Announcing Audience Extension: a new way to create more premium inventory in DoubleClick for Publishers

Today at the London ATS Trading summit we announced the launch of Audience Extension, a new feature within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) designed to generate more premium revenue for publishers by leveraging their audiences across the web.

Audience extension enables you to reach your audience across other publishers, bundle these impressions with your own inventory, and resell those packages to your direct advertisers at a premium. Audience extension inventory comes from the vast pool of brand safe inventory via publishers on DoubleClick Ad Exchange.  Audience Extension can be used without leaving DFP; flight dates, targeting and bid parameters are set directly within your core ad server.  

Audience extension is best suited to publishers with high value content channels within their owned and operated inventory that are consistently sold out, or who have defined audiences onsite that have a value to advertisers that transcends the context of their own site. It’s also used by publishers looking to reach a critical mass of users from a given geo-location.

Key Benefits

• A single place to manage, execute and optimize buying across owned & operated and external inventory


• Bid management capabilities integrated in the core ad server


• Integrated data management


• Cross-inventory performance reporting, analytics & insights


• Complexity hidden from sales team & ad operations

Posted by Sean Harvey, Business Product Manager

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). The list below contains some highlights. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Line Item Bulk Edit:  We’re constantly working on improving the trafficking process to enable you to create and change your campaigns more easily and effectively. You can now change the start and end date, the quantity, and the rate of several line items at once by using the bulk edit feature on the order overview page.

New AdMob SDK: The new Google AdMob SDK v6.1.0 for Android and v6.1.4 and v6.1.5 (non-UDID and UDID, respectively) for iOS are available for download. The new versions include the ability to specify multiple ad sizes in an AdView, introduce an app event listener for custom creatives that fire custom app events, and fix bugs reported from previous versions of the SDK.

Available in DFP:

Copy Creative Templates: If there is a creative template that you often use, you can now copy the template if you would like to re-use it for new creatives.

Available in DFP Mobile:

Allow non-matching images in aspect ratio creatives: Offers the ability to upload an image asset which doesn't match the aspect ratio you have selected in the line item.

Suggested ad units: You can now create mobile ad units by approving suggestions generated from actual traffic. When a not-yet existing ad unit generates impressions we will show it after some impressions as a suggested ad unit in the inventory screen of the network where users can approve them to become actual ad units. This saves you time by automatically creating ad units in advance, while still maintaining control over your overall inventory structure.

Multiple sizes for ad units in applications: You can now create ad units with multiple sizes in applications, allowing you to sell high-value custom sizes without compromising your ability to deliver standard banners or use ad networks.

Available in DFP Video:

Pausing / Archiving for Content & Sources: Content and Source will have new status: Archiving. Archiving a content source marks all of its content as archived. You can also mark video content as archived and this will persist until the user sets it back to the "video source setting"

DFP API Hangouts:
On September 18th at 11am PT join the DFP API Team and Ad-Juster in a hangout focused on how Ad-Juster integrates with the DFP API to make Publisher's lives easier. Ad-Juster, a company that helps ad operations teams automate the pulling of countless reports from multiple sources, will present a demonstration of their tool and also discuss how they integrate with the API.  Add questions before and during the live hangout and don't forget to add this event to your calendar. To ensure your computer is ready please follow the instructions prior to the event. Thanks, and see you there!

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

Doubling down on mobile in DoubleClick for Publishers

66% of the population accesses the Internet every day on their smartphone (source: Google and Ipsos Our Mobile Planet: Understanding the Mobile Consumer, May 2012), and never leaves home without their device(s).

The prevalence of mobile devices enables users to constantly connect to a publisher’s content, whether on-the-go, at work, or on the couch at home.

For a publisher’s advertising business, this means display advertising has needed to evolve from purely ads in web browsers, to ads across all screens and devices. You have to help advertisers connect with your audience in whatever setting and on whatever screen they're consuming your content.

At the heart of DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), we've built a single platform that enables publishers to seamlessly manage all of their digital advertising under one roof. In the most recent release of DFP, we’re excited to bring even more DFP desktop features to mobile so that trafficking a campaign to your website is no different to trafficking a campaign to your mobile site and application. New features include:

• Frequency capping: You can now enforce frequency caps on mobile web sites and in mobile applications. Frequency caps can be applied to mobile campaigns and to mobile ad units, allowing you fine-grained control over the advertiser and user experience.


• Suggested ad units: You can now create mobile ad units by approving suggestions generated from actual traffic. This saves you time by automatically creating ad units in advance, while still maintaining control over your overall inventory structure.


• Multiple sizes for ad units in applications: You can now create ad units with multiple sizes in applications, allowing you to sell high-value custom sizes without compromising your ability to deliver standard banners or use ad networks.


• Data transfer for mobile: If you are using the data transfer beta, you will now have access to mobile-specific reporting data, including device, carrier and OS information.

In addition to bringing the best-in-class desktop functionality of DFP to mobile, we recognize that mobile is indeed different, and presents publishers with unique advertising opportunities not found on desktop. To help publishers capitalize on new opportunities and the uniqueness of mobile, we’ve recently released the following mobile functionality:

• SDK mediation: You can now connect with major in-app advertising networks, including iAd, via the networks’ own SDKs. You can choose which SDKs to include in your application with our adapter-based approach, minimising application size and giving you control over updates. You also have the option to serve ads from a sequence of ad networks to maximize fill rates and improve RPMs.


• App events: You can now provide a custom advertising experience by extending the Google AdMob SDK. Creatives can pass messages to the application, allowing the application to respond (for example, to change the background color). This enables truly integrated ad formats while still using the SDK to do the heavy lifting.


• Support for pre-loading ads: You can now pre-load ads from DFP Mobile. This enables you to improve the user experience, whether to mitigate the effect of slow mobile connections, or to match the smooth user experience of the rest of your application.

With DFP, we’re committed to giving publishers the tools they need to seamlessly manage and deliver all of their digital advertising in order to take full advantage of the multi-screen world. 

Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

Our engineers have been hard at work during the last few weeks to provide you with some new, exciting features in DFP. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.


Available in DFP:

Teams: Imagine that your organization operates an East and West coast sales team, and you'd like to restrict access to your East coast orders and advertisers so only users on your East coast team can view and edit the campaigns. With the new Teams functionality in DFP, you can now group your network's users into teams, defined by you, enabling you to restrict access to any combination of companies, orders and inventory. Learn more.

Auto-Macro Insertion for Creative Templates: The key to successfully serving third-party creatives and minimizing discrepancies is to make sure that you are properly inserting macros into the third-party code. A macro is a short piece of code provided by DFP that will enable your third-party tags to properly track clicks or track impressions.  In addition to automatically inserting macros for reconginzed third-party creatives, DFP will now also recognize and insert macros for  third-party code in custom creatives and custom creative templates. This provides you with the same macro-insertion support and efficiencies you are used to when trafficking regular 3rd party creatives.

Ad Exclusions: There are situations when you will want to avoid an advertiser running on a competitor's website. For example, if you've got a news story about a plane crash, you probably don't want to run airline ads next to it. Ad Exclusions provide controls to prevent labelled line items to deliver on specific inventory. These labels can additionally be added per default on company level to ensure a smoother workflow for your trafficking operations.


Creative Upload for Standalone Creative Library: The recently launched Standalone Creative Library now supports the ability to upload creatives and creatives sets directly, which can be stored for later use.

Local Time Zone Trafficking: In addition to being able to change the role and language you use DFP in, you can now change a DFP user's time zone to match the user's location. When you do, the displayed times throughout the trafficking sections of DFP will be adjusted to match the time in the location you've set for the user.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Additional Reporting Scheduling options: We’ve added further  granularity to reporting scheduling options to give you more insights into the health of your inventory. You can now schedule your reports with additional breakdowns such as year-to-date, quarter-to-date, month-to-date, and lifetime.

SDK Mediation for Mobile: SDK Mediation is a form of ad network optimization for mobile in DFP which allows you to set up a waterfall (or daisy chain) of networks, where one network after another is called until an impression is filled. Use this new feature to send impressions from mobile applications to ad networks via the ad networks' own SDKs.This is useful when:

• An ad network only accepts requests from its own SDK


• Certain custom formats are only available in the ad network's SDK


• Information provided by the SDK, such as location information or a unique user ID, enables higher CPMs

Available in DFP Mobile:

Frequency Capping: Frequency capping is now available for mobile in two ways:

• Line item frequency capping: For mobile web, this uses cookies in a similar fashion as desktop (the DoubleClick cookie where possible; otherwise the DFP first party cookie). For mobile applications, this uses a double-anonymised identifier generated by the Google AdMob SDK.


• Ad unit frequency capping: Ad unit frequency capping now works for mobile in cases where there is an identifier available.

Available in DFP Video:

• Fallback Image for VAST Non-linear ads: It’s now possible to display a fallback image when VAST non-linear ads fail to render.


• VPAID Creative Validation: DFP will validate hosted linear and non-linear VPAID creatives and notify the user if it's invalid.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). The list below contains some highlights. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.




Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:




Inline Editing for Line Items and Creatives: We’re constantly innovating to bring simplicity and time saving processes to DFP. To help speed up the editing process of line items and creatives, you can now update several parameters of your line items and creatives from the Order Overview page rather than clicking into, and editing each item separately.



Standalone Creative Library: To get your work done more efficiently, we’ve designed the new link “Creatives” on the Orders-Tab. This location gives you access to all creatives uploaded to your network where you can review them by name, advertiser, type and size. When clicking into a creative, you have access to the complete creative object and its assignments, which allows you to make changes without first having to open a respective campaign. We think you’ll notice that this is one more way we’re helping to speed up workflow.



Available in DFP Mobile:




Tagging Upgrade: Many of you have asked for this and now mobile Google Publisher Tags (GPT) have been upgraded to support additional features you’re familiar with from desktop tags such as asynchronous rendering.




Available in DFP Video:




Merge/Removal of Duplicate Videos: To further help with efficiency, DFP now has the functionality to merge or remove duplicate videos. This is particularly useful when using more than one CMS to upload videos into DFP, which often leads to duplicates showing up.




Content Filtering: To help with the organization of your uploaded videos, you can now view them by using the following filters in the Content-Tab: name, source, source name or content ID. This feature also lets you narrow down your results by allowing you to combine filter criteria as well.




UI Enhancement for Displaying Video Content: To provide you with even more controls and insights on your video content, additional information has been added to the Video Content Overview page such as video preview capability, import date and targeting criteria.




Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

New industry metrics to help publishers chart their growth plan

As the display industry evolves, we're collectively discovering and analyzing trends that point towards promising opportunities and paths to growth. This is the year where we’re doubling down on publishers, giving you the tools you need to make the most from today’s digital media landscape. One of the ways we’re helping publishers navigate their way to success is by providing new sources of industry knowledge and benchmark data. So today we’re introducing a new report, “Display Business Trends: Publisher Edition”.

The Publisher Edition will be the first in a series of publications looking at aggregated global data from across our display advertising solutions. We’re doing this to generate metrics that will answer a few of of the most common questions we hear from our partners, and put some data behind long-held industry assumptions. For example:

• Is the banner really dead? If you mean the 468x60 banner, then it might be time to hold a wake. This ad size dropped down to 3% of all impressions. Brand-friendly “premium” units are gaining share and we’re seeing that smaller ad units are dropping in popularity. However nearly 80% of all impressions are the ad unit “three musketeers”: the medium rectangle, leaderboard, and skyscraper still comprise the vast majority of ads served.


• What types of sites are showing strong impression growth?  In 2011, we found that Shopping, Sports, and Auto & Vehicle sites were some of  the fastest year-on-year growth verticals on the Ad Exchange and AdSense. We saw impressive figures across the board, with 15 out of 25 publisher verticals displaying double-digit growth.


• Are your sell-through rates getting a 17% holiday bonus? Anecdotally we’ve heard that publishers’ sell-through rates increase at the end of the year, thanks to higher advertiser holiday spending. We’re now able to quantify this end-of-year shift, and we found that the global publisher sell-through rate increases from 36% to 42% in the fourth quarter. Comparing the regions in 2011, European publishers experienced the greatest sell-through boost, increasing to 47%.


• How fast is the growth in mobile and video? Growth in mobile usage has exploded, with mobile web impressions on the Ad Exchange and AdSense platforms increasing by 250% from the third to fourth quarter in 2011. Over the same period, video ad impressions increased nearly 70% across the DFP Video platform.

• Where in the world are you? All over, as it turns out. Of a possible estimated 245 different countries and territories, we saw publisher ad impressions from 235 of them. These included the island country of Palau - one of the world’s newest sovereign states - and the middle-African nation of Equatorial Guinea, with astounding growth rates of 1106% and 4635% respectively. And while the United States still accounts for the highest percentage of impressions overall, we’re seeing a significant representation from China and Japan, coming in at 11% and 6% respectively.

These metrics are a beginning: they give a snapshot of what’s happening in an ever-changing industry. We hope this sparks conversations across the marketplace about the trends driving these metrics, and how publishers can best capitalize on them to grow their businesses bigger, faster.


For our part, we’ll be continuing the conversation at DoubleClick Insights on June 5th, where we’ll be live-streaming our discussion on the future of buying and selling ads online. We hope you’ll join us there!

Posted by Jonathan Bellack, Director of Product Management, Display Advertising.

Answering to our users - delivering on commitments

Last year at IAB’s Innovation Days, I made a number of predictions, all focused on answering one central question: how can we put the user at the center of all that we do? One year later, I think it’s time for a progress report - to hold ourselves accountable and see how far we’ve come. I presented an update on some of my predictions earlier today at Digital Media Summit, hosted by Luma Partners:



Prediction: People will have a direct say in 25% of the ads they see:

Update: We’ve seen choice friendly formats take off across the industry. In our own network, engaged views of TrueView skippable ads grew 4x last year. Going beyond ads, we rolled out paywall alternative Google Consumer Surveys, which has already shown more than 300 million surveys, with an average publisher RPM of $12. Given all the innovation, I actually think we aimed too low and that consumers will have a say in well over half of the ads they see.



Prediction: Engagement rates across all display ads will increase 50%

Update: This increase in engagement will be driven by two factors: relevance and creativity. While technological innovations continue to improve relevance, we believe rich media will be the key to unlocking the creative potential of digital advertising. According to Nielsen AdRelevance, rich media impressions almost doubled in 2011. We’re committed to helping creative agencies scale and optimize rich media ads with templatized ad units in the latest version of DoubleClick Studio.



Prediction: 35% of campaigns will use metrics beyond clicks and conversions

Update: As we move to a model that seeks to drive engagement versus just clicks, we need new measures of success. We’re working with the industry-wide “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3MS) initiative to establish new standards for brand advertisers to measure reach and engagement. And just last month, we launched the Brand Activate Initiative with several pilots for new metrics — Active View, which shows brands whether their ad has been seen; and Active GRP, the digital counterpart to the gross rating point. We’ve already received interest from dozens of major brands.



As an industry, we’ve made plenty of progress over the last year. With all the innovations to do right by our user, I actually have two new predictions I’d like to add to the list.



New Prediction: 25% of brands will favor digital ads over all other media

This is a pretty bold prediction, considering today this number is probably close to none. So why are we so bullish? First, audiences continue to move online: in 2011, households with broadband internet but with no cable TV, increased 23% (Nielsen Cross-Platform Report Q3’11). Second, so is content: the newly launched YouTube Original Channels alone will introduce 25 new hours of original programming a day. Third, technology is offering new levels of control and measurement: technologies like real-time bidding will allow for improved targeting while initiatives like 3MS and Brand Activate will demonstrate effectiveness. With reach, control, quality content and measurement, I think the real question will become, why wouldn’t a brand name digital their favorite medium?



New Prediction: 100% of campaigns will be integrated everywhere

All signs indicate that campaigns that reach across screens - TV, desktops, smartphones and tablets -- are more effective. For example, in a study conducted by Google and Nielsen Multi-Media Labs in September 2011, users who saw a multi-screen Volvo campaign had a 24% higher brand recall than those that viewed their ads on TV alone. We’re increasingly seeing increased interest in buying across screens on our own platforms, like DoubleClick for Publishers Mobile, where we’ve seen the number of impressions delivered double every quarter.



The online advertising ecosystem is complex, and in order for digital advertising to be a medium that provides a great experience for consumers, marketers and publishers alike, we all need to work together. For our part, we’ve invested in hundreds of partnerships to better support publishers, and advertisers, ultimately serve our users. Happier consumers will drive better performing ads, more money for publishers and increased ad spend (including marketing budget) for agencies. I look forward to seeing the continued innovation that this “user revolution” inspires and working with all of you to move towards the bright future I hope we all envision for this industry.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). The list below contains some highlights. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.




Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:




Improved Custom Targeting Input: We've designed DFP so there are fewer steps, clicks, and screens throughout the trafficking process to help you reduce the time it takes to traffick your campaigns. To help you streamline your workflows even further, you can now select custom targeting criteria when trafficking a campaign with a single key-stroke to help you quickly select and search for the right targeting criteria.



Additional Reporting Combinations: To help you generate precisely the data you're looking for, we've introduced additional reporting combinations to give you a more granular look at your data. A sample of the new combinations available include:

• Ad Unit x Line item x Creative/size x Country x Custom Targeting 


• Ad Unit x Line item x Creative/size x Country 


• Ad Unit x Line item x Creative/size x Metro 


• Placement x Line Item x Creative 


• Ad unit x Line Item x Creative/size x Hour

Available in DFP Mobile:




MRAID Support: Our latest mobile SDK for DFP and AdMob was launched to fully support the IAB's Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions (MRAID). For publishers who use DFP to deliver ads to mobile applications, the new Google AdMob SDK gives your advertisers the flexibility to provide creatives that work seamlessly across any application, regardless of the device, platform, or ad technology involved. Learn more.




Available in DFP Video:




Stream Based Frequency Caps: To help give you more delivery options when working with you video advertisers, we've introduced stream-based frequency caps to help control how often an ad appears in the same stream. Learn more.




VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0, and VMAP 1.0 Support: At Google, we've been longtime supporters of video advertising standards. We're happy to announce our support for the latest set of guidelines announced at the IAB's Digital Video Marketplace Event. This means that we'll be implementing VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0 and VMAP 1.0 across our video advertising products. Together, these three guidelines strengthen the video advertising infrastructure already adopted by most participants in the video ecosystem. The Video Suite also adds support for skippable ads, podding, in-ads privacy notices and ad sequencing, while offering greater clarity around compliance and mobile scenarios. Learn more.




Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

MRAID support in DFP: Simplifying in-app rich media on mobile

As part of today’s release of the Google AdMob SDK, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and AdMob now fully support the IAB’s Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions (MRAID) standard for advertising in mobile applications.



MRAID is an initiative from the IAB to define a common API for mobile rich media advertisements, in order to help the mobile marketplace reach new levels of consistency, efficiency and effectiveness. Adopting a common standard for rich media in applications will make building rich media ads simpler and enable advertisers to reach a wider audience with a single creative.




For publishers who use DFP to deliver ads to mobile applications, the new Google AdMob SDK gives your advertisers the flexibility to provide creatives that work seamlessly across any application, regardless of the device, platform, or ad technology involved. Using an MRAID-compliant SDK also enables publishers to:

• Work with a greater range of vendors to produce rich media campaigns 


• Reduce integration and maintenance costs by removing vendor-specific SDKs 


• Develop differentiated ad formats against a stable, vendor-neutral platform 


• Attract large scale advertisers building high value, high reach campaigns 


• Use HTML5 creatives across mobile web and mobile apps

We look forward to actively participating in the future development of MRAID. We believe it will have a significant impact on the mobile advertising industry by lowering costs, increasing scale and providing the foundation for a mature mobile display ecosystem.




Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

A Universal Language for Video Ads

Like many New Yorkers, I can’t imagine life in this city without the subway - it’s essential to how the city operates, creates millions in economic value, and even features great mariachi bands. But the subway wasn’t always this efficient. In the early 1900s, there were multiple subway systems, with different size train cars, running on different track configurations - even one propelled by air! Today, after the unification of these subway systems, everything works seamlessly together.

So what does the subway system have to do with video advertising? Well, the two dominant video advertising guidelines -- VAST and VPAID -- are like the unified transportation system for video advertising. VAST and VPAID define a common language that unifies the diversity of the video advertising industry: Flash and HTML video players, ad networks and exchanges, mobile devices and connected TVs, 30 second spots and interactive overlays.

At Google, we’ve been longtime supporters of video advertising standards. We’re happy to announce our support for the latest set of guidelines announced at the IAB’s Digital Video Marketplace Event today. This means that we’ll be implementing VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0 and VMAP 1.0 across our video advertising products. Together, these three guidelines strengthen the video advertising infrastructure already adopted by most participants in the video ecosystem. The Video Suite also adds support for skippable ads, podding, in-ads privacy notices and ad sequencing, while offering greater clarity around compliance and mobile scenarios.

What benefits can you expect from VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0 and VMAP 1.0? 

• If you’re a publisher, interoperability will improve and you’ll be able to accept a wider set of video ad formats with less technical work. The new error codes will also help with troubleshooting of third party served ads.


• If you’re an advertiser, the Video Suite allows you to create more engaging brand stories that reach a wider audience across all devices. You’ll be able to take greater advantage of skippable ads, which offer new pricing models focused on performance.


• If you’re a vendor, the technical details of these specs really matter, and we’ve provided much more clarity around the compliance requirements for video players and ad servers.

So much has changed in the online video space in just ten years, that we thought we’d take a trip down memory line with this infographic:

Click through for the full infographic

As an industry, we’ve started to take VAST and VPAID for granted, much like New Yorkers and their subway system. That’s a good thing, because it means they’ve become an essential part of powering our economy.



Posted by Payam Shodjai, Product Manager, Video Monetization

What's new in DoubleClick for Publishers

Spring is here and so are a couple of new features in DFP! For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

• Integrated Change History: To help you keep a closer eye on your ad operations, we’ve integrated our change history feature into the orders page in addition to its home in the Admin tab. The change history can help you quickly identify and review all changes made to your orders and line items, including: what has changed (e.g., line item), what change occurred (e.g., from "Paused" to "Ready"), who made the change, and the date and time the change was made.


• Creative Preview Links: “What will my creative look like on your site?” You've told us that this is one of the most common requests that you hear from advertisers. With our creative preview tool, you’ve been able to create an internal test page for QA purposes, and send screenshots to advertisers to see how their ad would appear, but advertisers could not interact with their creative on your site unitl it went live. We’ve changed that with the release of external creative preview links. You can now send your advertisers a link to a test page that displays their creative on your site so they can easily preview and interact with their creative on your site before it’s live.


• Bulk Creative Upload: We’ve designed DFP so there are less steps, clicks, and screens throughout the trafficking process to help you save time when trafficking your campaigns. In efforts to help you streamline your workflows even further, we’ve introduced the ability to bulk upload multiple creatives. With this tool, you can easily drag and drop multiple image, Flash, or text creatives from your desktop directly into your line item with a single gesture rather than uploading multiple individual creatives, helping you save time and minimizing clicks.

Available in DFP:

• DFP Optimization: Publishers can now supercharge ad performance with DFP Optimization - an advanced optimization system that supercharges ad performance to help publishers increase the value of their premium inventory, and boost yield for non-premium inventory. DFP Optimization leverages Google’s infrastructure and processing capabilities to automatically deliver the best ad, to the best user, at the best time. Read more.

• First-party audience segmentation: Publishers are increasingly taking control of their audience data as one of the key assets of their digital businesses. To help you manage and control this data, we’ve introduced the ability to define and manage audience segments directly in DFP to help you increase the value of their inventory while gaining insights on how different audience segments engage with your content. Read more.

Available in DFP Mobile:

• Click-To-[Action] Creative: As mobile advertising becomes a greater emphasis for your advertisers, it’s important to recognize that their campaign objectives may differ from their web-based campaigns. On mobile, advertisers may define success as driving downloads of a mobile application, calling a telephone number, or opening a map versus visiting a website. To provide your advertisers with uniquely mobile experiences, we’ve released a new mobile creative type that enables you to specify an action (ie. download) as the destination. This new creative type will help you differentiate your mobile offering and provide your advertisers with the latest mobile formats and functionality.

Available in DFP Video:

• VPAID Linear SWF Creatives: Creative agencies are building more VPAID compliant video ads than ever before. DFP Video now supports the VPAID standard as defined by the IAB, allowing you to accept more video ad campaigns without needing extra technical development. VPAID introduces a common language between ad servers and video players for handling interactive video ads for Flash and HTML5 environments.

 Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

First-Party audience segments in the upgraded DFP service

Buying and selling ads based on audience has transformed the display industry in recent years. Buyers use new technologies to run highly relevant campaigns to users across ad networks and exchanges. This benefits publishers greatly, because it allows them to deliver more useful ads to their users ultimately helping increase RPMs on their indirectly sold inventory.



Publishers are increasingly taking control of their audience data as one of the key assets of their digital businesses. But publishers tell us they still want better tools to improve the integration, transparency, and control over their own audience data for both direct and indirect ad sales.



Today we’re announcing the first in a series of features in the upgraded DFP service that help publishers manage and control audience data through one platform, integrated directly with their primary ad serving technology.



This first release is focused on first-party segments - as a publisher, you will have the ability to define your own user audience based on criteria that you define (e.g., sports enthusiasts, travel readers). First party audience segmentation was available in the existing DFP service, and is now integrated seamlessly with the upgraded DFP service.



First-party segmentation involves no implementation or integration effort by you. Simply define the criteria you want for your audience segments, in DFP and DoubleClick technology does the work of populating them directly from the ad tag. Once you’ve defined your audience you can use it to increase the direct sales value of undersold inventory, and gain insights on how different audience segments are engaging with content across your site. We have designed it to be seamless, easy to use and to put you in control of your data.



First party segmentation is a great tool for our publishers, but it’s just the first step in the work of building out DFP’s audience capabilities. In the coming months you’ll see more information from us as we release a series of new features that are directly integrated with the upgraded DFP service.



Posted by Sean Harvey, Product Manager

Supercharge ad performance with DFP Optimization

When advertisers are evaluating whether to advertise on a publisher’s site, they want to ensure their ad will perform well. Advertisers decide whether to keep buying on your site or a competitors’ based on if their campaigns are reaching the most valuable audience and meeting their campaign goals.




As a publisher, ensuring your advertiser's campaigns are receiving the impressions, clicks, and conversions they expect can be a daunting task. Ad operation teams spend hours at the controls of their ad server adjusting delivery settings, flight dates, and targeting, in effort to help their advertiser’s campaigns perform well. But solving this equation manually for hundreds or thousands of campaigns at once is virtually impossible to do.




The answer may lie in technology....and we think we can help.




Today, we’re excited to introduce DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Optimization, an advanced optimization system that supercharges ad performance to help publishers increases the value of their premium inventory, and boost yield for non-premium inventory.




DFP Optimization leverages Google’s infrastructure and processing capabilities to automatically deliver the best ad, to the best user, at the best time. The system uses advanced modeling and pattern recognition, and harnesses the power of AdWords machine learning and AdSense contextual matching, to deliver ads to users who are more likely to respond to them. DFP Optimization helps advertisers improve campaign performance, while helping publishers maximize clicks, conversions, and revenue.




Heise Online, one of Germany’s leading IT publishers, saw clicks on their optimized campaigns increase by 52% using DFP Optimization. This increase helped their sales teams improve the site stats they share with prospective clients, and were able to charge new premiums for its highly valuable inventory. Thomas Goldmann, Sales Director at Heise Online said “DFP Optimization has had a positive influence on our sales relationships with advertisers. Optimization allows better use of our premium inventory and increases the quality we can make available to our customers.”




DFP Optimization is fully integrated with the DFP ad serving platform, and can be easily implemented across all of a publisher’s inventory. After activating DFP Optimization, the system will continually learn, process, and adapt; this happens all without any manual intervention from your ad operations team. The system provides validation for publishers and their clients through a built-in control group that demonstrates the percentage lift for each optimized campaign. With this powerful reporting tool, you and your clients will know the solution is working.




To learn how you can begin increase the value of your inventory with DFP Optimization, please contact us.




Posted by Alex Vogenthaler, Product Manager