Less Shopping and More Travel: Two Top Trends for the January 2011 Ad Planner 1000

A new year often means new resolutions, a time to recover from the excesses of the holiday season and plan for the new year. As reflected in January’s Ad Planner 1000, anyway, it seems that less shopping, tax season and travel are particularly top of mind with people navigating the web.

With the holiday season over retail sites took a hit in January as it appears consumers have scaled back on purchases - at least in the online world. Popular sites in the AP 1000 such as target.com (-40%), shoplocal.com (-38%), kohls.com (-38%), bestbuy.com (-35%), walmart.com (-35%) and sears.com (-32%) all saw significant declines in the number of unique visitors to their site from the month before. But special deals to counteract the expected drop in retail sales can work magic - as it did in for the deal site, livingsocial.com. Its Amazon.com $20-for-$10 offer resulted in over 1.3 million vouchers sold and a 47% increase in the number of visitors to its site for that month.

And while people are spending less, they might be hoping to see tax refunds, and thus the appearances of two tax-related sites in the January list: the irs.gov entered the list at #449 and intuit.com, makers of the popular TurboTax software, entered at #321.

It’s possible that finding new jobs and new destinations are popular resolutions this year if the surge in traffic to career and travel sites are any indication. Job search site indeed.com (+26%) saw more than a quarter of their unique visitors increase in January and sites careerbuilder.com (+21%) and monster.com (+20%) also fared well with increases in traffic from the month before.

The increase in visitors to travel-related sites was particularly notable in January’s AP 1000 list. Tripadvisor.com (+33%), booking.com (+33%), orbitz.com (+31%), travelocity.com (+31%) -- all saw more than a third more unique visitors to their site than in December. While sites hotels.com (+29%), expedia.com (+21%), easyjet.com (+20%) and priceline.com (+16%) also saw notable boosts in traffic.

Check back with us next month to see when we publish the data for February’s AP 1000. We’re looking forward to seeing how cupid’s arrow will work his magic on sites in the AP 1000 list.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing

Real-Time Display Advertising State of the Industry

The ability to buy and sell impressions in real-time is a major enabling feature of the fundamental changes powering the display marketplace today. Impressions are coming up for sale as they occur in real-time. Savvy buyers are evaluating these impressions and making data-driven decisions about their value. Display advertising is becoming more accountable, scalable and lucrative.

To learn more about this real-time trend, we recently undertook an industry study with Digiday, surveying more than 300 digital media buyers, agencies, intermediaries and publishers about their thoughts on real-time display advertising. Highlights from these findings will be presented today at DIGIDAY:ONMEDIA in Los Angeles. Some of the revealing findings include:

• 88% of buyers plan to buy via RTB in 2011, up from 75% last year.
  
  
• 47% of media buyers say that the benefits or RTB will increase their overall digital advertising budget this year (16% said it would not, 37% were unsure).
  
  
• Spending on RTB is quickly moving out of the "test budget" range: 79% of buyers estimate that more than 10% of their digital display budgets will go to RTB in 2011. 33% estimate that 50% or more of their digital display budget will go to RTB. And 7% estimate 90-100% of their digital display budget will go to RTB.
  
  
• 29% of media intermediaries (such as DSPs, ad networks, and exchanges) anticipate their volume of real-time bidding will increase by 100% or more versus last year. 19% believe it will go up by at least 200%.
  
  
• More formats are moving to RTB: 34% of buyers say they are extremely or very likely to purchase rich media ads via RTB this year, 32% are extremely or very likely to purchase dynamic creative ads via RTB, 20% are extremely or very likely to purchase mobile display ads via RTB, 18% are extremely or very likely to purchase in-stream video via RTB and 14% are extremely or very likely to purchase mobile rich media via RTB.
  
  
• Nearly half (48%) of publishers surveyed say they plan to increase the amount of inventory they will make available via RTB. 28% are still deciding. Only 24% said they were not planning to increase RTB inventory.
  
  

Real-time bidding is a major enabling force behind this sea change in the way digital media is transacted in today’s advertising marketplace. Yet, RTB is just part of an explosion of technology advancements in display. Read more about this technological Big Bang.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Coming Soon: New Agency and Advertiser Pages in DoubleClick Search

(originally posted on the DoubleClick Search Blog)

In the blog post from January 18, we mentioned that we’ve been working on an updated version of DoubleClick Search, called V3. We’ll soon be introducing some of the features from V3 to the current version of DoubleClick Search: the new Agency Home and Advertiser Home pages. In addition, we'll be adding a unified DoubleClick Search sign-in page on the Google domain. Benefits include:

• Performance: This move to the Google infrastructure will provide a faster and more stable environment for DoubleClick Search with the Agency/Advertiser release, and allow us to make product changes more quickly in future releases.
• Instance consolidation: You'll be able to access agencies and advertisers from all instances at one sign-in page.

• Workflow: It will be easier and faster to select agencies and advertisers, to display only the advertisers that matter to you, and to access the Reporting Center.

• Preparation for V3: These changes will help to pave the way for even bigger changes in the coming months: the full release of the updated DoubleClick Search V3! Come see us at SES in NYC on March 22 for the premiere of DoubleClick Search V3.

To see a preview of the DoubleClick Search Home release, sign up for the webinar on February 24.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team