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