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