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

DFA AnalyticsBeta Now with Conversion Reporting

When we launched DFA Analytics in beta in November 2009, our goal was to provide users new, powerful reporting and visualization tools to better analyze campaign performance data.

With DFA Analytics you can evaluate account performance at-a-glance with easy-to-understand charts and graphs. You’re able to drill down through reports and view performance by multiple dimensions such as geography, browser, operating system and connection speed, regardless of whether targeting was implemented during campaign set up.

Now with this latest release of DFA Analytics, we’re adding another dimension -- conversion reporting -- to make for an even more robust reporting solution.

A new “Conversions” tab in the DFA Analytics interface provides data on conversion totals, click-through and view through conversions. And advertisers using sales conversion tags can see revenue data in an easily understandable format

Highlights of the new feature include:

• Filtering: A new filtering option by Spotlight conversion tag lets you see view conversion reporting by one or more Spotlight activities at a time.
  
• Pivoting: Tailor reports for more in-depth analysis with the new pivoting feature which allows you to compare one or two metrics at a time across two different dimensions, including geography.
  
• Frequent updates: Currently conversion data is updated several times a day. As we continue development we expect to provide more even more frequent updates of data in the future.
  
  
• Security permissions: The permissions set during the trafficking process, such as the “View Revenue Data” permission, carry over seamlessly to reporting in DFA Analytics. This ensures that sensitive information in your conversion data is kept in the right hands.

We’re working hard to add new reporting features to DoubleClick for Advertisers so expect to see frequent improvements to DFA Analytics in the coming months. To find out more about these new features in DFA Analytics, check out the articles in the Help Center (login required).

Posted by Allyson Taylor, Product Manager

An Important Step Towards Reducing Discrepancies

It is often noted by industry observers that transaction costs for online display media remain unnecessarily high. Discrepancies are a big part of the problem. Every month advertisers and publishers share ad serving reports and go through an arduous reconciliation process, often revealing campaign errors that could have been fixed earlier and kept advertiser budgets and publisher revenues on track.

In response, the IAB introduced the Impression Exchange standard last year. The Impression Exchange facilitates the exchange of ad serving data between publishers and third-party ad servers, providing publishers with daily updates on discrepancies to help flag potential issues. The use of the Impression Exchange is also central to the IAB and 4A’s new standard terms and conditions released earlier this year.

DoubleClick is proud to announce that we are the first advertising technology provider to achieve end to end compliance with the Impression Exchange. Additionally, we are working with our colleagues throughout the industry to ensure interoperability as they also adopt this new standard.

The Impression Exchange offers a number of benefits for advertisers. It reduces the amount of time spent resolving discrepancies and eliminates the need to manage multiple reporting sign-ins for publishers. Also, the IAB and 4A's new terms and conditions state that if a publisher using the Impression Exchange is working with an advertiser who has the solution available but is not using it, then the publisher's numbers will be used for billing.

The Impression Exchange is available today in DoubleClick for Advertisers and DART for Publishers, with integration of our full suite of DoubleClick publisher products planned for the future. In fact, DoubleClick is currently the only solution to adopt this standard. To take advantage of this, make sure you enable this feature in DFA to help fight discrepancies and make display buying more efficient for everyone.

Ari Paparo, Director of Product Management

Investing in Exchange Bidding

We’re happy to announce that we’ve acquired Invite Media, an innovative start-up based in New York and Philadelphia.

The team at Invite Media has developed technology that enables advertisers and agencies to use “real time bidding” to buy display ad space, and to optimize display ad campaigns, across multiple advertising exchanges, all in a single interface.

As we’ve regularly said lately, we’re investing significantly in the display advertising ecosystem and are seeing great momentum. We’ve developed, and are continuing to develop, tools that help both publishers and advertisers take advantage of the opportunities that display advertising offers. These investments are really bearing fruit: publishers are getting improved returns from our suite of publisher solutions; and advertisers and agencies are running effective and creative display campaigns with Google across the web.

Real time bidding technology is an important part of this ecosystem. It enables advertisers and agencies to tailor their bids on an impression-by-impression basis, based on their own data, when bidding on websites that choose to make their ad space available through an advertising exchange. Exchanges that enable real time bidding to all, or some, of their buyers include the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, along with a number of other exchange platforms.

For example, using real time bidding, a retailer running a display ad campaign for a shoe sale can bid $5 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) for ad impressions on a particular news website, but specify that it will bid $10 CPM and show an ad for running shoes if it knows that browser has previously visited the athletics part of its website. Details of the ad impression are passed to the retailer’s bidding platform in real time by the exchange, and the auction takes into account the retailer’s increased bid. This technology lets advertisers and agencies continuously tailor and hone their display ad campaigns, and alter their bids and ads, to reach potential customers they want to attract.

We’re big believers in the benefits and future of this type of display ad buying. But we’re all just at the beginning. It can, and will, be much bigger than it is today, which will benefit the entire ecosystem - advertisers and agencies who can run more effective campaigns, demand-side platforms who offer real-time bidding services to advertisers and agencies, publishers who will get higher prices and more competition for their ad space (while controlling what space they make available, and to whom), and users who will see more useful ads that load faster.

For those who are involved in display advertising, you’ll know that there’s a lot of momentum and buzz in this particular area. In recent months, many agencies and advertisers have been asking us to make a bidding platform available directly to them, as they want to take advantage of the opportunities that real time bidding presents. We’re going to continue to invest significantly in improving Invite Media’s technology and products as a separate platform and, in time, make it work seamlessly with our DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) ad serving product. DFA enables advertisers and agencies to effectively plan, target, serve and measure display ad campaigns across the web. Integrating Invite Media’s technology will help DFA’s clients to easily buy ad space across multiple ad exchanges, as part of managing their broader display ad campaigns. Invite Media’s platform will of course continue to be available to any agency or advertiser, whether they use DFA or not.

Invite Media enables ad space to be bought across multiple exchanges and platforms, with its clients in control of where their ad dollars are spent. It’s going to continue that way. Think of Invite Media as just like DFA itself - technology that delivers ads across multiple websites.

One final note about how this fits in with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Just as Invite Media works across multiple exchanges, this announcement changes nothing about the operation of the Ad Exchange - it will continue to provide exactly the same open and neutral access to ad space for multiple buyers, partner support and API availability as it has always done.

We’re excited by the huge potential of real-time bidding and display advertising. Together with other participants in the industry, we’re working to help them both grow significantly in the years ahead.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management