Announcing New DoubleClick Ad Exchange Features: Improved Ad Review Center and Publisher Toolbar

We have been listening to your feedback on Ad Exchange ad controls and we’re excited to announce some new enhancements to save you time and give you even more control to manage which ads run on your site.



New controls in the Ad Review Center

The new Ad Review Center gives you complete transparency into the ads showing on your site. Ad Review Center now shows you ads of all targeting types that have appeared on your pages including real time bidding ads (RTB) and enables you to review and take action on them.



New features and benefits of Ad Review Center include:

• More ad targeting types: You can now easily review and take action on ads of all targeting types -- contextually-targeted, placement-targeted, interest-based, and Real Time Bidded ads.


• Ads ranked by impressions: To ensure that you’re always reviewing the most important ads first, we now show ads ranked by the number of impressions that they’ve received. With ads that you’re holding for review, we show the ads according to the number of impressions that we project they will receive.


• Take action on individual or bulk ads: You can now easily block ads individually or in bulk by simply clicking on an ad or highlighting multiple ads at once.


• Pre-approve and block AdWords accounts: For clarity, we've changed the term "advertiser" to "AdWords account." You’ll find your lists of pre-approved and blocked AdWords accounts on the Settings tab.


• Renamed tabs: We’ve updated the names of the tabs to more clearly explain their purpose.

This version of the Ad Review Center uses graphic technology that is too intensive for older browsers. If you use IE7 and are unable to upgrade, consider installing Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that enables older versions of IE to correctly render all the newest features in Ad Exchange.

If you’ve used the Ad Review Center in the past, the new version is live in your account now. If you haven’t yet enabled this feature, visit the Allow & Block ads tab to get started.



New Publisher Toolbar

The new Google Publisher Toolbar, a Chrome extension, makes it easy to manage your ads without visiting the Ad Review Center. It displays a variety of information about your Ad Exchange and Google AdSense ads, including alert bar notifications, details about current impressions, revenue stats, ad slots, buyers, and creatives on any site where your ad tags are running when you use a Chrome browser. Publishers can also easily block ads in real-time and report any issues to Google right from within the toolbar.



To learn more about Ad Review Center and Google Toolbar, register for one of the webinars on June 14th or contact your Ad Exchange account representative.



Ad Review Center & Google Toolbar US Webinar

Thursday, June 14th at 11am PDT (1pm CST, 2pm EDT)

Register HERE



Ad Review Center & Google Toolbar EMEA Webinar

Thursday, June 14th at 3pm GMT (7am PST, 10am EDT)

Register HERE



Posted by Dan Stokeley, AdSense Product Manager and Drew Bradstock, Ad Exchange Publisher Product Manager

Third-party audience segments now available in the new DoubleClick for Publishers Platform (DFP)

Last week at DoubleClick Insights, we made a number of announcements across our suite of products, all with a common goal: to re-imagine how ads are bought and sold online. One of these announcements, which we believe help our publisher partners grow their businesses, is the ability for publishers to integrate their third-party audience segments in the new DoubleClick for Publishers platform (DFP).



This is the latest feature in our series of enhancements which puts publishers in control of audience management within the new DFP. This feature enables you to seamlessly work with a data provider with whom you have a relationship, directly in your DFP account. Third-party segments in the new DFP mirror the way they worked on the legacy DFP service, but have an improved billing integration. Billing for the data providers’ charges that you agree on can be integrated directly into your DFP invoice.



Third-party segments are fully integrated into your core ad serving workflow. Once you approve the segments in the DFP interface at the provided CPM cost, they are available as if they were your own segments.



This new feature allows you to forecast, traffic & report more easily; you can also augment your inventory offerings via DoubleClick Sales Manager.



There’s no implementation work, no additional third party pixels and no added latency.



We believe this will all make publishers’ life easier, enable better integration with your sales management tools, make your inventory more attractive, give you more control and give you additional flexibility and opportunities to maximize your revenues.



In the coming months you’ll see more announcements from us as we continue to release new features to help you use data more effectively in the new DFP.




Posted by Sean Harvey, Product Manager and Alok Sheth, Software Engineer

Connecting shoppers and great stores online

(Cross posted to the Official Google Blog)



Online shopping is great for many reasons, but most of all it’s a convenient and fast way to turn your intent to buy that new pair of running shoes, for example, into an actual purchase. But shoppers tell us they’re often nervous about buying from online stores they don’t know. We created the free Google Trusted Stores program to help solve this problem. When shoppers see the Google Trusted Store badge, they know in a snap they’re shopping with a reputable retailer and they can feel confident making an informed purchase.


We’ve been testing the program since last fall with about 50 online merchants and more than 10 million orders. It’s working even better than we hoped, generating positive feedback from shoppers and increasing sales for merchants. Starting today, Google Trusted Stores is open to all U.S. merchants who want to apply. 

Helping shoppers choose stores they can trust

When shopping online, you may come across the Google Trusted Store badge. Hover over it and you’ll see a “report card” which shows “grades” for that merchant’s shipping and service, including more precise metrics about what the grades mean. 

The Google Trusted Store badge and report card

This badge is only awarded to online stores that deliver a great overall experience, so even if you haven’t shopped with this merchant before, you can easily tell if they are trustworthy, ship quickly and reliably, and offer exceptional customer service. If there’s a problem with your purchase, we’re here to help. When you buy from a Google Trusted Store, you can opt in to get up to $1,000 lifetime purchase protection per shopper. And our dedicated customer service team is there to work with you and the merchant to assist in resolving the issue.

Helping merchants demonstrate their excellence and earn new business
Google Trusted Stores helps online stores attract new customers, increase sales and differentiate themselves by showing off their excellent service via the badge on their websites. Soon the badge will also appear on Google.com ads and in Google Shopping results.

Google Trusted Store badge on AdWords

Over the last nine months of the pilot, our tests show that participating in this program can help merchants big and small. For example, Wayfair, the largest online-only retailer of home goods and one of the top 50 largest online retailers as ranked by Internet Retailer, increased sales* on its site by 2.3 percent with Google Trusted Stores. And Beau-coup, a specialty online favors and gifts retailer, saw an 8.6 percent increase*. Take a look at our merchant success stories to learn more about how Google Trusted Stores has had a positive impact on website conversion rates and average order sizes for online retailers. 

Google Trusted Stores is entirely free, both for shoppers and for online stores. We’re still testing the most helpful ways to display Trusted Stores information to shoppers, so you may see different versions, or none at all, while we conduct experiments. If you’re a merchant and would like to participate in the Google Trusted Stores program, please apply. 

Posted by Tom Fallows, Group Product Manager, Google Shopping



*Increased sales percentages are based on a combination of uplift in conversion and average order size.

Mac

Attend a DFA Training in June

School is out for the kids but for us in online advertising, there is plenty of classroom time to be had this month for DFA users. Visit the DFA Help Center to register for any webinars as well as our classroom offerings.

Classroom Training

DFA Fundamentals: This full-day course (10am-5pm) is for new DFA users looking to understand the fundamentals of third-party ad serving including best practices for campaign trafficking, serving ads and pulling reports.

• Chicago - June 20
• San Francisco - June 21
• Los Angeles - June 25

DFA Trafficking Lab: Get more practice trafficking campaigns. These sessions cover the basics such as assigning landing pages to creatives, updating campaigns, setting up geo-targeting and using creative rotation.

Class Prerequisite: Attendees should have taken the DFA Fundamentals class in the previous two months or have less than two months trafficking experience.

• Chicago - June 21
• San Francisco - June 22
• Los Angeles - June 26

Webinar Training

DFA for New Users - June 20
Learn the fundamentals of trafficking in DFA from creating an Advertiser through exporting Tags.

MediaVisor Fundamentals - June 19
This webinar covers the most common uses of MediaVisor including set-up, sending RFPs and IOs, and trafficking.

Be sure to check back with us on this blog for next month's training schedule. We look forward to seeing you in class.

Posted by Amanda Gangl, DFA Product Trainer

A new (and improved) look for the DoubleClick site

Last week, you heard from Neal Mohan at DoubleClick Insights talk about how the digital ad ecosystem is rapidly evolving.




To help digital marketers keep up with the latest insights and updates from DoubleClick, we've given the DoubleClick website a refresh. We've reorganized the site to do a better job of surfacing the latest DoubleClick news and added a dash of visual style in the process.

What else changed with the new design?




Improved discoverability: 

In addition to becoming a destination to discover the latest news and insights from DoubleClick, the site is gateway for you to explore and learn about DoubleClick’s digital technology solutions. We’ve reorganized the site to make it easier for you to discover and learn about the solutions that best meet your business objectives.




Cleaner design: 

As part of a Google-wide effort to bring you an experience that’s more focused, elastic, and effortless across all of our products and websites, the new site underwent a thorough usability review to help strip out unnecessary clutter in order to make finding the information you’re looking for as easy as possible.




Multi-screen site for a multi-screen world:

We know first hand that users browse the web across multiple-screens and devices. The new site offers a consistent and seamless experience whether you’re visiting from your desktop, mobile, or tablet device.




We hope you like the new site and find it useful, and invite you to have a look around.




Posted by Stephen Kliff, Product Marketing Manager and Manoja Wijewardene, Webmaster

A new (and improved) look for the DoubleClick site

Last week, you heard from Neal Mohan at DoubleClick Insights talk about how the digital ad ecosystem is rapidly evolving.




To help digital marketers keep up with the latest insights and updates from DoubleClick, we've given the DoubleClick website a refresh. We've reorganized the site to do a better job of surfacing the latest DoubleClick news and added a dash of visual style in the process.

What else changed with the new design?




Improved discoverability: 

In addition to becoming a destination to discover the latest news and insights from DoubleClick, the site is gateway for you to explore and learn about DoubleClick’s digital technology solutions. We’ve reorganized the site to make it easier for you to discover and learn about the solutions that best meet your business objectives.




Cleaner design: 

As part of a Google-wide effort to bring you an experience that’s more focused, elastic, and effortless across all of our products and websites, the new site underwent a thorough usability review to help strip out unnecessary clutter in order to make finding the information you’re looking for as easy as possible.




Multi-screen site for a multi-screen world:

We know first hand that users browse the web across multiple-screens and devices. The new site offers a consistent and seamless experience whether you’re visiting from your desktop, mobile, or tablet device.




We hope you like the new site and find it useful, and invite you to have a look around.




Posted by Stephen Kliff, Product Marketing Manager and Manoja Wijewardene, Webmaster