Display advertising: “WATCH THIS SPACE”

Last year, the travel industry—like many others—was having a difficult time. To grow its business, Hawaiian Airlines created and ran an engaging and interactive display ad campaign on the Google Display Network (comprising over a million partner websites, as well as Google sites like YouTube), encouraging people to fly to Hawaii. The campaign worked. Hawaiian Airlines increased online ticket orders and revenues by three percent in a very difficult year, and now spends 15 percent of its advertising budget on the Google Display Network.

We’re now proud to see thousands of great display advertising stories like this every month—from large and small advertisers. If you’ve read this blog or the press over the past few months, you’ll know that display advertising is no longer just the “next big business” for Google—it’s already central to what we and our clients do.

Advertising with Google used to be all about four lines of text, on Google.com and on our partner sites. No longer. Did you know that, outside of ads alongside search results, more than 40 percent of the ads that we show are now non-text ads? And that doesn’t include the 45 billion ads that our DoubleClick advertising products serve every day across the web.

We get excited by display advertising for a number of reasons. First, we now know that we can use all the technology and expertise that we’ve developed in search and search advertising to improve display advertising for users, advertisers and publishers, right across the web. Second, helping advertisers and publishers to easily deliver the most engaging, relevant, creative and valuable ad contains the sort of huge technical challenge that we love. And third, great display advertising helps to fund great content on the web.

Display advertising has come a long way from the ugly banner ads and pop-ups of the mid 1990s, but there’s still huge improvements to come. As we’ve indicated in previous posts, our efforts are focused on three core areas.

Simplifying display advertising

Many advertisers still don’t bother with display advertising because buying ads across millions of sites in various formats causes too many headaches. We’ve been working to simplify the process for advertisers and agencies so they can buy with ease. For example, our DoubleClick platform manages the complexity of planning, scheduling, measuring and optimizing ad campaigns across the web. And Teracent’s technology can automatically tailor and select the creative elements in an ad, and adjust them based on location, language, weather and even the past performance of ads, to show the optimal ad.

Delivering better performance

We’re focused on helping advertisers get the best results from their campaigns—by enabling creative branding campaigns, precise targeting, wide reach and effective measurement. Over recent years, we’ve added a ton of new features to YouTube and the Google Display Network, to help advertisers get—and measure—the results they’re after. From remarketing to Campaign Insights to video targeting on YouTube, we’re building tools that are helping advertisers get great results and enabling them to run some of the most amazing ad campaigns the world has ever seen.

Opening the display ecosystem

Like search advertising, display advertising should be accessible and effective for every advertiser and publisher, from the smallest corner store to the biggest global brand. Display advertising will grow if it is more open and inclusive. Products like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which enable publishers and agencies to buy and sell ad space in an open, competitive, real-time environment, are making it happen. Every day, there are more ad calls on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange than there are trades on all the world’s stock exchanges combined.

WATCH THIS SPACE

Our single message about display advertising can be summed up in three words: “WATCH THIS SPACE.”

Starting today, we’re going to be talking about our vision for display advertising with a campaign called “WATCH THIS SPACE.” As part of this, you might see ads across the web, in print and maybe even elsewhere. Drop on by the site, read about what’s happening today in display advertising at Google and—even more importantly—what’s yet to come!



Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management