Tag Archives: Advertisers

Do it better with data: How identifying data signals can improve digital creative

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

Introducing the Google Analytics 360 Suite

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

Three changes marketers can make today to prepare for data-driven creative

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 sales(1).

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 Creative Solutions
1. eMarketer, 2015

Improve your deal workflow with Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager

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

Enable better decisions with Data-Driven Attribution

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 Adometry, 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

Finding the ad copy and landing page that your customers will love

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

Netflix launches global hit series Narcos with help from DoubleClick and Google Web Designer

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.

Booting the bots: New botnet protections across our ads systems

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

Google display ads go 100% HTML5

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.

Weight Watchers boosts acquisition volume by 56% using DoubleClick Dynamic Creative

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