Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Cutting Complexity, Adding Value: Unified Ad Tech Efficiencies Could Save Marketers 33%

Wednesday, May 22, 2013 |
SPECIAL OFFER: On Tuesday, June 4th we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!


Digital marketing delivers powerful results for advertisers -- but running digital campaigns has become too complex. Google commissioned The Boston Consulting Group to better understand the potential to improve efficiency for marketers and create more value in digital campaigns.

Using “lean” methodology to map and measure the end-to-end process of 24 digital campaigns across 15 digital marketers in Europe, here’s a summary of what BCG found:


  • Campaign teams were spending on average only 1 day in 5 on ‘value-creation’ activities, with 80% of their time spent on low-value activities such as trafficking.
  • Using a unified ad technology stack (a combined solution from a single vendor) generates resource-productivity improvements on average of 12% and up to 33% across the campaign lifecycle.
  • Marketers realise further productivity gains by combining a single ad technology stack with wider organizational change -- which frees up talent for higher-value activities, such as strategy development, analysis and creativity.
  • These are still “early days,” and marketers achieved these gains with even an early version of the unified technology stack. Further gains are possible as technology continues to advance.
  • Increased efficiency means better performance. Marketers that re-invested efficiency gains into value-creating activities created an important competitive advantage in campaign performance.
  • It takes a pragmatic approach. Marketers should use a step-by-step lean approach to address pain points in processes, structure and technology.
  • It also takes an ecosystem. Advertisers, agencies, publishers and technology providers, working together, all have a role in cutting complexity and adding value to the overall industry.


We’re releasing the full report today.

The New Display Benchmarks Tool: Put Context Around Your Display Campaigns

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SPECIAL OFFER: On Tuesday, June 4th we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!



Imagine: you’ve built a beautiful digital marketing campaign and it’s finally live. You get your reports back with a list of data points and while the numbers seem good, it’s pretty hard to understand them without any reference points. That’s the crutch: data doesn’t take on meaning when it’s just floating around in the ether; you need to build context around your data and anchor it to other relevant data points to better understand what your own numbers mean. 

Industry benchmarks -- reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry -- give you these comparisons. And today, for the first time, we’re launching the Display Benchmarks Tool, an easy-to-use webpage that lets you pull benchmarks to help you make better decisions about your campaigns.  




Whether you're after comparisons by country, industry vertical, ad size or ad format, our tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions. Here’s a quick demo of how to pull the benchmarks. 

We've been playing around with the tool and identified some interesting trends around user engagement in our industry. Here's a bit of what we've seen:

Trend #1: User choice leads to more engagement: People want to choose how and when they consume content online. We’re starting to see new ad formats, such as the TrueView and Engagement formats, that let people choose whether to watch or skip an ad. Our benchmark data shows that people are increasingly choosing to interact with these ads. Video completion rates are the highest we’ve ever seen, with people completing 60% of the videos that they watch.  

Trend #2: Richer ads lead to more engagement: Longer interaction also stems from more beautiful and compelling ads, which advertisers are increasingly incorporating in their campaigns. Interactive video ads, such as this one from Cadillac, allow advertisers to layer information about their brands on top of their video commercials. Dual-channel ads, such as this Skyfall ad, let viewers turn their mobile phones and tablets into controllers that dictate what happens within the content on their desktop. These ads represent the new creative formats that are closing the gap between advertising and awesome content. And we’re seeing the results: since last summer, people are interacting with rich media ads ~50-60% more frequently and spending ~20% more time interacting. 




































Trend #3: Optimize your campaigns for engagement: Advertisers used to rely solely on click-through rates and reach/frequency reports to measure their campaigns. Now, these new rich media formats provide a better set of metrics, which help advertisers understand what’s best for users and optimize their campaigns. For example, from the benchmarks tool we’ve learned that interaction rates correlate strongly with larger ad area - the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. Similarly, we’ve learned that rich media expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for getting people to interact for longer amounts of time. These types of insights are instrumental in making improvements to an advertiser’s campaign.

These findings confirm what we've heard from our partners -- as ads become more engaging and relevant to users, their performance improves. If you’re still hungry for more data, don’t worry --  next Tuesday, we’ll be kicking off a “Data Insights Blog Series,” where we’ll deep-dive into one trend a week and explain how the insights apply to your campaigns. 

As you check out the tool for yourself, let us know if you find any nuggets you think we’ve missed. We just might feature your insight in one of our blog posts.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Explore the Future of Digital Marketing with Google and Industry Executives on June 4th

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 |


On Tuesday, June 4th we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

Hear executives from advertising, agencies and publishers discuss some of the big questions in digital such as:

  • How do creatives leverage, but not be overwhelmed by, technology to deliver next-generation consumer experiences?
  • What unique experiences are publishers developing that add value to consumers and advertisers alike?
  • How do CMOs best use social with other marketing channels to build strong brands?  


The full agenda for the thinkDoubleClick event is listed below.  You can join in the conversation on June 4 by using the #thinkDCLK hash and commenting during the live stream at www.youtube.com/doubleclick.


Register here for the thinkDoubleClick summit

June 4, 2013
9 am - 12:15 PDT


9:00 - 9:30 am
Connecting Digital, Accelerating Growth
9:30 - 10:00 am
The Coca-Cola Company's Liquid & Linked Marketing: How a 127-year-old company is pivoting for success in a real-time, socially-connected world

The Coca-Cola Company sells over 500 brands in 207 countries, with over 700,000 System associates and 1.8B+ servings of their beverages everyday.  Hear insights and lessons learned on how the world's most valuable brand is remaining relevant by becoming more connected, transparent and nimble in real-time.

10:00 - 10:35 am
Advertisers Must be Inventors

This year, Volkswagen and Deutsch LA partnered with Google to work on a briefto re-imagine how to build a stronger, bigger community around its brand.  In today’s connected world, telling stories alone isn’t enough; we need to create tangible value and utility to bring the brand’s promise to life. In this session the creative team from Deutsch LA will be talking about the process for developing more rewarding and shareable experience.

10:35 - 11:15 am
Time to Rethink the Marketing Mix?
Emerging trends in digital marketing -- including new ad formats, the rise of social media, and proliferation of channels -- are creating new challenges and opportunities for brand marketers. What are the key trends marketers should be concerned about -- and how should they respond? AdAge deputy editor Michael Learmonth poses the hard questions in an executive dialogue on what’s next for
brand marketing.

Fireside chat with:
11:15 am -
12: 15 pm
New and Native: Extending the Conversation
Technology has had a profound impact on the media industry. This disruption, though, has brought along significant opportunities for creative publishers to thrive. In this session we’re bringing in three executives to show how they’ve leveraged the digital revolution to deliver more engaging content and differentiated solutions to advertisers.






We look forward to seeing you on June 4th at thinkDoubleClick.

CM Summit with Neal Mohan - Live Stream - May 21, 9:45am ET

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Today at the Conversational Marketing Summit (CM Summit), Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Display advertising, will be speaking on ‘The State of Google.’ We'll reveal new insights for today's digital advertisers on how to bridge data-driven buying with brand marketing in our interconnected world.

Tune in as Neal discusses the future of advertising at Google:
  • Live stream on YouTube.com begins on May 21, 2013, at 9:45am ET 
  • Following us? @GoogleDisplay tweeting live during the event 
The Conversational Marketing Summit (CM Summit) is taking place from May 21-22 2013 in NYC. This year’s theme is “Parting the Clouds: Bridging Data and Humanity.”

Posted by Mary Shirley, Product Marketing Manager

Monday, May 20, 2013

Enhanced campaign upgrade tools now generally available

Monday, May 20, 2013 |
Last month, we introduced the beta release of dedicated tools to help you seamlessly upgrade to enhanced campaigns. Today, we’re excited to announce that these tools are available to all DoubleClick Search customers globally. Read on for details around the newly available features, what's coming, and how customers are seeing success in upgrading to enhanced campaigns with DoubleClick Search.

Easily upgrade to enhanced campaigns

With this release, advertisers can save time when upgrading to enhanced campaigns with custom solutions that will:

  • Identify similar campaigns that target different devices within your DoubleClick Search account
  • Create reports to quickly merge and upload these similar campaigns into one enhanced campaign
  • Provide the AdWords-suggested mobile bid adjustment in DoubleClick Search for more control and precision over bids in an enhanced campaign

Learn about these features and more in our enhanced campaigns upgrade guide.

Upcoming features

This is the second of several feature rollouts we have planned for enhanced campaigns. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be introducing advanced features to prepare advertisers for a constantly connected world, including support for ad group mobile bid adjustments and granular device-segmented reports.

What we’re hearing so far

With the goal of simplifying search management, we’re continuing to invest in solutions that will help marketers run effective search campaigns across devices, as well as across channels -- and our clients are seeing the benefits. 

Keith Wilson, VP of of Agency Products at The Search Agency, notes: "Recent enhancements in DoubleClick Search support for enhanced campaigns has been a wind on our backs for transitioning clients to enhanced campaigns. The overall functionality within DoubleClick Search is evolving rapidly, and that enables our teams to keep pace with the changes in the paid search space with the right tools.”



After performing initial upgrades using DoubleClick Search tools, Samridhi Chawla,
 Senior Account Manager at Acuvue, said: "Our accounts look cleaner after upgrading to enhanced campaigns. The DoubleClick Search team has done a great job in making the transition smooth, and we're already seeing positive results."

Hear more about our enhanced campaigns vision from our clients and product experts.




To learn more about how clients have been using our enhanced campaigns upgrade tools, we’ll be at SMX Advanced in June, where Eric Papczun, US President of Performics, will share his company's plans, successes, and best practices on upgrades through using search platforms like DoubleClick Search. Register here, and stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog to learn more about our support of enhanced campaigns features.

Friday, May 10, 2013

DoubleClick Search offline conversions go instant, too!

Friday, May 10, 2013 |
With DoubleClick Search, you already get instant Floodlight conversion data in all your reports to bring you the freshest, most reliable data. This is just one of the ways we’re focusing on our our reporting investments to help you make better decisions in search, and beyond.



To make your digital marketing even smarter, we’ve recently increased how quickly you can see your offline conversions in DoubleClick Search, so that they’re just as fast as the online conversions you get today:

  • Updates made to conversions through the DS Conversion API Service or via bulksheet are ready to download from DoubleClick Search reporting within the hour (instead of 24 hours previously). This allows you to test and support your integration with the API much faster.
  • Conversion statistics such as Actions, Transactions, and Revenue are updated in the DoubleClick Search UI in near-real time for today and yesterday, so you’ll be able to make smarter decisions with up-to-the-minute feedback.

In addition, we’ve made some improvements to the Click ID-based Conversion API:

  • A newly generated Click ID now becomes usable in the DS Conversion API in near-real time
  • The API documentation was updated to include guidelines on how to distinguish between DS and non-DS click IDs using the gclsrc parameter.  We also added details on error handling for batched conversion uploads.

We’re excited about these recent  real-time reporting developments, and look forward to bringing you more tools to power your business with all the insights you need.

For more information on instant conversions or our Conversions API service, reach out to your DoubleClick Search representative or our support team at ds-support@google.com.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Explore the future of digital marketing at thinkDoubleClick, June 4th

Thursday, May 9, 2013 |

What’s the future of digital media and marketing? How are CMOs thinking about leveraging digital to reach and engage audiences? What marketing channels are proving most effective in building brands digitally - paid, owned or earned?

These are some of the questions executives from across the digital marketing ecosystem will address at thinkDoubleClick, Google’s annual discussion on the state of digital.

Register now to join the event livestream on June 4th, 9:00 AM - Noon Pacific. Registration enables you to participate in the conversation, and ask speakers and panelists your questions with #thinkDCLK.

thinkDoubleClick 2013 speakers include:

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th!

Missed last year’s event? It’s not too late to catch up with the videos below.


Posted by Scott Brown, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick