New Ad Planner 1000 List for August

Check out the latest Ad Planner 1000 for August 2010. Summer is winding down here in the northern hemisphere. People are finishing up vacations, soaking up the last rays of the summer sun and preparing their children for the back to school season.

Back to School
At least in the United States, back to school sends parents and kids into a frenzy of excitement or dread depending on which way you look at it. But one thing stands in common - shopping! Retailers hoping to cash in on the back to school season saw a spurt in their site traffic during the month of August.

A popular resource for dorm room decorating, ikea.com saw a 14% increase in the number of unique visitors to their site and the home and garden retailer, bedbathandbeyond.com cracked the AP 1000 for the first time at #999.

A new fall wardrobe to start the school year is in order too and this was reflected in the increase in traffic going to clothing retailers sites such as kohls.com (+10%), hm.com (+10%), gap.com (+9%) and jcpenney.com (+9%).

Not surprisingly, sites offering school supplies were also positively impacted by the back to school season: staples.com (+6%) and apple.com (+9%). An interesting but perhaps unrelated trend in the AP 1000 for August was the rise in sites offering computer security software: symantec.com (+10%), kaspersky.com (+10%) and avast.com (+9%).

Getting an early start on homework perhaps? The increase in unique users to reference sites such as thefreedictionary.com (+13%), wikipedia.org (+11%), thesaurus.com (+11%) seems to suggest that many students are diving into school work these first few days of the school year.

End of Summer Travel
Now that we’ve covered some of the top risers in the AP 1000, there are also some declines in site traffic to report too. Travel and hospitality companies saw decreases in people visiting their sites as people were winding down their summer vacation plans.

• Travel booking sites: hotwire.com (-16%), priceline.com (-16%), expedia.com (-13%), kayak.com (-11%), orbitz.com (-9%), travelocity.com (-9%).
  
• Hotels and airlines: marriott.com (-11%), hilton.com (-11%), and airlines aa.com (-9%), southwest (-9%).

In Tech News
The latest hot trends for social, mobile and location-based services continues to do well with foursquare.com debuting at #985 on the list. Group buying services also continue to gain popularity, groupon.com (+22%), livingsocial.com (entered list). Finally, Michael Arrington’s work ethic seems to be paying off in terms of visitors to his site -- techcrunch.com grew 21% from the month of July to August.

Posted by Alex Lin, Product Specialist

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

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