Category Archives: DoubleClick Publishers Blog

DART for publishers – DoubleClick Publishers

Viewability spotlight for sellers: Four ways to improve ad layouts for better viewability

Our latest infographic puts a spotlight on viewability by sharing a dozen technical best practices for improving viewability based on insights from Active View, Google's MRC-accredited viewable impression measurement technology.

On this blog, we're breaking down the best practices into small, approachable chunks. Already, we've focused on two tips for enabling viewability measurement, and three speedy ways to improve viewability. In this post you'll learn tips for laying out ads on a webpage or scrollable page in an app in order to improve viewability rates.

Here is today's recommendation:

We hope these recommendations are improving your site or apps ad viewability. Feel free to share your viewability success story in the comments section below.

In the next part of our Spotlight on Viewability, we'll share three content and ad loading methods that can improve viewability.

Posted by Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing Manager, Brand Measurement, Google

Viewability spotlight for sellers: Three speedy ways to improve viewability

Our latest infographic puts a spotlight on viewability by sharing a dozen technical best practices for improving viewability based on insights from Active View, Google's MRC-accredited viewable impression measurement technology.

Recently on the blog, we focused on two tips for enabling viewability measurement. In this post you'll learn tips for improving ad viewability by optimizing your apps and sites for speed and responsiveness.

Here is today's recommendation:

We hope these recommendations are improving your site or apps ad viewability. Feel free to share your viewability success story in the comments section below.

In the next part of our Spotlight on Viewability, we'll share four ways to improve ad layouts for better viewability rates.

Posted by Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing Manager, Brand Measurement, Google

Viewability spotlight for sellers: Two tips to enable viewability measurement

There's a lot that publishers and app developers can do to increase the likelihood that their ads will be measured as viewable. Our latest infographic puts a spotlight on viewability by sharing a dozen technical best practices for improving viewability across four categories based on insights from Active View, Google's MRC-accredited viewable impression measurement technology. These insights and recommendations come from our services teams that have spent thousands of hours working with publishers and developers to improve advertising outcomes.

In this post, we focus on tips you can use to improve ad viewability by optimizing your apps and sites for speed and responsiveness.

Here is today's recommendation:

We hope these recommendations will improve your site or apps ad viewability. Feel free to share your viewability success story in the comments section below.

In the next part of our Spotlight on Viewability, we'll share 3 speedy ways to improve viewability.

Posted by Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing Manager, Brand Measurement, Google

Announcing the launch of AMP in Search

Speed matters, particularly on mobile devices. People are likely to abandon websites after just three seconds if the content doesn’t load quickly. This is bad for the user trying to access content, and also for the publisher whose business depends on users engaging with content. That’s why, last October, we joined others across the industry to announce the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.

Earlier today, Google announced that web pages created using AMP will appear when relevant in the Top Stories section of the search results page, giving users a lightning-fast experience --- early tests have found that AMP pages load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages.

A key goal of the AMP Project is to ensure that publishers’ existing business models are supported. To that end, AMP in Search will have what could be termed as version one of some new features aimed at helping publishers earn money and understand and engage their audience. Full details are on Github and on the AMPProject.org site, but here are the highlights:

  • Ads: Advertising pays for a lot of the great journalism that we all love to read for free, so it’s essential that publishers can run ads on AMP pages with the ad servers and networks of their choice, in multiple formats (including native ads), and with full control over where they appear on the page. AMP also supports the new viewability metrics advertisers and publishers use to measure how users are engaging with ads. Currently publishers can choose from more than 20 ad tech providers who have developed support for AMP, including DoubleClick and AdSense. You can read more about the ads support in AMP in general here and specifically about DoubleClick for Publisher's support for AMP here.
  • Subscriptions: For many publishers, subscriptions and paywalls are critical to the bottom line. AMP lets publishers retain full control over which readers can access which stories, to ensure that publishers can continue to make money via subscriptions on their AMP pages. Visit Github for more details on subscriptions in AMP.
  • Analytics: Analytics are important to publishers because they help them understand what people like to read and how they read. AMP provides an analytics framework that lets publishers measure data like pageviews, users, time spent, and more. The insights provided by these kinds of metrics can help publishers create appealing stories, build brand loyalty and ultimately make money. Learn more about the analytics support in AMP here and specifically about Google Analytics in AMP here.

While we’re excited to have collaborated with the industry to bring this project forward and improve the mobile web for users, we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible. There’s much work ahead for the open source AMP project and we’re looking forward to the benefits this will bring to users, publishers and advertisers

Posted by Craig DiNatali
Director, Global Partnerships

Nitin Kashyap
Product Manager

SDK-less mediation: A more efficient path to greater yield

Today, we're happy to announce SDK-less mediation for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers, now in beta. People spend nearly 37 hours per month in apps, creating a significant revenue opportunity for publishers1. But maximizing revenue from app inventory is challenging. Demand for app inventory is highly fragmented and managing performance across multiple partners while maintaining their 3rd party SDKs is cumbersome.

Simplifying app yield

We developed SDK-less mediation in DoubleClick for Publishers to make it simpler and less time-consuming to manage yield across multiple mobile ad networks, including DoubleClick Ad Exchange. DoubleClick for Publishers automatically updates the CPMs for supported networks by collecting and analyzing reporting data on your behalf, removing the need to constantly monitor and adjust your settings. Also, we’ve made it easier to segment your inventory and control groups of networks that can access that inventory. Then to maximize your yield, our solution dynamically picks the best order to call those networks for every impression.

In the past, adding a new network to your mediation chain meant integrating and maintaining another SDK in your app—an error prone process that could lead to bugs, bloated code, or worse, security issues. Our SDK-less solution removes these hassles and makes it easy for you to add new partners by simply changing a few settings in your DoubleClick for Publishers account. Starting today, Aarki, Drawbridge, MdotM, and Smaato can be included in SDK-less mediation. Support for more networks is coming in the near future.

Publishers like Runtastic, New York Daily News, and Ubisoft have found DoubleClick for Publishers’s app mediation features extremely easy to set up:

"With SDK-less mediation we have a much better overview about our performance and the new UI is extremely user friendly, transparent and easy to use."
- Philipp Durstberger, Head of Advertising, Runtastic

"Mediation is brilliant, one of a kind, first of a kind, turnkey, simple to use and takes only a few minutes to set up. My favorite is the SDK-less feature which never existed but should have. I don’t have to beg product and engineering teams to install multiple SDKs to onboard various demand partners."
- Ilya Utkin, Director, Revenue Platforms and Operations, New York Daily News

“I was impressed by how quick it was to set up DoubleClick for Publishers Mediation with different networks, and how stable and efficient it’s been from day one.”
- Baptiste Chardon, Head of Mobile Monetization, Ubisoft

Maximizing yield for publishers has always been our goal. With the release of SDK-less mediation, we’re making it easier for you to make the most from your app inventory. SDK-less mediation is currently in beta and will be available to all publishers this spring. Talk to your DoubleClick account manager about getting started.

Posted by Gargi Sur
Product Manager, DoubleClick

1 http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2015/so-many-apps-so-much-more-time-for-entertainment.html

A better mobile experience

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.

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

How we fought bad ads in 2015

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

Programmatic Guaranteed: Now available to advertisers, publishers globally

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

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

A Programmatic New Year: What’s your resolution for 2016?

In 2015, 15 billion dollars was spent programmatically1. As consumers move to mobile, more marketers and publishers are embracing programmatic as a way of connecting with people in micro-moments.

“Programmatic” may have been ANA’s Marketing Word of the Year in 2014, but it was even more popular in 2015 — Google searches for “programmatic” were 46% more popular this year vs. last year, and more than twice as popular from just two years ago2.

What New Year’s resolutions could you make to capture this growing programmatic advertiser demand in 2016?

Take DoubleClick’s Programmatic New Year interactive quiz to find out your 2016 “programmatic resolutions”. Whether you’re already using programmatic or just starting out, these resolutions will serve as a starting point for building your expertise, recognizing opportunities and helping your business grow next year.

Take the quiz and 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 AdAge, June 2015
2 Google Trends data

Mobile Bootcamp Part IV: Effectively monetize your app

Users continue to move across platforms and screens. Today, more than half the queries on our platform come from mobile devices, both on mobile web and apps. The balance between monetizing your app and providing a good user experience remains tricky yet essential.

Yesterday, we focused on ways to create a high quality app for your users. Continue reading to gather app monetization recommendations from Mark Wolly, Head of Mobile Publisher Solutions at Google, and find a happy medium between effective monetization and good user experience.

  1. Create ads that respect your UX: Good ad placements ensure reliable revenue without sacrificing user experience. Examine the flow of user engagement within your app to place ads in undisruptive places, such as the transition points in a reading app. You can experiment with the frequency and placements of your ads to ensure you’re delivering the right experience in the right context for the user. Try to avoid sandwiching them between your interactive app content and navigation/menu buttons.

  2. Choose the best ad formats for your app’s content structure: It’s easy for users to get distracted by ads given the limited screen size, especially when they don’t match the look and feel of your app.

    Try using Native ads to create a consistent look and feel across your content and ads. Formatted to fit mobile apps’ content and visual design, Native ads are more likely to be viewed and clicked by users. eBay recently started using our Native Ads on DoubleClick and experienced a 3.6X increase in ad engagement on average, with some campaigns delivering click-through rates up to 5%.

    Mark believes “Native presents an opportunity to reset on building premium quality mobile placements and creatives. Many publishers have already built custom formats for direct sales, but haven’t yet extended their advertiser reach by offering them via programmatic channels.”

  3. Build your programmatic direct strategy: Allowing you high quality creative formats from premium advertisers, programmatic direct introduces your app to new advertiser budgets and makes ad operations easier. As explained by Mark, “Many publishers have built incredible custom mobile formats that command high CPMs from high-quality advertisers. They can massively extend their advertiser reach, while retaining the same cpms and control, by offering these formats to new advertisers via programmatic channels.”

There is a fundamental shift amongst consumers in their use of mobile, making it indisputable that apps play a significant role in a consumer’s mobile experience. In the time that desktop audiences have grown 1%, mobile audiences have grown a staggering 41%.

Focusing on ways to increase app discoverability, understand user engagement, optimize app quality, and effectively monetize your app, our mobile bootcamp outlines key steps for enhancing your mobile offerings in time for the holiday season of mobile frenzy.

Posted by Danielle Landress
Associate Product Marketing Manager, Publisher Marketing