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