November Insights from DoubleClick Ad Planner

Insights abound in the latest global Ad Planner 1000 list for November 2010. This is a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by DoubleClick Ad Planner. Access the list here for more detailed information on each of the top 1,000 sites.

Perhaps not surprisingly with the holidays coming up in December, department store sites and retailers saw significant gains in unique visitors on the global list. Walmart.com went up a whopping 44% in November and other retailers saw significant gains as well kohls.com (+35%), jcpenny.com (+34%), target.com (+31%), sears.com (+31%) and macys.com (+20%).

Other categories, such as news, travel and hospitality didn’t fare so well. Here in the U.S. with the November elections you would think that sites such as the huffingtonpost.com (down 24%) would experience a big increase in the unique visitors from the previous month but that wasn’t the case. Apparently it was a slow news cycle in November, at least when it came to online news sites.

Other news-oriented sites that experienced notable declines in the number of site visitors in November include:

• aolnews.com (-32%)
• abcnews.go.com (-31%)
• nytimes.com (-27%)
• telegraph.co.uk (-26%)
• time.com (-25%)
• boston.com (-25%)
• usatoday.com (-24%)
• cbsnews.com (-18%)

We also observed that technology news sites, mashable.com (-33%) and techcrunch.com (-31%), lost almost a third of their site traffic from the month before.

Travel and hospitality sites also saw declines in the number of unique visitors to their sites during the month of November. Travel search sites priceline.com (-26%), orbitz.com (-25%), kayak.com (-24%) and booking.com (-20%) all saw significant decline from their October site traffic. Hotel sites marriott.com (-25%) and hilton.com (-19%) also saw their traffic fall from October to November as well as the hotel booking site, hotels.com (-23%).

If you want to dive into the data even deeper, we now publish 21 top 100 lists in 16 languages. Select your preferred language to access the latest top 100 country lists. We have top 100 lists for November for Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States.

These 21 lists are available in British English, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.

Expect to see more observations with your favorite sites when we publish our next monthly update with December's data.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

Signal to Noise tunes into local and foreign markets with DoubleClick Ad Planner

San Francisco-based interactive agency, Signal to Noise, wasn’t quick to jump on the DoubleClick Ad Planner bandwagon when the product was first available in 2008. It took a little time but the agency’s media team found Ad Planner really useful to supplement its other media planning tools when it came to managing campaigns targeting specific U.S. cities, foreign countries and other languages.

A major online retailer asked Signal to Noise to expand their online display campaigns to Canada, including websites in French. But the agency had no access to media planning data outside of the U.S. unless they were willing to make an expensive upgrade to their existing services.

When Allen Stern, media director for Signal to Noise, took another look at Ad Planner, he was impressed. “When we started to expand into Canada and to do French language campaigns, I tried Ad Planner again, and I was very surprised; I thought it was great!” he says. “All of a sudden, Ad Planner became a great tool for us.”

Stern’s team used DoubleClick’s free online tool to identify likely sites in Canada for his client to place its ads, mostly banners in English and French. He used Ad Planner’s flexible features to search for sites in Canada, in the French-speaking province of Quebec, or simply by language.

“We identified sites and put a plan together. Ad Planner actually helped us allocate budgets. Those ads worked great and have continued to drive ROI,” says Stern. “So our client was very pleased, and we continue to deliver media plans for Canada.”

It was the same story when his agency needed to understand the media landscape
in France and Germany. Once again, Ad Planner helped Stern find and track
appropriate sites, and saved the agency thousands of dollars in subscription fees
for other tools.

And even though his team can’t read French or German, that’s not a problem; Ad
Planner can still delve into a site’s statistics and tell them—in English—whether it’s a good prospect to add to a campaign.

Read the full case study to learn more about Signal to Noise’s success with clients’ campaigns using DoubleClick Ad Planner.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

DoubleClick Ad Planner Makes Regional Campaigns Easier

DoubleClick Ad Planner just made it easier to plan media buys for regional ad campaigns through two important upgrades.

First, the product has been localized to support 15 languages. In addition to American English, Ad Planner can now be displayed in British English, Russian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and Turkish.

Second, the Ad Planner team has published lists of the top 100 sites in each of 21 regional markets. Named the “Ad Planner 100,” these lists provide a quick reference to identify the most popular sites by country. Check out the Ad Planner 100 lists for the countries you advertise within:

Australia Belgium Brazil Canada China France Germany

Hong Kong Italy Japan Korea Netherlands Poland Russia

Spain Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey United Kingdom United States

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

DoubleClick Search 2010 Recap

DoubleClick Search has had an exciting 2010, with several new features designed to improve your DoubleClick Search experience:

• Added support for several Microsoft adCenter features in preparation for the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, including Geographic Targeting, Content Targeting, and Dynamic Ad Text.
• Added support for several Google AdWords features, including Bidding Options, Delivery Method, Ad Rotation, Device Platform Targeting, and Campaign-level Negatives.
• Greatly enhanced the support for AdWords Placement Targeting and Image Ads, moving these features out of beta to full production.
• Launched an all-new Bid Strategies page, with several ways to customize the reporting data to suit your needs. Also, the new Bid Strategy Keyword History page shows detailed history of bid strategy changes for each keyword.
• Added new features to the DoubleCilck Search Reporting Center, including the ability to report on Spotlight tags, and export directly from DoubleClick Search instead of having to queue up a request and then wait for an email.
• Provided users with the ability to resubmit their own search engine tasks in DoubleClick Search.

These features are only the beginning; stay tuned for even bigger changes in 2011. To follow just DoubleClick Search news on this blog, filter your view here.

Posted by Ariel Bardin, Product Management Director

Rich Media Grows to 10% of the Display Advertising Pie

Back in June of 2009, we highlighted the percentage of total display advertising volume going to rich media ads in the introduction of our “Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads” report. The headline on the first figure in the report stated, “Rich Media Only 6% of Ad Serving Volume in 2008.”

Checking back in, we find that, based on data collected by The Nielsen Company during Q3 2010, rich media volume is up -- by a lot. Today, rich media ads make up 10% of ad serving volume -- a whopping 4 percentage point increase since our report was published.

Look for rich media volume to continue to grow as more advertisers seek out the benefits of incorporating video and interactivity into their display advertising campaigns. After all, anything Flash ads can do rich media ads can do better.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Introducing the new DFA API code site

Want to build applications that talk to DoubleClick for Advertisers but not sure where to start? With the release of the new Google Code site for DFA, developers now have a comprehensive set of guidelines for using DFA’s web services API.

The new site will be your one-stop shop for everything you need to know about the DFA API, from documentation, to code examples and how-to’s, to announcements and product updates. There’s also a forum (you’ll need to apply for membership) where users can discuss the API and provide feedback.

In addition, you can refer to the DoubleClick Advertisers API blog for information on new features, discussion on best practices for developers and the heads up on planned outages.

The DFA API lets you build applications that talk directly with our ad trafficking system. It’s especially useful for automating routine, as well as integrating DFA with third-party systems. Most popular programming languages are supported, including Java, PHP, Python, .NET, Perl, and Ruby.

Posted by Ruben Perez, The DoubleClick for Advertisers API Team

Introducing the DoubleClick Ad Planner Marketplace

Today we're excited to announce the beta launch of the DoubleClick Ad Planner Marketplace for advertisers and agencies using DoubleClick for Advertisers. The Ad Planner Marketplace is a new solution connecting buyers and sellers of online advertising to make the process of traditional online media buying simpler and more efficient.

Buying online media can be incredibly inefficient with 28% of total media spend going to administrative costs, according to ThinkEquity. And in terms of planning media, it can be hard to access data to find the best sites that attract your target audience and to get detailed information on a site’s available inventory.

At DoubleClick, we're further developing Ad Planner with these challenges in mind. Ad Planner is a good resource for site research, providing robust data on sites and their available ad placements. The launch of Ad Planner Marketplace takes this one step further by offering additional information about publisher inventory including the availability of inventory, audience profiles for inventory and the ability to place order requests for inventory.

Still in beta, Ad Planner Marketplace is just the first step in building out a completely streamlined media planning and buying solution on the DoubleClick for Advertisers platform.
Currently with the Ad Planner Marketplace you can:

• Search for ad placements that meet your campaign goals
  
• Review information on publishers’ placements including:
  
  • Audience Statistics: Unique Visitors, Demographics, Audience Interests
    
  • Advertising Information: Impression volume, Available ad sizes, Available ad types and formats, and CPM rates
• Send order requests to reserve and purchase site placements directly in Ad Planner from participating publishers in the Marketplace.

The Ad Planner Marketplace beta is currently available to users of DoubleClick for Advertisers. In this beta release, ad placements are only available from publishers selling in US dollars. Expect to be updated in the coming months as we continue to add features and make enhancements to the Ad Planner Marketplace.

If you are interested in signing up for the beta, fill out this form [update 6/1/2011: we are no longer accepting beta requests for Marketplace]. If you are not already on DFA, contact us for more information.

Posted by Seth Demsey, Product Manager

Trends and observations in the September Ad Planner 1000

The September edition of the Ad Planner 1000 offers a few obvious trends as students across the northern hemisphere have returned to school and are putting their thinking caps on.

As the school year gets into full swing, homework and school projects abound and usage of reference sites increases correspondingly. September was a good month for reference.com which was up more than 23%, thesaurus.com followed closely with its 21% increase in the number of unique visitors, wiktionary.org went up almost 18%, merrian-webster.com more than 17% and thefreedictionary.com enjoyed more than a 16% increase in site visitors for the month of September.

The return to school did not seem to bode well for online gaming and entertainment sites as we observed a decline in site traffic with many of these sites. Perhaps much of play time has gone from the online realm to the offline world of the playground.

Battle.net was the most embattled as it saw a huge drop in site visitors (-38%), while 4399.com was not far behind with a steep 35% decline, duowan.com dropped 24%, pcgames.com (-24%), addictinggames.com (-18%), sdo.com was down 17% and nick.com and zylom.com saw 16% fewer visitors to their sites in September. To a lesser extent, miniclip.com (-13%), armorgames.com (-9%) and juegos.com (-8%) also saw drops in visitors to their site during this month.

“Did you catch that season premiere last night?” is likely a common refrain heard around water coolers everywhere. Thanks to the new television season, network sites re-entered the Ad Planner 1000: nbc.com at #679, cbs.com at #712 and abc.go.com at #748. Tvguide.com also benefited with enough of an increase to site visitors to crack the list at #820.

Sports trends have usually shown their mark on the Ad Planner 1000 from month to month and September is no different. In the U.S., football fervor is underway and the biggest beneficiary is nfl.com with a whopping 61% increase in unique vistors to their site. Espn.com fared well (+26%), as did cbssports.com which debuted in the Ad Planner 1000 this month at #672. On the other hand, as playoff contenders emerge in the baseball post-season, the narrowing field of teams to follow seems to have affected mlb.com which saw site traffic go down 16%.

In other trend news, social networking sites Facebook.com remains atop the Ad Planner 1000 this month with a healthy rise in the number of unique visitors of 11%. Twitter fared well too with 12% more visitors in the month of September.

Expect to see more of these interesting observations with your favorite sites when we publish the next update to the Ad Planner 1000 in a couple of weeks.

Posted by Wayne Lin, Product Manager

Congratulations DMACs Award Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the fifth annual Digital Media Advertising Creative Showcase (DMACS) awards! The event took place Thursday October 14 at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. DMACS 2010 showcased the apex of cutting-edge digital media advertising around entertainment releases over the past year. The most innovative and creative digital media talent in the industry competed in six categories to receive recognition for campaigns executed with excellence. Google's DoubleClick Rich Media Team is the proud sponsor of these awards, and we would like to extend our congratulations to the winners!

Winners of the DMACS 2010 are:

Best Home Entertainment Rich Media Campaign:

Up – Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and Deadline Advertising

YouTube Creative Award:

The Last Exorcism – Lionsgate and The Visionaire Group

Best Television Rich Media Campaign:

The Fugitive Chronicles – A&E and The Visionaire Group

Best Video Game Rich Media Campaign:

Mass Effect 2 – Electronic Arts and Draftfcb, Sabertooth and Wieden+Kennedy

Best Theatrical Movie Rich Media Campaign:

The Expendables – Lionsgate and The Visionaire Group

Best Multichannel Cross-Media Campaign:

Dante’s Inferno – Electronic Arts/Visceral Games and Wieden+Kennedy, Kamp Grizzly and Emerge Interactive

The event was attended by approximately 150 of the entertainment industry’s leading marketing executives, agency heads, creative directors and designers. In addition to the awards ceremony, the showcase explored leading trends in digital marketing. Presentations included a panel discussion, hosted by Kevin Winston of Digital LA, on the topic of “TV Goes Tech: iTV, 3D & apps” and Eyetracking analysis and trends offered up by Lance Porter of New Media Mind.

Awards presenters included a range of talent and marketing executives from across the entertainment industry including Adam Carolla (comedian, talk-show host, author), Andrew Marlowe & Terri Miller (Creator/Executive Producer and Producer of ABC’s Castle), Janina Gavankar (The Gates, The L Word), Gordon Ho (Business development consultant for iTV and digital media and former EVP of Global Marketing at Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment) and Jamie Byrne (Head of Marketing Programs, YouTube).

Check out the videos and pictures.

Posted by Kate Macevicz, Campaign Manager

New Ad Planner 1000 List for August

Check out the latest Ad Planner 1000 for August 2010. Summer is winding down here in the northern hemisphere. People are finishing up vacations, soaking up the last rays of the summer sun and preparing their children for the back to school season.

Back to School
At least in the United States, back to school sends parents and kids into a frenzy of excitement or dread depending on which way you look at it. But one thing stands in common - shopping! Retailers hoping to cash in on the back to school season saw a spurt in their site traffic during the month of August.

A popular resource for dorm room decorating, ikea.com saw a 14% increase in the number of unique visitors to their site and the home and garden retailer, bedbathandbeyond.com cracked the AP 1000 for the first time at #999.

A new fall wardrobe to start the school year is in order too and this was reflected in the increase in traffic going to clothing retailers sites such as kohls.com (+10%), hm.com (+10%), gap.com (+9%) and jcpenney.com (+9%).

Not surprisingly, sites offering school supplies were also positively impacted by the back to school season: staples.com (+6%) and apple.com (+9%). An interesting but perhaps unrelated trend in the AP 1000 for August was the rise in sites offering computer security software: symantec.com (+10%), kaspersky.com (+10%) and avast.com (+9%).

Getting an early start on homework perhaps? The increase in unique users to reference sites such as thefreedictionary.com (+13%), wikipedia.org (+11%), thesaurus.com (+11%) seems to suggest that many students are diving into school work these first few days of the school year.

End of Summer Travel
Now that we’ve covered some of the top risers in the AP 1000, there are also some declines in site traffic to report too. Travel and hospitality companies saw decreases in people visiting their sites as people were winding down their summer vacation plans.

• Travel booking sites: hotwire.com (-16%), priceline.com (-16%), expedia.com (-13%), kayak.com (-11%), orbitz.com (-9%), travelocity.com (-9%).
  
• Hotels and airlines: marriott.com (-11%), hilton.com (-11%), and airlines aa.com (-9%), southwest (-9%).

In Tech News
The latest hot trends for social, mobile and location-based services continues to do well with foursquare.com debuting at #985 on the list. Group buying services also continue to gain popularity, groupon.com (+22%), livingsocial.com (entered list). Finally, Michael Arrington’s work ethic seems to be paying off in terms of visitors to his site -- techcrunch.com grew 21% from the month of July to August.

Posted by Alex Lin, Product Specialist

What’s new with the Ad Planner 1000 for July

Welcome to the third installment of the Ad Planner 1000. This July we naturally saw many summer-related trends on the list as the northern hemisphere experienced the warmer weather.

When the Weather Outside is Delightful
It stands to reason that people would spend more time playing sports in the summer than following them on the web. And at least with a couple of popular sports websites in the AP 1000 that seems to be the case. Fifa.com dropped 54% in the number of unique visitors to their site but still managed to stay in the AP 1000 -- perhaps thanks to the early July fervor leading up to the World Cup finals. NBA.com saw a 31% decline from June as the season ended and ESPN.com saw a quarter (-25%) of their traffic evaporate in July.

Sports are not the only game in town as video game maker Blizzard’s release of Starcraft 2 helped battle.net break into the AP 1000 at #484.

Blockbuster Season

Just as many professional sports go dormant in the summer, blockbusters are there to fill the void. Trying to make a decision about which new movie release to check out this weekend? You aren’t the only one: movie listings and film review sites enjoyed a healthy increase in site traffic in the month of July. Fandago.com and moviefone.com both saw a 11% rise and rottentomatoes.com went up 5%. That trend didn’t leave dvd rental and online movie & TV streaming site, Netflix, in the dust though - their site saw an increase (+12%) in traffic too.

Summer Socials
Summer time is a social time as people take vacation, spend time outdoors and fire up the grill. Could that be one of the reason recipe sites allrecipes.com (+20%) and cooks.com (+10%) saw a healthy rise in the number of visitors to their sites?

At the height of the social season Facebook remains at the top of the list. Facebook.com has been at the top of the AP 1000 since we launched in May and is relatively consistent in the number of unique visitors (up 2% from June). Myspace.com (+11%), linkedin.com (+8%), bebo.com (+5%) and orkut.com +3% all saw traffic increases in July while social sites such as twitter.com (-3%), hi5.com (-10%) and friendster.com (-17%) saw fewer people visiting their sites in the middle of the summer.

A case of spring fever giving way to summer loving? Dating sites zoosk.com (+22%) and match.com (+11%) also fared well in July.

So that was just a highlight of what’s going on with the latest Ad Planner 1000. Check back next month for more insights and observations.

Posted by Wayne Lin, Product Manager

Investing in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and buyer safety

DoubleClick Ad Exchange Product Manager, Scott Spencer, recently spoke with John Ebbert at AdExchanger.com about some product enhancements and Google’s ongoing efforts around inventory quality and safety. Here is an excerpt of that interview:

What is Google announcing today?

Basically, we’re going to be rolling out a few more tools to help DoubleClick Ad Exchange buyers buy quality inventory, and to check their campaigns.

Taking a quick step back; when we launched the exchange about a year ago, we engineered it with best-in-market buyer and publishers controls, as well as extensive crawl-and-verify inventory screening. Together with the real time bidder, these were the biggest upgrades we made.

As part of a long line of improvements in this area over the past year, we’re taking the wraps off a couple of additional features to give buyers even more control, quality and transparency.

The first is “Site Packs” – these are manually crafted collections of like sites based on DoubleClick Ad Planner and internal classifications, vetted for quality. These allow buyers to get a set of high quality sites for their particular campaigns, covering anonymous and branded inventory.

Second, we’re making some changes to our Real-time Bidder (in beta). The biggest change here is for Ad Exchange clients who work with DSPs. Historically, Ad Exchange buyers were hidden from publishers behind their DSP. By introducing a way to segment out each individual client’s ad calls, inventory can be sent exclusively to an Ad Exchange buyer even when that buyer uses a DSP. It increases transparency for publishers and potentially give buyers more access to the highest quality inventory, like “exclusive ad slots” – high quality inventory offered to only a few, select buyers as determined by the publisher.

Thirdly, we’re soon going to be rolling out a beta of what we call “Data Transfer” – this is a report of every transaction bought or sold by a client on the Ad Exchange. Effectively, it’s a daily log file of everything that happened. Clients can then review every branded URL that they purchased to ensure everything was what they expected.

A recent report suggested that exchange inventory is unsafe for marketers. How does Google respond?

You won’t be surprised to hear this, but when it comes to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, I disagree. We have high quality DoubleClick and AdSense publishers.

Of course, it’s always possible to find a single page among millions that is objectionable in one way. But we’ve built extensive checks to ensure the quality and safety of our inventory, including strict participation policies, continuous automated scanning of all publisher sites, and automated inventory review to identify improper traffic patterns. A flag can trigger either a human review or an automatic blocking. These validation tools apply to our combined pool of AdSense and Ad Exchange publisher inventory. They operate at a page-level granularity, pre-screening individual ad units, then report to the client in great detail afterwards.

We’ve also developed ways for marketers to choose high quality inventory, like through the Ad Planner 1000 filter, and the ability to buy or exclude specific publishers, URLs or categories of content.

You can read the full interview here.

Posted by Jon Nevitt, Product Marketing Manager

New Tutorial! Ad Planner Export to AdWords Feature

A top request from DoubleClick Ad Planner users has been to make it easy to plan and buy your next Google Display Network (GDN) campaign in Ad Planner. GDN advertisers have particularly found Ad Planner to be an indispensable resource in researching sites for their next media buy. Carnival Cruise Lines is just one advertiser who made good use of Ad Planner in the planning phase of their GDN campaign.

So in response we launched the export to AdWords feature in Ad Planner back in May.

With this feature, you simply export GDN placements from Ad Planner into AdWords. These exported placements will be set up as either a new campaign or added to existing campaign or ad group within AdWords.

This online tutorial will help you learn how to take advantage of this simple way to buy GDN placements found through Ad Planner.

In this tutorial, you will learn about:

• Creating a media plan and finding GDN placements
  
• Exporting your plan to AdWords
  
• Setting up a new campaign or adding to existing campaign in Adwords

You can also find the tutorial via the DoubleClick Learn Center (login required).

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

Introducing mobile ad serving in DoubleClick for Advertisers

As the popularity of mobile advertising rises, so too do the challenges for advertisers. The proliferation of mobile devices along with emerging standards make for a challenging environment in which to execute on mobile campaigns.

Serving mobile ads through DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) is the answer to tackling some of these pain points head on. This latest DFA release allows advertisers and agencies to traffic mobile ad campaigns alongside the rest of their online advertising campaigns.

Serve mobile ads in DFA
Trafficking mobile ads in DFA is easy. You use the same process as you would for any campaign in DFA. Mobile is just another ad type and placement type that you would select within the DFA trafficking interface. You don’t even need to create a separate campaign for your mobile ads in DFA, you can include them in any existing campaign alongside the rest of your online creatives assets.

Serve mobile ads to a variety of mobile platforms
DFA mobile ads are designed to be trafficked on inventory that is optimized for mobile browsers or within a mobile application. Tailor your message to each of the major mobile platforms and automatically serve the appropriate Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) creative size to a broad array of mobile devices. You also have many of the existing DFA targeting features at your disposal such as day-parting, keywords and geo-targeting.

Integrated reporting
With fully integrated reporting you get mobile impression and click data all in the same place as the standard DFA reports. There is also a mobile-specific report which shows a breakdown of stats for your mobile placement by wireless carrier, mobile platform and country.

Mobile-optimized tags
The mobile placement in DFA generates tags that are optimized to run on a wide variety of mobile devices ensuring that your campaign has the reach you desire. These tags work seamlessly with the Doubleclick Mobile publisher platform and have been tested successfully on a number of other leading publisher technology providers. If you’re a publisher and want to accept DFA mobile placements, just log into your site directory account or email sd-support@google.com.

Standard ads go mobile too
As many mobile phones come with full Internet browsers, you’ll often find that your standard ads are being viewed on mobile devices too. So, alongside the mobile placements we’re also releasing mobile browser targeting for standard ads. This gives you the opportunity to control the creative you serve alongside standard web content when it is viewed on a mobile device (e.g., iPhone, iPad or Android devices).

Just the beginning
We’re working hard to add new features to mobile in DFA so expect to see multiple enhancements to your mobile advertising experience in DFA in the coming months.

Posted by Alex Gawley, Product Manager

What’s new with the Ad Planner 1000 list for June

We hope you have been enjoying our monthly updates on the Ad Planner 1000, a valuable resource for determining the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by DoubleClick Ad Planner.

This month, we're pleased to expand the number of Google properties included in Ad Planner and the AP 1000. YouTube.com tops the list at number 2, joining other Google properties already included in the AP 1000 Blogger (49), Orkut (38) and Picnik (540).

Some other interesting updates with this latest Ad Planner 1000:

Did you get caught up in the World Cup craze? The entire world did and it showed. The number of unique users to fifa.com increased a whopping 454% making the site the 42nd most popular site in the world for the month of June. In May, fifa.com cracked the Ad Planner 1000 at 441. Fifa.com wasn’t the only site that benefited from the World Cup in June:

• June was a banner month for Spain as it led up to this month's big World Cup win and Spaniard Albert Contador winning the Tour de France. Marca.com was a winner too with a 79% increase in unique users from the month before.
  
• The World Cup didn’t go unnoticed either in the United States as espn.go.com saw a 48% rise in June. And won’t it will be interesting to see where ESPN falls in the July Ad Planner 1000 thanks to some stateside craze of our own named Lebron James?
  
• In May goal.com jumped 21% in the Ad Planner 1000 rankings and the momentum didn’t stop in June when the site enjoyed a 40% rise in unique users.

Smart phones might be the best thing since the proverbial sliced bread -- weren’t you glad you had yours to keep up-to-the minute on the World Cup? Some big launches in June made its impression on the Ad Planner 1000.

• Did you wait out the long lines and get your iPhone 4 right at its launch in June? Whether you did or not, many of you visited the Apple site in the month of June and so the 19% increase in unique users should come as no surprise.
  
• HTC, the maker of several Android phones, cracked the list at 980, perhaps from the recent momentum of launching some new devices this year such as the Droid Incredible and the Evo 4G.
  
• The carriers benefited as well with att.com and sprint.com experiencing a 20% and 21% increase in site users respectively.
An interesting trend though was the decline in the number of unique users to Nokia (-12%) and Blackberry (-16%).

With school out and the longer days, summer vacation is certainly on the mind. The interest in travel sites was evident by the increase in unique users to the following sites:

• kayak.com (+22%)
  
• booking.com (+15%)
  
• travelocity.com (+12%)
  
• marriott.com (+12%)
  
• hilton.com (+14%)
  
• hotels.com (+11%)

What will July hold for the sites in the Ad Planner 1000? Only one way to find out, check back with us in a couple of weeks when we will publish the new July 2010 list to the Ad Planner 1000.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

Havas Digital uses DoubleClick data to drive better results for clients

Here is a great case study about DoubleClick's relationship with Havas Digital and how it has translated into Havas driving better results for its clients. For more than 10 years, Havas Digital has used DoubleClick services to help deliver and tweak hundreds of online advertising campaigns.

The worldwide group of agencies under the Havas Digital banner uses many services from DoubleClick, including DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) and the data transfer solution that feeds Havas’ powerful in-house digital marketing decision support and optimization system, called Artemis.

Artemis is Havas Digital’s proprietary digital campaign management and optimization system that enables users to collect and evaluate data to gain a better understanding of advertising campaign performance.

The system helps marketers optimize digital campaigns through insights into consumer behavior such as website visits, search clicks, banner or video exposures. Artemis also matches digital exposure data with website sales and customer lifetime value metrics.

DoubleClick’s data transfers power some of Artemis’ most advanced solutions, providing marketers with fresh insights that far outpace run-of-the-mill metrics like click-through and conversion rates.

The best data available
With DoubleClick’s data transfer solution, selected DoubleClick ad server log files are available every morning for download by clients. These files contain the best data available to help analyze online consumer behavior, including detailed information on an advertiser’s impressions, clicks or conversions (or Spotlight events).

After this data is fed into Artemis, seasoned analysts from Havas use Artemis’ automated Advanced Reports to help optimize the media spend for hundreds of name-brand advertisers. Often this involves making recommendations on tricky issues like optimal ad reach and frequency, streamlining the conversion process, attribution weighting for search vs. display, and syncing up numerous channels of online and offline advertising.

Read the full case study to learn more about Havas Digital’s success with clients’ campaigns using Artemis and DoubleClick data transfer.

Global scale and support
With operations in 54 cities around the world, Havas Digital is there for its clients, wherever they are. And DoubleClick is there too, checking in regularly to ensure that Havas Digital has all the fresh, top-quality data it needs. DoubleClick also operates a dedicated network for Havas Digital in Asia Pacific and dedicated custom networks for several clients.

“Our long-lasting relationship with DoubleClick has enabled us to offer the marketplace a truly differentiated service with data-driven decision support at its core,” says Anthony Rhind, Havas Digital Global co-CEO. “The combination of highly granular data from DoubleClick and powerful analysis from Artemis helps us to put solid business results at the heart of our clients’ digital campaigns.”

With high-octane data from DoubleClick fueling the powerful engine of Artemis, this partnership is delivering strategic insights and great results to advertisers around the world.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

What’s new with the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report 2009 Year-in-Review

We published the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report in 2009 to give advertisers and agencies a resource to measure their display campaigns’ performance against industry norms. As a result of feedback and interest from our clients and others in the industry, we’re pleased to offer this year’s edition with a couple of updates:

• Data on impressions served through DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) by creative type. Simple flash is the dominant ad format accounting for close to 70% in the U.S. and 85% in the EMEA region. Static image ads was the next most common format representing 20% of the volume through DFA in the U.S. and 10% in the EMEA region.
  
• The availability of a benchmarks report with detailed EMEA region metrics. Last year we included worldwide overall click-through rates and rich media metrics in the report. Now we are pleased to introduce a separate EMEA Benchmarks Report which covers in-depth display benchmarks across a subset of countries in the EMEA region.
  
• Comparison between overall 2008 and 2009 benchmarks. You will also find in this latest report, a month-by-month comparison of benchmark data for click-through rates, interaction rates, expansion rates and interaction time for the years 2008 and 2009.

When reviewing the data we noticed some interesting trends:

• In 2009, the overall click-through rate for the U.S. did not change from 2008 (0.10%) and what’s more is in a month by month comparison of click-through rates (CTRs) from 2008 to 2009 we saw that CTRs were very consistent throughout the year with a minor spike in January -- possibly a result of the post-holiday sale season.
  
• When it comes to CTR, interaction rate, average interaction time and average display time, we did not observe a great difference between U.S. (see page 2) and EMEA (see page 2) benchmarks.
  
• Consistent with last year’s report, we continued to find a correlation between ad size and clicks and interaction rates -- that is, the larger the ad size, the higher the rate. This finding holds true for both U.S. and the EMEA region.

As with last year’s report, the data for these benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DoubleClick for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. The report covers benchmarks for the entirety of 2009 by ad format, ad size and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions.

For greater detail on the benchmark data, download the U.S. report here and the EMEA region report here. More in-depth benchmarks by industry are available exclusively to DoubleClick clients so contact your account manager to discuss further.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

What’s new in the Ad Planner 1000

In May we introduced the Ad Planner 1000, a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. It’s a great reference for checking out the most popular sites on the web and observing interesting trends in this latest list of the top 1,000 global sites from month to month. Here are some of our observations from the latest Ad Planner 1000 sites for May 2010.

‘Tis the Season
April showers might bring May flowers but it also brings an end to the tax season. So not surprisingly we saw a precipitous drop (-62%) in the number of unique users going to irs.gov from April to May 2010.

May also spells the end of the television season. Could that be the reason behind the rise in traffic to online video sites as viewers are scrambling to keep up with their favorite shows’ season finales? In the list of top 1,000 May 2010 sites we saw increases in traffic to top video sites vimeo.com (+22%), hulu.com (+20%) and netflix (+13%) and saw nbc.com entering the top 1000 as well.

Games that People Play
The World Cup comes once every four years so the build up to the event makes it no surprise that fifa.com broke the Ad Planner 1000 in May, coming in at 441 on the top 1,000 list. Not to mention goal.com which was already on the Ad Planner 1000 and experienced a 21% increase in unique visitors.

But soccer is not the only game in town these days, at least not here in the U.S. Playoff season is here and naturally the NBA is reaping the benefits. Basketball fans are flocking to nba.com and as a result the number of unique visitors is up 22% this month. We can’t say the same for hockey, however, as unique visitors to nhl.com went down 11% from April. Perhaps this signals waning interest from hockey fans whose teams failed to make the playoffs this season?

While people were playing games outdoors, plenty were staying in. Zynga.com, a popular online gaming site, rose 22% in the month of May.

So that was just a taste of trends for May - check out the latest Ad Planner 1000 and observe interesting trends for yourself.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

DFA AnalyticsBeta Now with Conversion Reporting

When we launched DFA Analytics in beta in November 2009, our goal was to provide users new, powerful reporting and visualization tools to better analyze campaign performance data.

With DFA Analytics you can evaluate account performance at-a-glance with easy-to-understand charts and graphs. You’re able to drill down through reports and view performance by multiple dimensions such as geography, browser, operating system and connection speed, regardless of whether targeting was implemented during campaign set up.

Now with this latest release of DFA Analytics, we’re adding another dimension -- conversion reporting -- to make for an even more robust reporting solution.

A new “Conversions” tab in the DFA Analytics interface provides data on conversion totals, click-through and view through conversions. And advertisers using sales conversion tags can see revenue data in an easily understandable format

Highlights of the new feature include:

• Filtering: A new filtering option by Spotlight conversion tag lets you see view conversion reporting by one or more Spotlight activities at a time.
  
• Pivoting: Tailor reports for more in-depth analysis with the new pivoting feature which allows you to compare one or two metrics at a time across two different dimensions, including geography.
  
• Frequent updates: Currently conversion data is updated several times a day. As we continue development we expect to provide more even more frequent updates of data in the future.
  
  
• Security permissions: The permissions set during the trafficking process, such as the “View Revenue Data” permission, carry over seamlessly to reporting in DFA Analytics. This ensures that sensitive information in your conversion data is kept in the right hands.

We’re working hard to add new reporting features to DoubleClick for Advertisers so expect to see frequent improvements to DFA Analytics in the coming months. To find out more about these new features in DFA Analytics, check out the articles in the Help Center (login required).

Posted by Allyson Taylor, Product Manager

An Important Step Towards Reducing Discrepancies

It is often noted by industry observers that transaction costs for online display media remain unnecessarily high. Discrepancies are a big part of the problem. Every month advertisers and publishers share ad serving reports and go through an arduous reconciliation process, often revealing campaign errors that could have been fixed earlier and kept advertiser budgets and publisher revenues on track.

In response, the IAB introduced the Impression Exchange standard last year. The Impression Exchange facilitates the exchange of ad serving data between publishers and third-party ad servers, providing publishers with daily updates on discrepancies to help flag potential issues. The use of the Impression Exchange is also central to the IAB and 4A’s new standard terms and conditions released earlier this year.

DoubleClick is proud to announce that we are the first advertising technology provider to achieve end to end compliance with the Impression Exchange. Additionally, we are working with our colleagues throughout the industry to ensure interoperability as they also adopt this new standard.

The Impression Exchange offers a number of benefits for advertisers. It reduces the amount of time spent resolving discrepancies and eliminates the need to manage multiple reporting sign-ins for publishers. Also, the IAB and 4A's new terms and conditions state that if a publisher using the Impression Exchange is working with an advertiser who has the solution available but is not using it, then the publisher's numbers will be used for billing.

The Impression Exchange is available today in DoubleClick for Advertisers and DART for Publishers, with integration of our full suite of DoubleClick publisher products planned for the future. In fact, DoubleClick is currently the only solution to adopt this standard. To take advantage of this, make sure you enable this feature in DFA to help fight discrepancies and make display buying more efficient for everyone.

Ari Paparo, Director of Product Management

Investing in Exchange Bidding

We’re happy to announce that we’ve acquired Invite Media, an innovative start-up based in New York and Philadelphia.

The team at Invite Media has developed technology that enables advertisers and agencies to use “real time bidding” to buy display ad space, and to optimize display ad campaigns, across multiple advertising exchanges, all in a single interface.

As we’ve regularly said lately, we’re investing significantly in the display advertising ecosystem and are seeing great momentum. We’ve developed, and are continuing to develop, tools that help both publishers and advertisers take advantage of the opportunities that display advertising offers. These investments are really bearing fruit: publishers are getting improved returns from our suite of publisher solutions; and advertisers and agencies are running effective and creative display campaigns with Google across the web.

Real time bidding technology is an important part of this ecosystem. It enables advertisers and agencies to tailor their bids on an impression-by-impression basis, based on their own data, when bidding on websites that choose to make their ad space available through an advertising exchange. Exchanges that enable real time bidding to all, or some, of their buyers include the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, along with a number of other exchange platforms.

For example, using real time bidding, a retailer running a display ad campaign for a shoe sale can bid $5 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) for ad impressions on a particular news website, but specify that it will bid $10 CPM and show an ad for running shoes if it knows that browser has previously visited the athletics part of its website. Details of the ad impression are passed to the retailer’s bidding platform in real time by the exchange, and the auction takes into account the retailer’s increased bid. This technology lets advertisers and agencies continuously tailor and hone their display ad campaigns, and alter their bids and ads, to reach potential customers they want to attract.

We’re big believers in the benefits and future of this type of display ad buying. But we’re all just at the beginning. It can, and will, be much bigger than it is today, which will benefit the entire ecosystem - advertisers and agencies who can run more effective campaigns, demand-side platforms who offer real-time bidding services to advertisers and agencies, publishers who will get higher prices and more competition for their ad space (while controlling what space they make available, and to whom), and users who will see more useful ads that load faster.

For those who are involved in display advertising, you’ll know that there’s a lot of momentum and buzz in this particular area. In recent months, many agencies and advertisers have been asking us to make a bidding platform available directly to them, as they want to take advantage of the opportunities that real time bidding presents. We’re going to continue to invest significantly in improving Invite Media’s technology and products as a separate platform and, in time, make it work seamlessly with our DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) ad serving product. DFA enables advertisers and agencies to effectively plan, target, serve and measure display ad campaigns across the web. Integrating Invite Media’s technology will help DFA’s clients to easily buy ad space across multiple ad exchanges, as part of managing their broader display ad campaigns. Invite Media’s platform will of course continue to be available to any agency or advertiser, whether they use DFA or not.

Invite Media enables ad space to be bought across multiple exchanges and platforms, with its clients in control of where their ad dollars are spent. It’s going to continue that way. Think of Invite Media as just like DFA itself - technology that delivers ads across multiple websites.

One final note about how this fits in with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Just as Invite Media works across multiple exchanges, this announcement changes nothing about the operation of the Ad Exchange - it will continue to provide exactly the same open and neutral access to ad space for multiple buyers, partner support and API availability as it has always done.

We’re excited by the huge potential of real-time bidding and display advertising. Together with other participants in the industry, we’re working to help them both grow significantly in the years ahead.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

Announcing the Ad Planner 1000 and Greater Integration with AdWords

Today, we are introducing several new features that integrate DoubleClick Ad Planner data with other Google advertising solutions. These features help streamline the process of planning and building online ad campaigns while offering advertisers access to better data for more informed media planning decisions.

Ad Planner Top 1,000 Most Visited Sites

The Ad Planner 1000 list is a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. Published monthly, this list details the number of unique visitors, page views and reach for each site for the top 1,000 sites globally. It’s a great way to quickly reference the most popular sites on the web.

This latest resource represents yet another step in the evolution of Ad Planner in providing reliable traffic and audience information for websites. In conjunction with our Ad Planner 1000 list, the Google Content just released an Ad Planner 1,000 targeting feature. These two features combined provide an example of how Google is working to provide more actionable data for online display advertisers.

Exporting Google Content Network Placements to AdWords
Many Ad Planner users are also AdWords users, and one of the top requested features is to provide a simple and easy way to buy Google Content Network placements advertisers find through Ad Planner. The newly launched Export to AdWords feature enables advertisers to simply export Google Content Network placements from Ad Planner into AdWords. These exported placements will be set up as a new campaign or ad group within AdWords.

For advertisers running text ads or display ads on the Google Content Network, this provides an easy way to build media plans of managed placements. Now translating the great audience research data in Ad Planner into your AdWords campaigns is easier than ever.

Creating Lists in Ad Planner
To help you create your own list of favorite sites to save and add your media plans, we also recently launched “Lists” in Ad Planner. With “Lists”, you can store sites and placements in lists for future use in media plans. To get you started, we’ve made the Ad Planner 1,000 list available to all Ad Planner user accounts for use as a handy reference or for download.

Our goal with the Top 1000 Sites and other recent updates is to deliver new tools for greater planning efficiency and data to make more informed advertising decisions.

Visit www.google.com/adplanner to check out our new features.

Posted by Rohit Kundaji, Software Engineer and Wayne Lin, Product Manager

DFA WebServices API Beta Release on May 8

The latest beta release of the DFA WebServices API, version 1.10.2, will be released on May 8, 2010. Read the release notes (DFA sign-in required).

Posted by Ruben Perez, Customer Solutions Consultant

Audience Interests Now Available in DoubleClick Ad Planner

Advertisers can now build media plans to reach audiences with interests relevant to their campaigns using DoubleClick Ad Planner. Audience interests represent the aggregate interests of visitors to any given website. With today's release, the top ten audience interests for each site are now listed on the profile page for each of the millions of sites profiled in Ad Planner. This provides an important complement to the demographic data that's already widely available. By combining an understanding of a website's demographic appeal with the range of interests of the audience the site attracts, advertisers can get a more complete picture of who they will reach by advertising on the site.

To date in Ad Planner, advertisers have used site categories, which describe the content of websites, as a proxy for audience interests. For example, to plan an ad campaign for a pet product, advertisers would look for sites with content about pets for their media plan. While this may be an appropriate proxy, it also may overlook some great sites, since when people are interested in a topic, they don't only visit sites about that topic. Audience interests in Ad Planner helps advertisers find a wider range of sites for their media plan without compromising their ability to reach the right audience.

With the "Search by audience" tab in Ad Planner, selecting the "Pets" interest will reveal a list of sites that have a high affinity with audiences interested in pets. While some of the sites will be about pets, many additional sites will be about other topics. Take the screenshot below, which is from the Ad Planner profile for a site about politics. Although the site is not about pets, it scores a high (36.9x) affinity with audiences who are interested in pets, which means visitors to this site are 36.9 times more likely to be interested in pets than the average Internet population. A category filter on pets would never locate this site, but an interests search on pets would.

Audience interests gives advertisers a new tool for selecting the best sites for their media plans. To learn more about how we generate the data for audience interests, please refer to our methodology document. To try out the new audience interests features, visit www.google.com/adplanner.

Posted by Ben Chambers, Software Engineer

DoubleClick Rich Media Services is Hiring

Do you want to be at the forefront of the advertising industry? Think you have the talent to keep innovating ads in this fast paced business? A number of openings are now available with Google's exciting and innovative rich media team. You'll be working with some of the biggest creative agencies and media agencies to create interesting new ways of advertising in a creative and dynamic way on high profile sites. If you're interested, or know someone who would be interested, take a look at the full job specs below:

• Rich Media Technical Support Coordinator - Paris
• Rich Media Technical Support Coordinator - Dusseldorf
• Interactive Designer, Rich Media Technical Services - Mountain View, CA or New York
• Rich Media Flash Developer - San Francisco, CA
• Rich Media Technical Web Consultant - San Francisco, CA

Posted by Sally Cole

DoubleClick Platforms Support VAST 2.0

Building a Robust Video Advertising Ecosystem

According to eMarketer, Video ad spend is expected to top 40% year-over-year growth for the next five years, becoming a $5B US Market by 2014. To help fuel this growth, we’re introducing three initiatives to streamline online video advertising for marketers, agencies and publishers. First, DoubleClick now supports the IAB’s VAST 2.0 standard for video ad serving in both DFP and DFA. Second, we've launched VAST Inspector, allowing publishers and advertisers to easily review and test ad tags for VAST compliance. And third, we’ve rolled out the Interactive Media Ads SDK, a Flash library that allows publishers to display VAST 2.0 ads.

Creating Efficiencies with a Common Language

DoubleClick has worked closely with the IAB and other industry participants over the past several years to create a universal language for video advertising, resulting in the Video Ad Serving Template, or VAST. In simple terms, VAST is to video ads as HTML is to web pages - a standardized response. Just as all browsers understand HTML, eventually all video players will understand VAST. Other companies that have recently announced VAST 2.0 compliance include ADTECH, a division of AOL Advertising, and SpotXchange.

With VAST 2.0, publishers currently using DoubleClick In-Stream to monetize video assets can now benefit from third-party ad serving, allowing them to open up more video inventory and sell it more effectively. DoubleClick for Advertisers customers can use VAST to run and measure campaigns across any publisher who accepts VAST 2.0 tags.

Compliance with the latest VAST standard reduces time-consuming, error-prone and expensive trafficking work and technical implementations, allowing ads to be easily viewable in many different video players. Additionally, all DoubleClick clients can take advantage of VAST Inspector to make sure tags have been set up correctly for smooth performance and error-free reporting metrics.

Support for a Broad Range of Development Needs

Over the years, DoubleClick has released different Software Development Kits (SDKs) to support various video ad serving needs. We have now consolidated all of these SDKs into a single Interactive Media Ads SDK (IMA SDK). The IMA SDK combines the power of previous versions, and can request and display all of the most popular video ad formats, whether they are served by DFP, AdSense or any other VAST-compliant ad source. We’ve also rebuilt the IMA SDK from scratch to display ads faster and support the latest standards.

For publishers that have basic video ad serving needs, the IMA Component requires virtually no coding. For large media companies and video distributors, the IMA SDK version allows for complete customization. We’ve also worked alongside the leading video player vendors, including Brigthcove, Ooyala and Longtail Video (which distributes the JW player), to ensure compatibility with our SDK, helping publishers get up-and-running quickly with little technology overhead.

Posted by Campbell Foster

DoubleClick Ad Planner's Audience Measurement Methodologies Submitted for MRC Audit

DoubleClick Ad Planner is our free, online measurement product that helps advertisers and agencies to create media plans, by providing reliable traffic and audience information for websites on which they may wish to advertise. It measures millions of sites in over 40 countries and is used by thousands of advertisers and agencies to build media plans. In recent months, we've been investing significantly in new features for DoubleClick Ad Planner. (Better site data in DoubleClick Ad Planner, Ad Planner updates provide more data, more ways)

To further our commitment to provide reliable data in DoubleClick Ad Planner, we have submitted it for accreditation by the Media Rating Council (MRC). The MRC is an advertising industry group that works to accredit audience measurement services that are valid, reliable, and effective. MRC accreditation is voluntary and some third-party measurement products have submitted for accreditation, as we have; some have not. Once complete, the MRC accreditation will provide independent confirmation that Ad Planner's methodologies, and the processes supporting this technology, adhere to industry standards.

As part of the MRC audit, we're sharing more details about our data sources and methodology. For our traffic measurement, Ad Planner uses a hybrid measurement methodology that combines direct-measured site traffic, through Google Analytics data that publishers have chosen to opt in to provide us, and sample aggregated data from Google products and services. We currently have over 10,000 sites that are contributing direct measured opt-in data to Ad Planner. Our sample data comes from a variety of sources including anonymized, aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. All of this data is aggregated over millions of users and is powered by computer algorithms. The breadth and reliability of this aggregated data means that our traffic measurements are among the most accurate in the industry.

To learn more about Ad Planner's data, we invite you to read our recently updated methodology document. To start using Ad Planner, visit us at www.google.com/adplanner.

Posted by Wayne Lin

Extend Your Reach with Remarketing on the Google Content Network

If you've used remarketing in DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) then you know how effective it can be in delivering highly targeted and relevant ads to those who have previously visited your website. Whatever your campaign goals - to drive conversions and sales activities or to promote brand awareness - remarketing can help drive ROI on your campaigns.

Today, the wider availability of remarketing on the Google Content Network (GCN) is a great development for DFA clients. With this latest release, you can easily develop remarketing lists via the "Audiences" tab in AdWords and remarket your ads to an even wider audience on the GCN.

Here's how the newly integrated workflow for remarketing on the GCN works for DFA users:

• Link your existing remarketing lists in DFA to your Google AdWords account
• Your existing DFA remarketing lists can be linked at the advertiser or network level and if you add a new list it automatically shows up in AdWords.
• Your lists will then be available for review and use within the AdWords user interface
• You can create remarketing lists in DFA based on your existing conversion tags without any additional work.

Benefits of remarketing on the GCN

In addition to remarketing on the sites you run through DFA, you should think about extending your audience reach to the GCN. Why?

• You can achieve greater reach and engage with your audience more deeply. Reach a large number of users multiple times a day, week or month. Because of the large number of websites who join the Google Content Network, you can connect with many users on your lists(s) as they browse these sites.
• You can create customized audiences by building remarketing lists in creative ways. For example, you can find "abandoned shopping cart users" by reaching all the people who created a shopping cart but didn't complete a transaction and even reach people at every stage of your sales funnel.
• You can reach your audiences in different ways by adding other layers of targeting, such as by geography or placement. This would, for example, allow you to reach users only in a certain region on certain websites that you select.
• It's easy. With the integrated workflow between DFA and GCN you can easily create and manage lists in AdWords.
• The price is right. With the Google auction, you achieve efficient pricing that drives the right ROI for you. With CPM and CPC bidding, you optimize your pricing with complete control to adjust the bid higher or lower to reach your campaign goals.

What's more is that remarketing in DFA is now part of the core offering and accessible at no extra cost.

If you're on DFA, contact your account manager to find out more. If you're not, contact us to see how you can sign up for DFA and get started.

Posted by Pamela Eng

DoubleClick, Google Content Network and YouTube at OMMA Global

This week OMMA Global takes over the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, and Google will be there. Here's an overview of what's in store.

On March 17th, get a complete view of the art and science of rich media advertising from Google's resident rich media experts, Peter Crofut and Chip Scovic.

Next day listen to Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management, deliver his keynote presentation on opportunities in online display advertising. He'll cover changes in the display ecosystem, and how everyone can embrace these changes and achieve their goals. If you miss his keynote, be sure to catch the panel right after on Online Advertising - Rapid Recovery or Recession 2.0?, or the late morning session Connect with the Google Content Network with Jason Miller, Group Product Manager, Google Content Network.

Later in the day, Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manager, Video Monetization will participate in the panel Can Online Video Reach Scale for Clients Budgets in 2010? Hear what he, and other experts, have to say about definition, scale and measurement when it comes to online video.

Our DoubleClick, YouTube and Google Content Network teams will also be at the Trade Show to let you know what's new and to answer your product questions.

Interested in attending? Register here, and if you're a MediaPost member, your full-conference pass is FREE. You can also sign up for private networking sessions here. Use the code OGSF20 for a 20% discount.

Posted by Sally Cole

WebServices API v1.9.2 March 13, 2010 Release

DoubleClick is pleased to announce the latest production release of DFA6 WebServices API version 1.9.2 on March 13,2010.

**Please note the WSDL End Point URL for this Production v1.9.2 release has not changed but as with any release, make sure the stub classes in your web service toolkit are updated as new objects, properties and methods have been added.

Production: http://advertisersapi.doubleclick.net/v1.9/api

Release Notes

Read the release notes for the March WebServices API version 1.9.2 release to see details of the new features and enhancements available to you.

Posted by the DoubleClick Advertiser Products team

Better Site Traffic Data in DoubleClick Ad Planner

The mission of DoubleClick Ad Planner, Google's free research and media planning tool formerly named Google Ad Planner, is to provide the deepest, most accurate insight into online audiences possible. This insight helps display advertisers select the best sites for their media plans and drive results for their campaigns.

One of the many data points that DoubleClick Ad Planner provides is site traffic data. In line with Ad Planner's mission, we've improved how we estimate and share this data in order to provide media planners, buyers and researchers with improved data quality and more data visualization options. This builds upon the traffic improvements we made in January of 2009 and is part of our continuous effort to provide trusted insights into online audiences.

This release includes the following two significant improvements:

• Traffic estimates across a number of metrics are now more accurate (Unique user and reach estimates remain the same)
• Direct measured traffic is now included for publishers who opt-ed in their Google Analytics data

Upgrading Site Traffic Estimates

To improve the quality of our site traffic estimates, we have upgraded our traffic estimation model. Our model uses a hybrid methodology that combines sample user data, from various Google products and services, with direct measured site-centric data. The model's direct measured signal is pulled from Google Analytics customer accounts that have chosen to opt-in to sharing their data with Ad Planner. This hybrid approach allows us to use direct measured data to train our traffic estimation models and produce the best estimate for any given site. For more information about how we use opt-in Google Analytics data check out our past blog posts on how Google Analytics data is used in Ad Planner and on replacing traffic estimates with direct measured Google Analytics data.

This latest upgrade improves the accuracy of our estimates by over 10%. We look at a large amount of data and metrics to evaluate our estimates and are continuously working on improving them. We believe our model to be among the more accurate sources of traffic estimation in the industry.

Publishers who would like to complement their site listing with direct measured data are welcome to do so by opt-ing in their Google Analytics data in DoubleClick Ad Planner Publisher Center. We invite publishers who are new to Ad Planner to learn more about using Publisher Center to manage their site profile.

Providing Direct Measured Site Traffic Data

In May 2009, we announced Ad Planner Publisher Center, which made it possible for publishers to opt-in their Google Analytics data to Ad Planner. We've now upgraded site profiles in Ad Planner to display this data in the worldwide charts for Daily Unique Visitors on site profile pages. For publishers who opted-in, their direct measured data is displayed as a solid line in their chart. For example, Gamezhero, a website offering free online games, opted-in their Google Analytics data in June. Here's what their worldwide chart for Daily Unique Visitors looks like now:

In the coming months, we plan to bring direct measured site traffic data to country-level profile views in addition to the worldwide profile views that are currently supported.

Understanding the Data in Ad Planner

To offer additional transparency into how Ad Planner generates its data, we've published a new help document about our methodology. The document provides more details behind how Ad Planner generates site traffic data, in addition to other data, such as demographics, ad information, categories and descriptions.

Getting Started

Give DoubleClick Ad Planner a try at www.google.com/adplanner. We think you'll find it to be a powerful research and media planning tool that makes it easy to find audiences and create well-informed media plans.

Posted by Sally Cole