Constantly innovating: the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform

Earlier this summer we announced we were bringing together DoubleClick’s advertising technology products into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing (DDM) platform for advertisers and agencies.  



Over the coming months we’ll be giving you regular updates on this journey as we launch upgrades of the DoubleClick products, implement cross-product integrations, and deliver innovative, new features within the individual products.

We’ve had a busy summer, and are excited to share the following details:

• Platforms upgrades -  An important first step to delivering on the vision of DDM is upgrading the individual DoubleClick products to take advantage of Google’s technology. Today we’re highlighting the progress we’ve made upgrading two platforms: DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio.

DoubleClick Bid Manager -- Google acquired the Invite Media demand-side platform in 2010, and since then we have completely rebuilt the platform.  We announced during the summer that Bid Manager was going into beta and now, with a notable volume of traffic flowing through the system, we’ll be making this new version available to all customers in October.  Customers using the new Bid Manager to target, optimize, and buy display media have seen improved performance, including seeing 16% more inventory due to infrastructure improvements that reduce our latency with exchanges.

DoubleClick Studio version 2 -- We have also upgraded our rich media production tool, DoubleClick Studio, which facilitates a streamlined workflow between media and creative agencies for the web’s most engaging ad formats. Almost 80% of creative agencies using DoubleClick Studio have already transitioned to the new version, which delivers a faster and more responsive UI and integrated dynamic content capabilities.

Upgrading the individual platforms also gives us the opportunity to make sure that they work better together to unlock even more opportunities for our customers.

• Streamlining cross-product interactions:  When we asked leading agencies and advertisers how much time their staff could save by working in an integrated ad platform, they estimated they could save about a third of hours spent per week -- or about an extra month every year each team member could invest in other activities -- just by reducing manual processes and working in a single system.

With the DoubleClick Bid Manager upgrade and its integration with DDM, buyers can now access cross-channel opportunities that are only available through a unified system.  For example,  we’re excited to announce the ability for agencies and marketers using DoubleClick Search to show consumers display ads via DoubleClick Bid Manager based on their interactions with paid search ads. Marketers have struggled to coordinate their search and display marketing efforts, and this new integration makes it easier, with no new site tags and no new products to learn.  

Another subtle step toward cross-product interaction is the rollout this week of a new universal navigation bar and application switcher for users of DoubleClick Search, DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio. While a simple change, we believe this new UI will facilitate seamless switching between DoubleClick products, saving time for marketers who are using our platform to manage their campaigns across multiple channels.   

• Innovation across the platform:  In addition to integrating our platforms, we are continuing to invest in our existing products.  As an example of this, we’re excited to announce the launch later this month of Attribution Modeling in Multi-Channel Funnels in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

Advertisers use a variety of channels, messages and ads to engage customers. Determining which of these efforts is most effective in converting customers can be difficult (see related post here).  Attribution analysis can help identify what is driving customers, but until recently it’s only been practical for the most sophisticated advertisers.  By the end of September, we’re making attribution modeling available to anyone using DFA -- for free.

Some benefits of this approach include:

1. Ready to use data -- the attribution modeling data will live within DFA, so there’s no delay between when you want to run an analysis, and when you can actually start.


2. Flexible, customizable, transparent models -- you can take advantage of five standard attribution models in DFA, or build your own custom model tailored to the needs of your business


3. It’s free -- no need to build your own system for this kind of analysis. We’re giving it to you as part of DFA, with your data loaded and ready to go.

We're rapidly delivering on our vision for a fully integrated experience and common workflows across DoubleClick solutions -- from ad serving to buying and analytics.  We’re excited to be on this journey with our customers and believe that by delivering an integrated experience, we can help the industry truly unlock the full potential of digital marketing. Stay tuned for more updates, there’s a lot more to come!

Posted by: Jason Miller

India Site Clinic, Part 1

Thank you webmasters for your overwhelming response to the Google India Site Clinic initiative. The sites submitted covered 12 diverse categories, making this an excellent sample set for our analysis. As we analyzed the sites we were able to identify a few trends where we’d like to help Indian webmasters improve. So in this post we will address one of the most pressing concerns for a webmaster at this point in time: should a webmaster invest in a smartphone-optimized presence.

30% of the world’s smartphone users live in India and China (source)

India is one of the leading mobile markets worldwide. The nation has 919.2 million mobile subscribers as of March 2012 (TRAI, May 2012), which is 75% of the population. 65% of mobile subscribers are urban dwellers.

So why would your website benefit from having a mobile presence? Time for some colorful graphs and revealing statistics. The following statistics are derived from http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com. Surveys were conducted over 2 phases (March - July 2011 and January - March 2012) and 1000 sample users (across all age groups and gender) were surveyed for each of the phases.

78% of smartphone users visit a search engine on a daily basis.

Source: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/

Now let’s have a look at how the smartphone user spends his time on the Internet.

Source: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/ 

The graph indicates that 32% of surveyed users used online/mobile shopping coupons, 56% of them downloaded content, and at least 40% of them collectively spent time searching for restaurants/pubs, jobs, travel/holidays or reading news and magazines. Every site submitted for review to our Site Clinic fits one or more of the activities above so for these sites, a smartphone-friendly website might provide advantages to its users.



Good Mobile User Experience



For example, when a friend recommends a website he liked, your first reaction might be to check it on your smartphone as it may be some time before you get access to a desktop or laptop. If you aren’t able to read the content on the site or if the site doesn’t render properly on your mobile, you may be disappointed and might even forget about checking the site later on. Hence, a good user experience on mobile is very important.

Here is an example of the difference a mobile site can make:

Example site: www.caclubindia.com

These are a few simple things that have changed in the mobile version of the site:

1. Text is legible without zooming or panning


2. Links and buttons can be easily tapped with a thumb


3. Search functionality is accessible through use of a button

Is your site mobile-friendly?
To check how your site renders on a mobile phone you can simply check on your phone and see how your site looks. For a deeper analysis we recommend use of the GoMoMeter.

Now that you’ve had a look, let’s go through the steps to provide a great mobile experience to your users.

Building a smartphone optimized site

Google supports three configurations

1. 
   Sites can use responsive web design, i.e., sites serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google's recommended configuration.
   
   


2. 
   Sites can dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user-agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
   
   


3. 
   Sites can have separate mobile and desktop URLs.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

We recommend using responsive design because using a single URL makes it easier for your users to interact with, share and link to your content. It also helps Google's algorithms to assign indexing properties to the content. Redirection will not be needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. For detailed analysis of this and other approaches, please see our developers page for building smartphone-friendly sites.

We hope this post got you thinking about your site in the mobile space. Look forward to the next post in this site clinic series where we’ll address another interesting trend.



Posted by The Google Search Quality Team

Map of the Week: MOCA: Ends of the Earth

Map of the Week: MOCA: Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974

Why we like it: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) "Ends of the Earth” site a great example of using Google Maps as a conduit for connecting art with the real world. This map gives the viewer real world context for the artwork. We also like seeing a user interface that uses a full screen map and is designed to work as one with the map.



MOCA: Ends of the Earth was created as an at-home interactive experience for museum guests and the newest collection at the MOCA. The goal is to give users meaningful context using Google Map’s repository of global Satellite and Street View imagery. As described by MOCA, “Developed by MOCA for End of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, this interactive feature maps key artworks included in the exhibition, pinpointing their original locations to demonstrate the global nature of land art and its relations to real places and times.”

Aside from being a great way to learn about a piece of art that interests you, the site’s user interface creates a very pleasant experience for the user. You can also download a KML file and view the collection in Google Earth.

Perhaps one of the most nostalgic pieces of artwork in the collection is Charles and Ray Eames’ film Powers of Ten. Using this site you can visit the location where some of the film takes places and in an interactive ode to the film, you can recreate Powers of Ten anywhere you want by zooming in and out of Google Maps directly on the site.



Posted by Carlos Cuesta, Google Maps API Product Marketing Manager

Google and Forrester Present New Research on the Value of Combining Audience with Contextual Targeting

In the past 10 years the number and variety of new technologies in display advertising have more than doubled, effectively creating new - and better - ways to buy display across the web. With this influx of new display targeting technologies available to advertisers (contextual, remarketing, demographics, interest categories to name a few), our clients often wonder which targeting method performs better: audience or contextual advertising? We've said in the past that the combination of audience and contextual buying work better together, and now we have some new insight into how advertisers are thinking about these tools.



We worked with Forrester Consulting and surveyed 150 interactive marketers to evaluate their perceptions on the effectiveness of combining audience & contextual targeting with respect to display buying. The findings from the new whitepaper, Display Media Buyers Value Audience in Context, were presented during a special joint Learn With Google webinar featuring Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell and Google’s Woojin Kim. Register here to view the recording.



Key findings from the research include:

• 50% of respondents use a full range of targeting types including: Remarketing, Demographic, Behavioral and Contextual


• Contextual and behavioral targeting dominate: Used by the vast majority - 82% in the case of contextual, 71% in the case for behavioral


• 94% of marketers combine contextual & audience buying for higher performance and greater accuracy


• Audience targeting has become the norm in display buying: The majority of marketers surveyed are bullish on audience targeting, and few see it as overhyped.


• Most marketers plan on maintaining increasing spend on combined audience & contextual targeting.

Interested in learning more? Download the whitepaper on Think Insights with Google.


Posted by Katie Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager Google Display Network

Budget pacing insights arrive in DoubleClick Search

Our team has been focused on bringing you more tools for better measurement and actionable insights, right in the interface. Until now, marketers have been using labels in DoubleClick Search (DS) to easily organize and report on keyword performance by placing keywords into custom categories, regardless of which campaigns they live in.

Now in our latest release, we’ve added another layer of reporting flexibility with Budget Pacing Reports. These reports allow you to track performance against a budget in the DS UI. By visualizing week-over-week, day-over-day, or month-over-month trends, Budget Pacing Reports allow you to quickly identify campaigns that are under-spending or underperforming.





Tracking spend against a budget goal is a common need for many users. These reports save time for agencies that need to look at such data on a regular basis. Budget Pacing Reports provide:

• A rich language for entering KPI expectations with your budget target. Define your KPI goals, set expectations and constraints, and see if your campaigns are on track to deliver on them. For example:  I want CPA of $40.00 and I tolerate +-10% error.


• Data visualization for quick projections and insights. Given your entered specifications and expectations, easily visualize different date ranges to see trends and projections of intended outcomes to help you make the best decisions.


• A holistic view across campaigns. See how each campaign is contributing toward budget and KPI.

To learn more about Budget Pacing Reports, see our Help Center, or reach out to your Technical Account Manager for tips and best practices. You can also watch our training video below:








Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Get social, mobile, and 40+ new data points with the Google Analytics API

Google Analytics Core Reporting APIs enable a powerful and flexible way to analyze, report on, and ultimately optimize such things as web and mobile experiences, conversions, and sales.



Today we’re adding over 40 new metrics and dimensions that can be queried through the Core Reporting API. This enables developers to create reports that are similar to what is available in the Google Analytics web interface for important areas such as social and mobile. See a full list of additions on the Core Reporting API changelog.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new and a few helpful questions the data can answer.



Social Data

Now you can get data for both on-site interactions with social buttons as well as off-site social data from social data hub partner networks.

• Which content receives the most comments on social networks?


• What are the conversion rates for visits from social networks?


• For social buttons embedded in my property, which ones get used most often and for which content?

Mobile Devices

For mobile visits to your site, get all the good stuff like like brand, model, and input type.

• What are the top 10 mobile devices used to visit my website?

Geo

We added a new dimension to indicate the Designated Market Area (DMA) where traffic came from.

• What are the Top 10 Campaigns for the San Francisco Bay Area DMA?

Page Path Rollups

Create your own drill down reports with these new dimensions that allow you to roll-up metrics to hierarchical levels of your property.

• What does the performance of my website look like across different sections?

App & Exception Tracking

If you’re using the Google Analytics SDK for iOS/Android v2 beta, you can now retrieve App View and Exception metrics.

• On a daily basis, how many views did my mobile app get?


• On a daily basis, how many exceptions occurred in my mobile app, and how many exceptions were fatal? 

User Timings

New ways to report on all things related to user timing data.

• What were the time measurements for all user defined timings?

Related Resources:

• Dimensions & Metrics Reference for a list of all available metrics & dimensions. 


• Google Analytics Query Explorer to help you build queries and try out the Core Reporting API.


• Core Reporting API changelog for a list of the 40+ new dimensions & metrics.

Posted by Pete Frisella and Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API team

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