20th century, with dialogue half in Spanish and half in English.
Netflix wanted to reach a global audience that included target groups like "thrill seekers" (men 25-34 drawn to the excitement of crime culture) and "conspiracy theorists" (older males fascinated by the political implications of drug trafficking). That meant Netflix and its digital agency, AvatarLabs, needed to bring the Narcos story to countries from Peru to Sweden with targeted messages that would appeal powerfully to different target viewers in each culture ― without overwhelming their budget or their marketing teams.

See how they made it happen.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

^{1 Narcos can been seen exclusively on Netflix.}

Keeping fake traffic that originates from infected computers (aka “botnets”) out of our ads systems has been a priority since we launched, and over the years we've worked hard to put in place extensive technology checks and filters to safeguard against this type of traffic.

Today we're further reinforcing our existing botnet defenses across our ad systems through a new feature that automates the filtering of traffic from three of the top ad fraud botnets, amongst those we are monitoring and defending against. One of the key benefits of this new feature is that it is resilient to possible changes to the malware that generates this botnet traffic.

This move boosts our defenses against invalid traffic generated by some nasty ad fraud malware, including Bedep and two other malware families that we have code-named Beetal and Changthangi. Together these three botnets are comprised of over 500,000 infected user machines.

Today we’d like to take this opportunity to take a deeper look at ad fraud botnets.

Ad fraud botnets: a menace to the advertising ecosystem

Ad fraud botnets are armies of malware-infected computers that are controlled by malicious fraudsters intent on generating large amounts of non-human ad traffic volume, typically for unscrupulous publishers. As a result, ad fraud botnets are a major threat to the budgets of advertisers, the reputation of publishers, and the safety of consumers. And this threat is considerable, given that hundreds of thousands of computers around the globe are infected with malware used specifically for ad fraud.

The Bedep Botnet size over the course of 60 days. Dips in the graph represent weekends, when some infected machines are turned off.
Global distribution and concentration of Bedep Malware.

Botnet traffic is difficult to consistently filter in advertising platforms because malware authors try to make their fraudulent traffic look as human as possible so that it resembles legitimate traffic. For example, botnet traffic has many of the same characteristics as real traffic, including the use of common browsers, and typical user behavior on a web page (e.g., scrolling, clicking, and mouse movement).

Our move to consistently and confidently cut out the traffic from these botnets, despite any changes in the malware on which they’re based, represents a significant milestone in the defense of our advertising ecosystem.

The art and science of protecting against botnets at scale

Identifying ad fraud malware and protecting ad platforms against botnets is a sophisticated effort that requires deep technical knowledge, diligence, and the ability to think several steps ahead. It’s a game of chess against an opponent that is constantly changing the rules.

In addition, it takes robust and extensive infrastructure to properly analyze malware threats at scale. For example, there are millions of malware programs out in the wild, although not all of this malware is associated with ad fraud botnets. This scenario represents a considerable technical challenge, since the malware, along with a vast amount of botnet traffic, needs to be continuously analyzed. To compound the challenge, there are hundreds of thousands of new malware programs produced each day that our systems need to analyze as well.

Our team has expanded its expertise by working to gain a deep understanding of the Bedep, Beetal, and Changthangi malware families. Subsequently, we have expanded the capability to significantly protect our systems against traffic generated by this malware through an automated, scalable, and seamless filter. This filter is already available to all marketers on DoubleClick Bid Manager and Google Display Network (GDN).

A bold move, but there’s more to come

We believe in fighting the good fight in order to stop malicious actors in the advertising ecosystem. We also know that our success is not based solely on sophisticated algorithms or robust, highly-scalable infrastructure. Our success also relies on a team of warrior scientists that combines art and science to innovate and cultivate, relying on creativity and collective wisdom to effect change in unique ways.

This is a really exciting start to the year for us, yet we know that our work is not done yet. We will continue to be vigilant, working hard to protect our systems from fraudsters in 2016 and beyond. Stay tuned.

Posted by Andres Ferrate Chief Advocate, Google Ad Traffic Quality

Over the last year, we’ve rolled out tools to encourage advertisers to build in HTML5, so you’re able to reach the widest possible audience across screens. To enhance the browsing experience for more people across more sites, DoubleClick Digital Marketing, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the Google Display Network are now going 100% HTML5^*.

• Starting June 30th, 2016, advertisers will no longer be able to upload Flash ads into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, or AdWords.
• Starting January 2nd, 2017, Flash ads will no longer be able to run through DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, or the Google Display Network.

It’s important to update your ads to HTML5 before these dates.
Advertisers who currently use display ads built in Flash in their campaigns have several easy ways to navigate the transition, ensuring your creative continues to reach people successfully. Read more here.
Posted by Karin Hennessy
Product Manager, DoubleClick

^{*Note: this update applies only to display ads; video ads built in Flash will not be impacted on these dates.}

Ever since Weight Watchers first began as a gathering of friends in 1963, the company has been helping people lose pounds and live healthier lives. Today the Weight Watchers digital marketing team is focused on acquiring new generations of customers for those classic local meetings as well as their online products and services.

The Weight Watchers team has had ample success with search and social media, where they found it easy to test different headlines and calls to action. But they hadn't found a way to do the same kind of vigorous testing on display advertising. Building and managing dozens of creative iterations, and accurately measuring the results, seemed like a major challenge.

To tackle that challenge, Weight Watchers, its agencies, Neo@Ogilvy and OgilvyOne, chose DoubleClick Dynamic Creative.

See how they managed their creative testing to identify the best-performing creative iterations and boost acquisition volume by 56%.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

Brands can engage with their customers and drive brand loyalty by building branded apps that offer useful or entertaining information. Examples of branded apps include airline apps that provide check-in functionality, banking apps that provide bill pay and check deposit, and retail loyalty apps that drive in-store purchases. By providing functionality that people need regularly in a convenient way, these brands are able to remind customers of their value proposition and build stronger relationships.

But to get this customer loyalty, you first need to get people to install your app.

App install campaigns help you promote your app to your customers, so they can discover and install it. Having your branded app on your customers’ phones means you can be front-and-center on the screen that people check over 150 times a day, leading to increased brand awareness and mindshare.

Today, we’re excited to announce several new features across our DoubleClick Digital Marketing solutions that help you easily build an app install campaign to promote your branded apps.

Step 1: Set up tracking

Before you launch your app install campaign, make sure your app is setup to track installs (and other in-app actions your customers may take), so that you can understand which ads are most effective.

• If your app is in the Google Play Store, you can now automatically track installs of your Google Play app as conversions in DoubleClick, without any code changes.
• If your app is in the Apple App Store or if you work with an app measurement provider, we support integration with popular third party app tracking platforms (initially announced in September), so that you can track installs measured by those systems as conversions for your campaign.

Step 2: Build your ads

Your customers are viewing content across search, display, and video, so your app install campaigns need to reach them in all those places.

• Use the new templated app install creative formats in DoubleClick Bid Manager to generate your programmatic display ads instantly. These templates pull in info about your app from the Google Play or Apple App Store to create app install banners at the click of a button.
• Build, traffic and serve one rich media unit that works seamlessly across web and app environments, with universal ads, now available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.
• Through DoubleClick Search, you can access some of our highest performing ad formats; app install Search ads, launched last May, promote your app on Google Search results or on Google Play Search (Android only), and our new app extensions allow you to link to your app from your Google Search text ads.

Step 3: Reach your customers

Our app install workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager makes it easy to get your programmatic app install campaign up and running. In concert with this workflow, several new features make it even simpler and more effective:

• Create custom lists of apps to ensure that your ads show up in the apps you care about or that drive the best performance -- easily target or exclude lists of apps, giving you control over where your brand shows up.
• Already have an audience list of customers who’ve visited your mobile website? Use same device targeting to reach those interested customers with your app install campaign.
• Leverage the audience targeting solutions within DoubleClick Bid Manager (launched in November) for your app install campaigns, to reach your customers using in-market audiences, affinity segments or demographic groups.
• Drive higher performance and engagement with video ads; we’re launching a new video app install workflow in early March that enables easy campaign setup and targeting of video app inventory across the open exchange.

The new video app install line item workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager

Running app install campaigns can help drive more customers to your branded apps, paving the way for a deeper connection between your customers and your brand. Talk to your media agency and DoubleClick sales rep about getting started with these campaigns.

Posted by Steve Chang
Product Manager, DoubleClick

Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s SVP for Ads and Commerce, spoke today at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, CA. Building on the theme of “The Next $50B,” Sridhar reinforced Google’s commitment to better mobile experiences in order to move the digital advertising industry forward.

A faster mobile experience

Half of all users tell us waiting for slow pages to load is their top frustration with mobile. Let’s face it, your mobile strategy is irrelevant if people don’t stick around waiting for your page to load. That’s the premise behind Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open-source technology we announced last October that any publisher can use to make their pages load instantly - and also integrate with any advertising partner.

Sridhar provided an update on the work we’ve been doing with our partners since then to test a range of monetization solutions, from programmatic ad serving to native ads to paywalls. In this time, we’ve also built an ecosystem of third party providers who will support AMP.

Better mobile ads

With AMP we're excited to bring new, compelling mobile experiences to users. But we are also focusing on preventing bad experiences - and Sridhar shared the latest on those efforts. For example, have you ever been swiping through a slideshow of photos on your mobile device and all of a sudden an ad you didn’t mean to tap takes you to another site? We developed technology to detect and prevent these accidental taps - and we block a significant number of them everyday.

We also have policies in place for sites and apps that show Google ads. In 2015, we stopped showing ads on 25,000 apps that didn't meet our guidelines. Two-thirds of them were for bad practices, like ads that covered up your content. This means users have a better ad experience and it also helps publishers and all of those who depend on a healthy digital ads ecosystem. (Learn how we fought bad ads in 2015.)

Measurement across devices

As we work to create better mobile experiences, we can take advantage of one big upside of mobile: measurement. With mobile, we’re able to tap into more signals, and get more relevant data, from device to location to time of day.

Advertisers and publishers can use this data to make mobile ads better and improve business outcomes. For example, Sridhar shared how Cadreon used cross-device measurement in DoubleClick for an auto client to measure the impact of mobile on each conversion, ultimately realizing a 15% lift in total conversions and developing new insights to feed back into their media planning.

Watch Sridhar's full keynote here:

Posted by Jonathan Meltzer Head of Platforms and Publisher Marketing, Google

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

When ads are good, they connect you to products or services you’re interested in and make it easier to get stuff you want. They also keep a lot of what you love about the web—like news sites or mobile apps—free.

But some ads are just plain bad—like ads that carry malware, cover up content you’re trying to see, or promote fake goods. Bad ads can ruin your entire online experience, a problem we take very seriously. That’s why we have a strict set of policies for the kinds of ads businesses can run with Google—and why we’ve invested in sophisticated technology and a global team of 1,000+ people dedicated to fighting bad ads. Last year alone we disabled more than 780 million ads for violating our policies—a number that's increased over the years thanks to new protections we've put in place. If you spent one second looking at each of these ads, it’d take you nearly 25 years to see them all!

Here are some of the top areas we focused on in our fight against bad ads in 2015:

Busting bad ads

Some bad ads, like those for products that falsely claim to help with weight loss, mislead people. Others help fraudsters carry out scams, like those that lead to “phishing” sites that trick people into handing over personal information. Through a combination of computer algorithms and people at Google reviewing ads, we’re able to block the vast majority of these bad ads before they ever get shown. Here are some types of bad ads we busted in 2015:

Counterfeiters

We suspended more than 10,000 sites and 18,000 accounts for attempting to sell counterfeit goods (like imitation designer watches).

Pharmaceuticals

We blocked more than 12.5 million ads that violated our healthcare and medicines policy, such as ads for pharmaceuticals that weren’t approved for use or that made misleading claims to be as effective as prescription drugs.

Weight loss scams

Weight loss scams, like ads for supplements promising impossible-to-achieve weight loss without diet or exercise, were one of the top user complaints in 2015. We responded by suspending more than 30,000 sites for misleading claims.

Phishing

In 2015, we stepped up our efforts to fight phishing sites, blocking nearly 7,000 sites as a result.

Unwanted software

Unwanted software can slow your devices down or unexpectedly change your homepage and keep you from changing it back. With powerful new protections, we disabled more than 10,000 sites offering unwanted software, and reduced unwanted downloads via Google ads by more than 99 percent.

Trick to click

We got even tougher on ads that mislead or trick people into interacting with them—like ads designed to look like system warnings from your computer. In 2015 alone we rejected more than 17 million.

Creating a better experience

Sometimes even ads that offer helpful and relevant information behave in ways that can be really annoying—covering up what you’re trying to see or sending you to an advertiser’s site when you didn’t intend to go there. In 2015, we disabled or banned the worst offenders.

Accidental mobile clicks

We’ve all been there. You’re swiping through a slideshow of the best moments from the Presidential debate when an ad redirects you even though you didn’t mean to click on it. We’re working to end that. We've developed technology to determine when clicks on mobile ads are accidental. Instead of sending you off to an advertiser page you didn't mean to visit, we let you continue enjoying your slideshow (and the advertiser doesn't get charged).

Bad sites and apps

In 2015, we stopped showing ads on more than 25,000 mobile apps because the developers didn’t follow our policies. More than two-thirds of these violations were for practices like mobile ads placed very close to buttons, causing someone to accidentally click the ad. There are also some sites and apps that we choose not to work with because they don’t follow our policies. We also reject applications from sites and mobile apps that want to show Google ads but don't follow our policies. In 2015 alone, we rejected more than 1.4 million applications.

Putting you in control

We also give you tools to control the type of ads you see. You can always let us know when you believe an ad might be violating our policies.

Mute This Ad

Maybe you’ve just seen way too many car ads recently. “Mute This Ad” lets you click an “X” at the top on many of the ads we show and Google will stop showing you that ad and others like it from that advertiser. You can also tell us why. The 4+ billion pieces of feedback we received in 2015 are helping us show better ads and shape our policies.

Ads Settings

In 2015, we rolled out a new design for our Ads Settings where you can manage your ads experience. You can update your interests to make the ads you see more relevant, or block specific advertisers all together.

Looking ahead to 2016

We’re always updating our technology and our policies based on your feedback—and working to stay one step ahead of the fraudsters. In 2016, we’re planning updates like further restricting what can be advertised as effective for weight loss, and adding new protections against malware and bots. We want to make sure all the ads you see are helpful and welcome and we’ll keep fighting to make that a reality.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy SVP, Ads & Commerce

Six months ago at the US DoubleClick Leadership Summit, we announced the start of testing for Programmatic Guaranteed, a new way to use programmatic pipes to execute direct deals. In this time, over 300 advertisers and 200 publishers have tested this capability, and we’ve seen impression volumes double every quarter. Based on your feedback, we’ve made several changes and significantly improved the product. So today, we’re announcing the public beta of Programmatic Guaranteed and opening it to any advertiser using DoubleClick Bid Manager or publisher using DoubleClick for Publishers^*.

Programmatic direct spending was expected to reach $8 Billion in 2015 in the US alone - more than 50% of total programmatic display ad spend¹. Initial steps to bring the benefits of programmatic to direct deals have been focused on automating the deal booking process. While that’s a good start, it only scratches the surface of what programmatic technology can do. The true value of programmatic direct will be achieved when the power of real-time, data-driven decisions is combined with access to brand safe, reserved publisher inventory currently available through direct sales. This will not only shorten the time it takes to book and execute high value reservations type deals, but also improve advertising performance.

That was our goal when developing Programmatic Guaranteed. It’s the only product available today that uses real-time bidding infrastructure to bring the power of programmatic to direct sales. Advertisers and agencies get access to premium guaranteed inventory with cross-campaign / advertiser optimization and frequency management across programmatic and reservation inventory. Publishers can lock in revenue through reservations, forecast against programmatic deals, and enjoy the ease of automated billing and collections. All that without the need to email tags, worry about creative controls, resolve discrepancies, or fax I/Os back and forth.

Finally, we’ve found that Programmatic Guaranteed is creating new opportunities for advertisers and publishers to connect. Here’s what some of our partners are saying about Programmatic Guaranteed:

“The way we stay ahead is by constantly experimenting and pushing technology to work for us. With Programmatic Guaranteed we can lock in revenue by selling a guaranteed number of impressions at pre-negotiated rates. We’ve seen great success with an initial batch of advertisers so far. Programmatic Guaranteed is simple and effective, and it’s ideally suited to the direct sales environment because clients really understand it.”
-Joe Alicata, VP Revenue Product and Operations, VOX Media

"As a premium publisher we will automate what today is manual. Programmatic Guaranteed is definitely an end to end solution. It is exactly what a publisher like Conde Nast needs to do more in a digital environment that is constantly changing and becoming more demanding."
-Elia Blei, Commercial Director Digital and Large Markets, Condé Nast

“At Generator Media we aim to provide a holistic solution for our clients. Including Programmatic Guaranteed in our offering allows us to manage valuable reserved buys alongside our open exchange and private marketplace activity. Doing so provides a level of frequency and messaging control previously unattainable across large scale digital media buys.”
-Russell Wagner, Director of Platform Integrations, Generator Media

"Programmatic Guaranteed helps the publisher deliver very high quality inventory to the advertiser. When we start a campaign, we always have to start with the publisher: we then fix the price with the publisher, define the placement, the timeline and then we define the volume. Through this, if you compare direct sales with Programmatic Guaranteed, we are returning better results."
-Andrea Di Fonzo, Managing Director, MediaCom Italy

Programmatic Guaranteed is now available to all marketers and buyers using DoubleClick Bid Manager, and all publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers. If you have a reservation deal that would benefit from the efficiencies of programmatic, reach out to your DoubleClick account team today to get started. We’re excited to bring this innovative advertising tool to the market and we look forward to your feedback on how we can best improve Programmatic Guaranteed during the public beta.

Posted by Kurt Spoerer Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick

<sup>1 eMarketer, Oct 2015
* Programmatic Guaranteed is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business</sup>

At this time last year, we suggested three resolutions for 2015 to help you achieve more success with your programmatic campaigns.

Since then, the landscape has continued to evolve for marketers. There are more devices, more micro-moments, more ways to reach consumers. Not surprisingly, more people want to know about programmatic, too: Google searches for “programmatic” were 46% more popular this year vs. last year, and more than twice as popular from just two years ago¹.

For 2016, we’re sharing some new resolutions — and want to help you find the one that is just right for you.

Programmatic New Year is an interactive quiz that recommends personalized “programmatic resolutions”. These are ways you can further develop your brand’s programmatic strategy for 2016. Whether you’re experienced in programmatic or just getting started, the resolutions serve as a starting point for building your expertise, identifying opportunities and helping your brand succeed.

Take the quiz to find out your Programmatic New Year’s resolution. Consider sharing your resolution with friends and colleagues—it might just help you stick to it.

Posted by Carlo Acenas Associate Product Marketing Manager

^{1 Google Trends data}