TellApart Yields Tremendous Returns with Real-Time Bidding

We’ve written before that DoubleClick Ad Exchange has seen rapid uptake of real-time bidding (RTB). Ad Exchange inventory bought through RTB jumped from 8% in January 2010 to 66% in April 2011 -- a tremendous upswing in just over one year.

One company contributing to this upswing is TellApart. The company’s pay-per-conversion business model brings more dollars to display by ensuring ROI for e-commerce retailers. It’s adding as much as 8% in total revenue growth for top sites like Diapers.com, eBags, Drugstore.com, CafePress, Hayneedle and more.

Josh McFarland, CEO and Co-Founder of TellApart reports, “In our move to real-time bidding, we saw both our click-through rates and the volume of clicks increase, which means we’re getting more clicks at the right price. We’re increasing our spend with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, because we know every new dollar spent returns new revenue for our clients.”

For more details on how TellApart uses DoubleClick Ad Exchange as a core component of its model, download the full case study here.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

A new way to measure unique visitors to a site in Ad Planner

With DoubleClick Ad Planner our goal is to identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions. We’re constantly looking to add to and improve the quality of data presented in Ad Planner, and we’re pleased to announce a significant change to our algorithm that will improve how we derive the unique visitors (users) metric.

The unique visitors (users) metric is the estimated, unduplicated number of people who visit a site over a specific month. This measurement is key to understanding what percentage of your target audience you can reach at any given site.

We are rolling out our improved algorithm across all of the sites in Ad Planner today, April 19, 2011, and as a result we expect that you will start seeing an increase in the number of unique visitors for most sites. We’ve spent the past year on intensive research to build this new model and are very excited to finally put it into effect.

Note that the methodology for all other metrics in Ad Planner remains the same with this change. For more information on how we compile the data in Ad Planner reference this article in the Ad Planner Help Center.

Posted by Roshan Khan, Product Manager

Tracking Mobile Conversions in DFA

When talking to advertisers about mobile advertising, one topic that comes up again and again is the need for consistent, independent ROI tracking for their mobile campaigns. As users spend even more time in Mobile Apps and on the Mobile Web, these have become excellent channels for advertisers to reach their customers. However, despite the growth in scale and innovation in formats it has remained difficult to use just a single solution to track the performance of all those campaigns and to compare them to their online advertising counterparts.

We’ve been listening and are excited to announce two improvements to our mobile ad serving solution today that will help advertisers do just that.

Tracking conversions for mobile ads
First up, we are pleased to introduce conversion reporting for mobile ads in DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA). Now it is possible to see post-click conversions for mobile ads right alongside your existing conversion reports for display ads, enabling even more efficient allocation of budget.

To enable conversion tracking for a mobile site you can use exactly the same Floodlight tags as regular DFA conversion tracking. We’ve optimized the system to handle the quirks of cookie handling and javascript support on different mobile devices so it now supports a huge range of mobile phones, from older generation phones to the latest model smart phones covering the vast majority of the mobile traffic that we see. In addition, because it uses Floodlight, mobile conversion tracking in DFA allows you to use conversion counters and even e-commerce tags with your mobile campaigns so that you can track not just visits and actions but value too.

Now that mobile conversion reporting is captured in DFA, you have more information at your disposal to better understand the elements (search, display, apps and websites) driving traffic to your mobile websites and to compare them directly to the online campaigns you are already running.

Click trackers for mobile placements
DFA users create click trackers to record the number of clicks on text links, links in emails, or on other elements that are hard-coded on a website. They can also be used to track clicks on creatives that are not delivered by DFA, including clicks on distinct parts of multi-file creatives.

Now we are allowing clicking tracking in DFA to include mobile placements so that you can track clicks on site-served creatives or text ads (such as search ads) on mobile sites, with reporting by platform, carrier and country. These click-trackers are also optimized to use the same conversion tracking system as regular mobile ads in DFA.

>> Read more (login required)

Expect to see further enhancements in the coming months to DFA to enable you to serve mobile ads with the same ease and functionality as the display ads that you already serve through the system.

Posted by Alex Gawley, Product Manager

Travel and Taxes are Top of Mind in February’s Ad Planner 1000

The second installment of the Ad Planner 1000 list for 2011 saw similar trends to January in a few major areas, while a couple major events drove attention to additional sites.

Travel is still on the rise, as the popular travel aggregators priceline.com, travelocity.com, travelzoo.com (+10%), and booking.com (+7%) had a strong showing for a second consecutive month.

While not as drastic as the previous month, well known outlets such as sears.com (-16%), walmart.com (-13%), costco.com (-13%), bestbuy.com (-11%), overstock.com (-10%), macys.com(-9%), and jcpenney.com (-7%) still saw declines in visitors to their sites.

Also following last month’s trend, the upcoming tax season continues to boost irs.gov (+45%) and TurboTax sales keep driving up intuit.com (+10%). Folks are also turning to tax advisors, with hrblock.com making its 2011 debut in the top sites list at #803.

Sports in February saw an end to the football season (with a thrilling Green Bay victory), and a subsequent drop to nfl.com (-49%). To pick up the slack, the 2011 NBA All-Star Game was played in Los Angeles this month and drove up traffic for nba.com (+12%).

After multiple delays and rescheduling, the long-awaited final mission of Space Shuttle Discovery finally took off on February 24th. This event and the anticipation leading up to it also likely launched interest in nasa.gov (+24%).

Finally in tech news, the 2011 Mobile World Congress took place in mid-February in Barcelona. Google announced Android 3.0, its first OS built for tablets and android.com debuted on our list at #680.

Posted by Alex Lin, Product Specialist

DoubleClick Search V3: More Features to Whet Your Appetite

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)

The DoubleClick Search team has been hard at work to bring you a slew of great new features you’ve been asking for. A month ago we released the new agency and advertiser home pages. Two weeks ago we unveiled the DS3 preview. Today we continue the momentum with the launch of three new features in DS3. All of these are live and available to use starting today.

Find What’s Most Important With Filters
With filters you can sift your data down to just the campaigns, ad groups, ads or keywords that you care about. Filtering can be done on statistics such as clicks, impressions, or transactions as well as attributes like campaign budget, or keyword name. Filters are also saved as part of the report view. Once you’ve saved a report view it’s as easy as two clicks to review your best performing keywords, find ad groups with unusually high cost per clicks or pretty much any way you’d like to slice and dice your search advertising campaigns.

Really large bulksheets can take a long time to upload, and previously it was difficult to tell just how far along it was. But there’s one thing worse than not knowing when the upload will complete. It’s realizing you mistakenly clicked on the wrong file and watching helplessly in horror as it gets uploaded and processed.

Starting today, users of DS3 no longer have to worry - bulksheet uploads now include a progress bar, as well as the ability to cancel any upload in flight. We can’t help you pick the right file the first time, but now you can easily correct an errant click.

Drag and Drop Customized Columns
DS3 already includes powerful column customization that lets you customize and save report views. Today we’ve made column choosing even easier by adding the ability to drag and drop columns to change the order they show for reports.

This is just the beginning - we’ve got a ton of new features in store for you over the coming weeks and months.

If you like what you see already and are interested in upgrading to DoubleClick Search V3, contact your TAM for more information.

Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog for the latest!

Posted by Vanessa Howell, Product Manager