A Look Back at Trends from the April Ad Planner 1000

We’re back on this month with some interesting observations for the April Ad Planner 1000 list. It appears that the change of season had its impact particularly on sports, weather and technology sites as 2011 moved into the spring season in the northern hemisphere.

Major League Baseball here in the United States started the 2011 season strong with their website, mlb.com, experiencing a 58% increase in the number of visitors. Other American sports fared well as they were heading into their respective playoff seasons: basketball's nba.com (+6%) and the National Hockey League's nhl.com (+19%) saw upswings in their site traffic numbers during the month of April.

Deal sites have been experiencing steady growth in traffic month over month according to the AP 1000. In addition to the popular groupon.com (+4%) and livingsocial.com (+11%) sites, coupons.com (+23%), shopathome.com (+18%) and snapdeal.com (+8%) witnessed considerable increases in visitors to their site from the month before. Everyone loves a good deal apparently.

Changing seasons and its effect on weather-related sites also seems to be a consistent trend for sites in the AP 1000. Perhaps people who have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of better weather drove traffic to German weather site wetter.com (+33%), weather.com (+11%) and accuweather.com (+10%).

The arrival of spring seemed to motivate people to get the start on home improvement projects and so we observed increases in the number of unique visitors to retailers such as lowes.com (+14%) and homedepot.com (+6%) in the month of April.

Check back with us next month for May’s AP 1000 to see what April showers will bring to the most visited sites on the web.

Posted by Alex Lin, Product Specialist

The Perfect Ad and the Next Phase of the Display Advertising Revolution: Interview with Neal Mohan

(Cross-posted from the Google Agency Blog)

Following his keynote address titled "There's a Perfect Ad for Everyone" at New York's IAB Innovation Days @ Internet Week, Neal Mohan, our VP of Display Advertising was interviewed by Willow Duttge.

In his interview, Neal shed further insight into the new user revolution taking place in digital media and what it means for advertisers and publishers. Here are a few key takeaways from the interview:

• There’s a big opportunity for advertisers and publishers to deliver an enhanced user experience by employing dynamic rich media formats, delivering ads customized for each user, adopting user-centric metrics to measure campaign success, and offering users much more control over their advertising they see.
• Initial steps publishers and advertisers can take today toward this user-centric goal include looking closely at and listening to their audiences and experimenting with new formats and user experiences.
• The mobile revolution presents new opportunities for advertisers and publishers looking to connect with users in new and more meaningful ways.

And if you missed the livestream of Neal's keynote, watch it here.

Posted by the Google Display Team

Cranking Up the Speed of DFA Leads to Better Mobile Ad Performance

A little while ago, Google embarked on an ambitious project to make the web faster. We’ve taken a number of steps towards this goal, everything from helping online properties measure the speed of their sites with Google Analytics and improve their performance with Page Speed, to enabling our AdSense partners to load their pages faster. Today we’ve made another exciting leap forward...speeding up ad serving in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

Here, in a nutshell, is how we did it. We streamlined the process of issuing the DFA ad request and returning the ad to the browser by removing a step called the client-side redirect, and in the process shortened the time it takes to serve an ad. This speed-up is especially noticeable on mobile devices, where the extra steps in the ad serving process can slow down the user experience by an average of 1.5 seconds.

Even more interesting, when we looked at how faster ads on mobile devices affected interaction rates, we discovered that click-through rates increased by 12% -- a substantial difference! This project shows that speeding up the web both improves the experience for users and creates value for our partners...a true benefit for all.

Richard Rabbat, Product Manager and Lloyd Thompson, Software Engineer

Criteo Gets Great Results Retargeting Audiences at Scale with Real-Time Bidding

Real-time bidding (RTB) solves the challenge of efficiently and effectively acquiring ad space online. It requires two distinct layers of technology: a “pipe” and a “brain.”

The “pipe” provides a server-side connection to an inventory source and announces each impression individually as they become available for purchase. In June of 2010, Criteo integrated with DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s RTB API to access a “pipe” for RTB.

The “brain” is a buying system responsible for making the best inventory acquisition decisions possible, on behalf of the advertiser. Criteo’s platform, which does retargeting on a pure performance, pay-per-click (PPC) basis, is a highly intelligent “brain” of RTB. Criteo submits a different price for every single impression it sees. As an advanced buyer, Criteo manages to handle 100% of the ADX impressions it sees, and submits hundreds of millions of bids every day.

Together, Criteo and DoubleClick Ad Exchange are producing great results. Criteo’s VP of Marketing, Karen Dayan reports, “The relevance of our advertising is demonstrated by the great CTRs and great conversion rates we deliver. For many publishers we regularly deliver CTRs of 1%--which is huge, when the average display CTR is closer to .1%.”

Criteo’s Chief Buying Officer, Jonathan Wolf, says, “Real-time bidding is enabling us to further scale our business, and drive increased volume and performance for our advertisers, while also improving CPMs for publishers. We appreciate the global reach of Google and how easy it is for us to turn on RTB in a new market. That’s what makes DoubleClick Ad Exchange so valuable to us.”

Today, Criteo is a high volume, global buyer with live campaigns through ADX in 19 different countries. Google’s Head of Buyer Development for ADX, Chip Hall, says, “Criteo’s technological focus and entrepreneurial spirit has made them a great partner for DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Their sophistication in buying via real-time bidding on a global scale is impressive and has made them one of our top global partners.”

For more details on how Criteo uses DoubleClick Ad Exchange for retargeting audiences at scale, download the full case study here.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Delivering Mobile Rich Media Ads to Mobile Apps with AdMob

In January, we announced mobile support in DoubleClick Studio for rich media ads that are based on HTML5 standards. Today, we’re expanding the number of places that these creatives can be delivered in mobile. Now, both standard and rich media ads trafficked in DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) can run on AdMob inventory. Acquired by Google last May, AdMob is a mobile display ad network comprised of 89,000+ mobile sites and apps across 230 countries. DoubleClick is the only 3rd party ad serving platform from which rich media ads can be delivered into the AdMob network.

Today, through the mobile rich media beta with AdMob, advertisers can build HTML5 ads in DoubleClick Studio and run them across select apps on the AdMob network. AdMob’s certification of DoubleClick Rich Media covers three main HTML5 mobile rich media formats: banners, interstitials and expandables. When HTML5 ads are built in DoubleClick Studio, trafficked in DFA and run on AdMob, advertisers benefit from the integration of their mobile rich media metrics within the same reporting system they’re using for other channels such as search, online display and in-stream.

To date, advertisers have enjoyed the ability to build an ad once and run it anywhere with online display and rich media ads. Our work with AdMob gets us one step closer to making this possible for mobile display advertising too. At Google, we are committed to helping mobile scale and perform even better for brand advertisers.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Making Creative Trafficking More Efficient in DFA

This month we are releasing two highly requested features for creative trafficking in DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA): Flash variable detection and validation.

This update alleviates a major pain point for traffickers when uploading creatives in DFA. Previously traffickers needed to use a number of tools in order to detect and validate Flash variables in their creatives. Additionally, DFA did not detect any FlashVars that were written in ActionScript 3 so each one had to be added into the system manually. As a result, traffickers often found this process to be very time-consuming.

Now, when uploading Flash In-Page creatives, DFA automatically detects FlashVars for files written in both ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3. We also built Flash validation directly into the interface so traffickers can do all of their work in one place instead of enlisting mulitple tools to get the same work accomplished.

The new “Override ad-level click-through” check box (as indicated above) also provides greater transparency into the URL for each exit.

These new features are just the latest in our continual efforts to make DFA more efficient and easier to use. Keep following us on this blog or in the DFA Help Center (login required) to read up on the latest product developments.

Posted by Jai Mani, Product Specialist

An Interface Facelift for DFA

Over the last ten years, DoubleClick for Advertisers has gone through many revisions and added scores of new features. The launch of DFA6 in 2008, in particular, was a significant step in improving the overall usability of the trafficking system. Now, we are entering another phase in delivering usability improvements across the DFA interface as we work to standardize DFA’s look and feel across the system.

As we roll out these enhancements you will notice that pages within the DFA interface will be:

• Shorter because we’re removing unnecessary white space
  
• Easier to scan and read because we’re incorporating color to help distinguish field labels from their values
  
• Easier to use because we’re standardizing elements across the user interface - such as buttons, drop downs and text fields

At first, we’ll be giving a preview of the updated look in the Admin tab. Soon to follow will be the Advertisers and Campaigns tabs.

These changes will definitely be noticeable, but remember: we’re not removing any fields or changing how DFA works; all the workflows will be staying exactly the same. We’re just making what we’ve got easier to use.

Keep on the lookout for other user experience enhancements coming soon!

Posted by Mike Gordon, User Experience Designer