The three laws of display advertising physics

As we’ve written on our blogs before, new technologies are profoundly improving display advertising. In the last few years, there’s been a technological Big Bang, creating new ways to buy display ads across the web: exchanges involving real time bidding, demand side platforms, improved ad networks and more.

These technologies are enabling marketers to seize the digital moment and run far more effective campaigns, but just as the universe changed dramatically following the Big Bang, the digital buying marketplace has changed forever, requiring some new “laws.”

The three laws of display advertising physics

1. The Theory of Relativity: What’s better, a demand side platform, or an ad network? It depends

Our clients often ask us if they should use our DSP (Invite Media), or our network (the Google Display Network), especially as the distinction between the two platforms blurs. We often answer with an analogy from the world of stock investing (it’s not perfect, but it’s a first step). The first question is whether to buy and sell yourself, or engage someone else to manage your portfolio:

• The online broker model: For buyers looking to manage the details of their ad buying and use their own technology and data, a DSP like Invite Media is often the best option. This is similar to an online broker that lets you log in and closely manage your investments (and, as with Invite Media, get access to special trading features, market intelligence and expert advice).

• The stockbroker model: Some marketers have a desired campaign result (such as a target reach for a new car campaign, or a number of conversions for a sporting tickets campaign). They want to outsource the details and have a customized, transparent media solution designed for their campaign. The Google Display Network most often fits this bill—it’s like having a stock broker manage your portfolio to meet your investment goals.
  

Both platforms enable access to huge pools of ad space, deliver the same types of ad formats and facilitate similar ways of targeting ads. Again, it’s like buying stocks—whether you choose an online broker or stockbroker, you can select from thousands of types of stocks, markets and investment products.

2. Fusion Theory: Why contextual and audience buying release more energy when combined

Some have suggested that audience buying (delivering ads based on users’ interests) and contextual advertising (targeting ads to content) is an either/or proposition. However, we believe it’s the combination of the two that is most powerful.

• With effective contextual advertising, you can get the maximum reach while delivering your message in highly relevant locations—like news articles related to your products—in the precise moment a person indicates interest. Contextual advertising is vital to building brand awareness and reaching new prospects at relevant moments.

• Audience buying—such as remarketing—enables marketers to reach people who have already shown an interest in a particular topic or brand. This is especially effective for re-engaging consumers.

Marketers combining these types of buying can reach a broad range of people, then hone their messages to particularly good prospects to maximize the impact of their campaigns. We’ve seen that this approach drives better campaign performance; third party studies back it up.

3. The Law of Perpetual Motion: Why marketers should embrace a rapidly moving industry

Display advertising is in a state of constant motion, caused by the acceleration of online media consumption and the explosion in new technologies.

• Advances in computer science are driving changes in advertising. To illustrate: creativity has always been at the heart of good display advertising. But look at what’s become widely used by marketers in just the last few years—rich media technology, new mobile and video formats and dynamic creative technology that can take a creative ad concept and automatically bring it to life over millions of websites.

• The industry is literally moving faster as media buyers start to increase their use of real-time bidding (RTB) technology, which allows them to evaluate and bid on ad space on an impression-by-impression basis. We recently undertook an industry study with Digiday, surveying more than 300 digital media buyers, agencies and intermediaries about their thoughts on RTB in the year ahead. Some revealing findings:

• 88% of buyers plan to buy via RTB in 2011, up from 75% last year.
• 47% of media buyers say that the benefits or RTB will increase their overall digital advertising budget this year (16% said it would not, 37% were unsure).
• Spending on RTB is quickly moving out of the "test budget" range: 79% of buyers estimate that more than 10% of their digital display budgets will go to RTB in 2011. 33% estimate that 50% or more of their digital display budget will go to RTB. And 7% estimate 90-100% of their digital display budget will go to RTB.
• 29% of media intermediaries (such as DSPs, ad networks, and exchanges) anticipate their volume of real-time bidding will increase by 100% or more versus last year. 19% believe it will go up by at least 200%.
• More formats are moving to RTB: 34% of buyers say they are extremely or very likely to purchase rich media ads via RTB this year, 32% are extremely or very likely to purchase dynamic creative ads via RTB, 20% are extremely or very likely to purchase mobile display ads via RTB, 18% are extremely or very likely to purchase in-stream video via RTB and 14% are extremely or very likely to purchase mobile rich media via RTB.
• Nearly half (48%) of publishers surveyed say they plan to increase the amount of inventory they will make available via RTB. 28% are still deciding. Only 24% said they were not planning to increase RTB inventory.

We’re seeing this rapid growth and change first-hand. Since we acquired Invite Media in June 2010, the number of advertisers on the platform has doubled; agency spend has grown by almost 300%. And spending on display ads on the Google Display Network is growing more than 100% annually in a large number of countries. Publishers are benefiting from these changes as well (for example, a recent study found that publishers who participated in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange see an average 188% revenue lift when the exchange wins the auction).

In this new era, the most effective campaigns will be driven by marketers who rethink how they connect with people in this rapidly moving industry. Whether it means partnering with technology providers to buy better, or exploring the infinite possibilities of today’s creative units, embracing new media and technology provides a key way for marketers to differentiate and grow their businesses in a new universe.

The future

Unlike the Big Bang, the expansion in our industry is not chaotic or random. We’re moving towards a single platform that seamlessly incorporates the best technologies for planning, buying, serving, creating and measuring display ads; one that will enable marketers to effectively reach and engage people across desktops, tablets, videos, mobile devices and TVs.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

Webinar Alert - Contextual targeting: performance at scale

We'd like to remind you about an upcoming webinar on how to drive results with contextual targeting. The event is on Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST.

In this webinar, learn more about how contextual targeting can drive results for your clients - e.g.:

• Contextual targeting strategies for specific marketing objectives
• The Contextual Targeting Tool, build and optimize better-performing campaigns in minutes
• Tips for boosting performance of contextually-targeted campaigns

For more details on the content being covered, visit last month's blog post. To register for the webinar, click here.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Upcoming webinar - Contextual targeting: Strategies for performance at scale

Every day, Google’s contextual engine scans billions of web pages to show users relevant ads, in real time, about the things they care about. Contextual targeting remains one of the most powerful ways agencies and advertisers can reach their audiences - precisely in the moment of relevance. It continues to deliver great campaign performance, but it’s also seeing renewed interest as a powerful complement to audience targeting.

Please join Google for an upcoming webinar to learn more about how contextual targeting can drive results for your clients. Specifically, we’ll cover:

• Contextual targeting strategies for specific marketing objectives
• The Contextual Targeting Tool, which helps you build and optimize better-performing campaigns in minutes, not hours
• Best practices and tips for boosting performance of contextually-targeted campaigns

Register here for the webinar to be held on February 23, 2011 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Contextual targeting just got easier for your display campaigns

Last week, we launched the Contextual Targeting Tool to help your clients more easily reach customers as they spend time on millions of sites in the Google Display Network.

As you already know, with contextual targeting you can reach potential customers as they read web pages related to your clients’ products or services. Now, with this tool, you can create contextually-targeted campaigns more easily and quickly, while generating more clicks and conversions for your clients’ campaigns.

What does the Contextual Targeting Tool do?
This tool automatically builds keyword lists that can be used to show your clients' ads on relevant web pages in the Google Display Network. Tightly-themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting, and with the Contextual Targeting Tool, you no longer have to build them manually. In minutes, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of keyword lists, scaling client's campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting for their ads. This means they can get more clicks and conversions for campaigns and you can create these campaigns more quickly. Many of you have previously been using the Wonder Wheel tool to do this. The Contextual Targeting Tool now automates this process, and it does it right within clients' AdWords accounts.

How do I use it?
Let’s say your client sells soccer equipment and gear. Normally, you'd have to manually build out separate ad groups for each of your product lines, like soccer gear, soccer balls, soccer cleats, etc. With the Contextual Targeting Tool, simply type each product category into the search box, and the tool will automatically generate tightly-themed keyword lists for you. For example, when you enter soccer gear into the tool, you get more specific ad groups, such as youth soccer gear, discount soccer gear, soccer uniforms, soccer bags, etc.

click for full size image

Along with the new ad groups, the tool provides suggested bids and predicted placements to give you an idea of the types of sites in the Display Network where the ads can appear.

The Contextual Targeting Tool has been available to agencies and advertisers using AdWords Editor. This week, you will be also able to access it from the Opportunities tab in AdWords accounts, although for now you'll still need AdWords Editor to implement the ad groups in clients' accounts (download AdWords Editor). However, this requirement will be lifted and you’ll be able to implement new ad groups directly from AdWords accounts in the coming months.

You can learn more about using the Contextual Targeting Tool by watching this video. We hope this tool will help you more easily and efficiently reach your clients’ goals with their Display Network campaigns.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

The Agency Blog 2010 retrospective - what you've been reading

Over the past few weeks Google has released data on top search and YouTube video watching trends, highlighting what issues, entertainers, events and figures most powerfully captured the attention of the Internet population.

We here at the Agency Ad Solutions Blog have also compiled our top stories list of 2010, which show that the topics most relevant to our agency partners are the evolution of ad platforms (such as display and mobile), the need for powerful data and tools to manage accounts at scale, and the desire for resources to navigate the increasingly complex display ecosystem.

Below are the top stories of the year, as reflected in your readership:

New programs for agencies - We heard from you that you need relevant training at scale, cost-effective AdWords API pricing, and a centralized way to acquire new clients. In late April, we launched 3 programs to meet these needs -- a new Google AdWords Certification program for those managing AdWords accounts on behalf of advertisers; Google Partner Search, an online, searchable directory that helps advertisers identify Certified Partners to help with AdWords account management; and preferred AdWords API pricing, which gives qualified Google AdWords Certified Partners who manage client AdWords accounts free use of the AdWords API based on managed client spend.

Display advertising - While we didn't officially bring sexy back to display until September, you all expressed your interest and enthusiasm for display opportunities throughout the year. Hot topics included remarketing, the introduction of the Google Display Network, and the four-part Google Display Network series.

Managing accounts at scale - As agencies, the core of your business is effectively managing media spend across many clients. With the media landscape becoming increasingly complex with every passing day, it can be a challenge to keep up-to-speed on the latest opportunities, and incorporate them into client strategy. The need for effective account management tools was clear in your preferred blog topics -- broad match modifier, which balances reach with control; the updated Keyword Tool, with increased functionality; the Ads Multiplier plug-in for Docs to create templated ads at scale; and Google Ad Innovations, a single home for all of the latest and greatest ads launches.

A home for planners - Different roles within agencies need resources specific to their day-to-day responsibilities. This was none more apparent than for Account and Media Planners, who crave the latest data and insights to develop targeted and innovative strategies. For this role we partnered with our friends in DoubleClick to keep content fresh on Ad Planner, including the launch of the Ad Planner 1000 and integration with AdWords, the availability of Audience Interests, and a carry over from 2009 -- enhancements to Ad Planner and DoubleClick for Advertisers.

The year of mobile - It has been coming for years, but in 2010 it finally arrived. The year of mobile. You voraciously read tips and tactics shared in the 3-part "Going Mobile in 2010" series, as well as took advantage of training opportunities for mobile optimization best practices. With the launch of the Google Mobile Ads Blog, we'll have even richer mobile ads content for you in 2011, courtesy of our friends in the Google blog community.

The blog could not succeed without you, our loyal readers -- thank you. We look forward to continuing to bring you the content you need to be successful in 2011.

Posted by Katie Wasilenko, Agency Team

Upcoming webinars - Reporting in My Client Center and Remarketing

Please join us for two upcoming webinars:

• My Client Center (MCC) Reporting
  Friday, October 22nd, 8amPST / 10amCST / 11amEST
  Learn more about updates to the MCC Client Reporting interface. Topics to be covered include: Why this change to MCC Reporting? What exactly is changing? How do I create a report in the new interface? Where did my templates go? What are email-only users?
  Register here
  

• Remarketing optimization and advanced strategies
  Wednesday, October 27th, 11amPST / 1pmCST / 2pmEST
  Features of the webinar will include:

List Strategies: Does your current remarketing campaign consist of just a list of all site visitors? Or all site visitors excluding purchasers? By segmenting your lists and tailoring your messages, you can get much better results. We’ll discuss some creative list strategies that will help you think outside the box to expand and improve your remarketing campaigns.

Case Studies: Green Mountain Coffee, InterContinental Hotels Group, and BidCactus used smart remarketing strategies and saw big success. Hear about these case studies to gain insights for your own campaigns.

Implementation: We’ll review how to set up remarketing in your account by placing pixels on relevant pages and using simple commands to create custom audience segments.

Register here

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Google Media Solutions Series, Part 3: Re-engage your customers while they browse with remarketing and the Google Display Network

Welcome to the third installment of the Google Media Solutions series. In this post, we will review the Google Display Network. The Google Display Network is a large group of websites and blogs that display AdWords ads and allows advertisers to scalably reach their customers at moments of relevance. Clients are using it for direct response, web engagement as well as driving offline conversions.

We have rolled out many new features for the Google Display Network. One that we would like to highlight is remarketing. Google remarketing uses custom technology to reach potential customers who have previously visited your clients’ websites. Implementing the remarketing tag is very easy; you simply add a pixel to the clients’ sites. After adding the pixel, you can use remarketing to help capture additional sales or leads by re-targeting users who have already visited the site, and generally convert better and at a lower CPA. To learn more about remarketing and other innovative targeting options on the Google Display Network, you can check out this post from the Google Display Network blog series.

We frequently hear some common misconceptions from advertisers about the GDN that we’d like to clarify:

• I’ve tried the GDN before - what has changed?: The Google Display Network has changed a lot in the past few years. Today, the median advertiser gets approximately 20% of their conversions from the GDN at a CPA that is comparable to search.* To drive results like these, we are investing heavily in many new features that make the GDN an effective platform for advertisers with any marketing objective. Examples of features we've introduced over the years include site exclusions, above the fold targeting, frequency capping, and consolidated view-through conversion reporting.
• The Google Display Network only works for branding: Contextual targeting and remarketing are just a few examples of great tools that direct response marketers can use to reach potential customers in the later stages of the buying cycle, like consideration and decision. The Conversion Optimizer can also help you generate additional conversions at an attractive cost-per-acquisition (CPA). With powerful tools like these, you can make sure you are capturing all your potential customers as they spend time across the web.

Thanks for reading the third part of the Google Media Solutions blog series. Next week, we will discuss how you can use Google TV to drive results for your clients.

Posted by Laura Salzberg, Agency Team

*Internal analysis of North America advertisers advertising on both search and content, with conversion tracking enabled, from Dec. 2007 – Nov. 2008

Performance at Scale on the Google Display Network

Editor's Note: This is being cross-posted from the Inside AdWords Blog

One of our key goals is to help you drive better performance with your display advertising campaigns.

As users increasingly spend time across a growing number of sites, however, display advertising is becoming more challenging. Last year alone there were 47 million new web sites created*. Contextual targeting can help by automatically showing your ad to users on web pages related to your products on the millions of sites in the Google Display Network (GDN). But building and managing your campaigns can still be time-consuming. So how do you reach your target audience easily and efficiently while meeting your business goals?

Today, we’re launching two tools -- the Display Campaign Optimizer and the Contextual Targeting Tool -- to help you maximize your performance on the GDN, while saving you valuable time and resources.

Display Campaign Optimizer. This new tool automatically manages targeting and bidding for your Display Network campaigns with the goal of increasing your conversions while meeting your advertising objectives. You simply provide us with your target cost-per-acquisition (CPA), creatives and budget, and the Display Campaign Optimizer goes to work, showing your ads in all the right places, automatically. It monitors your campaign performance and, in real time, adjusts your campaign accordingly. Your campaigns stay optimized, as it “learns” and does more of what’s working and less of what isn’t. For example, Seventh Generation, a company that sells eco-friendly household cleaning, baby care and personal care products, was looking to connect with more “green” consumers across the web and get them to download coupons from their site for use in-store. After implementing the Display Campaign Optimizer, the tool delivered 60% of the coupons downloaded from their site, with a CPA 20% below their target. Further, analysis of our beta testers showed that on average, campaign using Display Campaign Optimizer were likely responsible for almost one-third of the accounts’ total conversion volume with CPAs within 6% of their peer group CPA.**

The Display Campaign Optimizer is now available globally for larger campaigns running on the Google Display Network.

(watch on YouTube)

Contextual Targeting Tool. While the Display Campaign Optimizer is an automated solution that does all the heavy lifting on your behalf, the Contextual Targeting Tool helps you more efficiently build your own display campaigns. This tool is ideal for those of you who prefer transparency and control over your campaigns’ targeting and bidding. The Contextual Targeting Tool builds tightly themed keyword lists for your display campaigns, which are used to contextually target your ads. Tightly themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting. With this tool, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of ad groups in minutes, quickly scaling your campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting and control over your campaign.

For example, if you sell yoga gear, normally, you might take the time to build out separate ad groups around each of your product lines, such as yoga mats, yoga clothing, yoga gear, etc. Inputting each product category into the Contextual Targeting Tool will generate even more tightly themed keyword lists. For example, inputting ‘yoga mats’ into the tool generates more specific ad groups, such as designer yoga mats, thick yoga mats, yoga mats with designs, etc. These are all separate ad groups that can help you generate additional traffic and sales, that you wouldn’t necessarily think of creating when manually building out your campaigns.

This week, we’re beginning a phased launch of the Contextual Targeting Tool, and it will become available to more advertisers over the coming weeks and months.

Whether you’re looking for easier ways of building out your display campaigns or looking for a more robust, automated solution that continually optimizes bids and targeting, we think these tools will help you easily and efficiently achieve performance at scale with your display campaigns.

Posted by Woojin Kim, Product Manager and Shaun Seo, Product Manager

* Source: Netcraft Web Server Survey, Dec. 2009
** Source: Internal analysis of active beta testers, in comparison with peer group advertisers. Oct. 2010

Providing a safer display ad buying experience

This week AdExchanger.com featured a Q&A with Scott Spencer, Group Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and Jason Miller, Group Product Manager, Google Display Network on the display media space and how Google is providing advertisers a brand safe experience on the Google Display Network. Here’s an excerpt of what they shared:

What are you investing in as it relates to providing a brand safe experience for advertisers across the Google Display Network?

Jason Miller: On the Google Display Network, we genuinely believe that marketers and agencies get access to the most brand-friendly network out there.

It’s important to emphasize that Google's technological expertise is in doing two things very well: first, crawling and analyzing content at great scale (as a search engine that’s Google’s core competency) - and second, targeting ads precisely at massive scale. We’ve applied this to the Display Network for quite some time.

We broadly invest in 4 areas to ensure brand safety:

First, strict policies. We don’t permit sites with content that violates our program policies.

Second, technology. Several layers of review - before admission to the network, the precise time of ad serving, and continuous automatic scanning - uphold our program policies. We do real-time blocking of ads if the page violates policy. We do this at massive scale and at a page/URL level - not just a site level.

Third, transparency. We offer domain - and, importantly, URL - level reporting. This provides deep insight into the sites and pages where our clients’ ads were served, on-demand. Major advertisers regularly get a report that shows what their ads looked like in the context of a given page.

Finally, advertiser controls. We give advertisers a robust set of controls to closely manage their ad delivery across the GDN, including hand-picked bundles of sites (such as the Ad Planner 1000) or individual sites, an above the fold filter, specific site and category exclusions.

Recently, we signed up to the standards and practices under the IAB’s Networks and Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines.

For the complete interview, including commentary on DoubleClick Ad Exchange enhancements and the safety of inventory on the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Ad Exchange, visit AdExchanger.com.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Google Display Network series: Reach exactly the right audience with precision targeting

This is our third post in a series on the Google Display Network (GDN). Today, we’ll look at the robust targeting options available to help you reach your audience with your display campaigns.

Reaching just the right audience is at the crux of every successful campaign. We continue to invest in powerful targeting technologies that enable this. Let’s look at what you can do today to reach your audience on the GDN.

Contextual targeting. What consumers read, right now at this very moment, says a lot about what they’re thinking about, making it a great opportunity to connect them with your message. Our sophisticated contextual targeting algorithm continually scans the millions of web pages in our network, understanding what they’re about, in real-time. Using this information, we automatically show your ads to the right users at the right time. It’s similar to our search technology that does a good job of finding relevant web pages for searches, increasing advertising engagement and reducing the clutter of irrelevant advertising. Contextual targeting works well for advertisers looking to generate conversions (like sales) through always-on direct response campaigns. However, you can also use contextual targeting for branding. For example, an advertiser who wants to associate their brand with environmental consciousness can contextually target their ads to appropriate pages with keywords like “green energy” or “green living”.

Placement targeting. What if you already know your audience is concentrated on specific websites? Placement targeting allows you to specify individual placements where you’d like to show your ads. Unlike contextual targeting, keywords aren't required; you simply choose the placements you’d like to target. A placement can be a website, or a subset of a site. For instance, if you're selling tennis gear and you’d like your ad to appear on a particular tennis website, or only on sports pages of a newspaper, you can specify that. Ad Planner or the Placement Tool can help you identify placements for your campaign.

Remarketing. Earlier this year, we announced remarketing, to help you reach users on the GDN based on their past interactions with your website. Remarketing is extremely effective because it targets a highly-relevant audience. With it, you can target users who:

• have visited your website or viewed specific product categories on your site
• didn’t convert or who abandoned their shopping cart
• have converted (in order to up- or cross-sell to them)
  

If you’re already driving traffic to your site through other means, like contextual targeting or your search ads, remarketing is a great complement to those efforts to increase your return-on-investment (ROI).

Interest category marketing. Currently in beta, interest category marketing allows you to reach people based on their interests. Leveraging the technology behind our contextual targeting engine, user interests are determined based on the type of web content they previously viewed. You can select from a list of interest categories (such as sports enthusiast or travel enthusiast) and we’ll show ads to people whose interests we think map to those categories. You can use interest categories in conjunction with contextual, placement and remarketing campaigns. Additionally, the Ads Preferences Manager gives users transparency and choice, enabling them to see the interest categories we think they fall into, add and remove categories, or opt out altogether.

Fine-tune targeting by adding geography and language, time, and demographic bids, or focus your brand presence with above-the-fold targeting. Further, you can apply a robust set of exclusions at the site, category or keyword level based on your goals and performance.

Whichever targeting options you choose, with the Google Display Network, precision doesn't have to come at the cost of scale. There is an Internet of opportunity, across mass-media, brand-name sites, all the way down to blogs, social networks, and local news. For every site you can name about a particular topic, there are dozens more you've never heard of that attract tens of thousands of monthly visitors.

We’ll see you next week, when we’ll talk about measuring and optimizing your display campaigns.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Case study - Alltel Corporation drives cost-effective traffic with Google InVideo ads

Turning successful television advertising into online video campaigns can be a challenge for any agency. The Martin Agency was faced with precisely this challenge for wireless communications company, Alltel, and turned to in-stream online video (InVideo) ads on the Google Display Network for great results.

Alltel runs several advertising campaigns on a number of media; it had content running on television and wanted to take advantage of it by testing it online.

At the same time, The Martin Agency was looking to experiment with InVideo ads on the Google Display Network, which includes YouTube, because they had heard it was simple to implement. The agency has been using Google TV Ads for its traditional television purchases since February 2009 and was eager to try out InVideo, its online extension. InVideo ads appear before, during, or after online video content, much like the way ads run in television programming.

According to Liz Hamner of The Martin Agency,

In-stream online video ads provide an opportunity to be even more efficient and targeted with our client’s marketing budgets. We can even test different creatives and optimize based on viewer clickthrough, video completion rates, and other metrics.

Alltel began testing Google InVideo ads in Q3 2009 and found that the auction model allowed efficient placements for these ads. It found that InVideo ads provided great results and allowed prime placement on content such as TV shows on YouTube, movies on crackle.com, clips on aetv.com, and games from Zynga at 50 percent of the cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) offered by other online video networks.

As a result of the campaign, Alltel generated a large volume of clicks at 50 percent of the cost of other online video providers. Additionally, Alltel drove a high clickthrough rate of nearly
2 percent, surpassing its initial goal of an industry average of 0.1 percent.

For more information on developing InVideo ad campaigns, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Google Display Network series: Your toolbox for creative display ads

In last week’s post of our Google Display Network series, we showed how DoubleClick Ad Planner can help you effectively plan your display ad campaigns and reach the right audience. Today we’ll talk about creating compelling display ads and the options available on the Google Display Network (GDN). Let’s look at each category of options you have today:

Great impact through rich media and video. Rich media and video formats engage users at a whole new level, drawing them in and encouraging interactivity in a way not possible with other ad formats.

Example of a great rich media ad run by Volvo and the agencies Euro RSCG New York and Media Contacts:

(Click to view larger image)

If you use rich media and video formats to engage your customers, here’s what we offer through our DoubleClick Rich Media and Video solutions:

• Choose from a variety of rich media formats, based on your campaign objective.
• Access DoubleClick Studio, a free rich media production and workflow tool.
• Analyze data on more than 100 unique interactions in every creative unit with Audience Interaction Metrics.
• Integration with DoubleClick for Advertisers, a robust ad management, serving and reporting solution, simplifies trafficking, reporting and billing of your rich media campaigns.

If you’re already working with another rich media vendor, we have many approved vendors we work with.

Build display ads in minutes. Creating display ads can be resource-intensive, and for many marketers, it may not be in the budget. So we introduced Display Ad Builder in 2008, a free tool for creating professional-looking display ads in minutes. Here’s what you can do with Display Ad Builder:

• Create image, video (InVideo, Click-To-Play), Flash and rich media (including expandable) ads using hundreds of fully customizable templates or templates tailored for specific industries.
• Stay true to your brand with your own images, text, videos and logos.
• We automatically convert the ads you design into most standard IAB ad sizes.

(click to view larger image)

Display Ad Builder is also great for testing different messages and creative elements, or to get insights for more complex display campaigns managed by your in-house team or agency.

Stand out by blending in. Text ads are a versatile ad format that are easy to create and edit, in minutes. They’re especially effective as an extension of your existing search campaigns. Simply opt your search campaign into the GDN and your ads will show to users as they surf relevant web pages via our contextual targeting technology. Text ads also complement display campaigns by engaging users who ignore display ads (i.e. banner blindness). Further, they give your campaign wider reach since not every publisher may accept display ads, or may only accept a limited number of display ad formats and sizes on their site.

(click to view larger image)

Whether your goal is to drive awareness, or to generate immediate sales, learn how the robust creative toolbox available on the Google Display Network can help. We’ll see you next week when we talk about how you can reach your audience with the targeting technologies available on the GDN.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Google Display Network series: Effectively planning your online display campaigns

We recently introduced a new umbrella name for our online display media offerings, the Google Display Network (GDN) to make our solutions clear to advertisers and agencies. You also heard from us about the investments we’re making in display advertising and the promise it holds for marketers and agencies to drive great marketing results. In this series of posts, we’ll cover what you can do today on the GDN.

We’ve been busy working to improve every step of your display campaigns: from media planning and developing creative, to choosing targeting, measuring results and optimizing your campaign. Each week over the next month, we’ll talk about the solutions available to you in each area, starting with campaign planning.

With millions of sites on the web, how do you find exactly the people who will respond to your message? We introduced DoubleClick Ad Planner to help. It’s a free research and media planning tool to help identify web sites most likely to attract your audience. The insights provided by Ad Planner continue to get deeper and more robust. Let’s take a look:

Research sites by ones you know your audience visits, or by defining your audience based on what you know about them, such as geography, demographics, interests, sites they visit or keywords they search. Recently, we released more features to help you research more effectively:

• Pre-defined audiences. Select from commonly used audiences like Baby Boomers to save time or if you don’t know how to define your audience.
• With Ad Planner 1000, quickly reference and target the web’s largest sites.
• Use subdomain and ad placement data for more granular media planning.
• With Lists, create lists of your favorite sites and placements for future use.
  

Manage your site results by applying a variety of site ranking methods:

• See sites that are most likely to attract your target audience, see larger, mass-media sites to ensure campaign scale, or, see a balance between the two.
• Filter to see just sites in the Google Display Network, or all sites that accept advertising.
• Apply other filters to see sites accepting certain ad formats, sites in specific categories like Video Games or sites with a particular domain suffix like .edu.

View robust site details. For each site, you can see detailed information and audience visitation patters. A Site Overview shows general site information like thumbnail and description and site categories. Traffic Statistics and Demographics show unique visitor metrics and demographic information. Online Activity shows what other sites your audience visits or keywords they search. Finally, Ad Specifications show placement type, impressions/day and accepted ad formats and sizes. Most recently, we introduced audience interest information, showing the aggregate interests of a site’s visitors. It complements the demographic data available in Ad Planner, providing a deeper view into a site’s audience.

Build, analyze and export your media plan. After researching sites, you can select sites and add them to your media plan. As you do, you’ll see unduplicated unique users, reach, and page view statistics. You can then analyze your media plan by reviewing its aggregate demographic statistics. When you’re ready, you can export sites directly into your AdWords account or into CSV format to import into MediaVisor.

Beyond robust features like these, Ad Planner provides true scale for your campaigns because you can go beyond the most common sites, to tap into millions of sites and do it for over 40 countries and 20 languages. Further, web site owners can claim, manage and share their data on Ad Planner, providing another level of up-to-date and accurate information for your media planning.

You can stay on top of new enhancements in our Ad Planner release notes. Stay tuned for our next post about developing effective ads and the solutions available on the Google Display Network.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Introducing the Google Display Network

(cross posted from the Inside AdWords Blog)

Over the past year, we’ve been focused on investing in display advertising, and we’ve seen great momentum from the increasing number of you running display campaigns with Google. We’ve rolled out new features and targeting options and more precise measurement tools. To provide more places for you to run display ads, we’ve added more publisher sites (through Google AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange) to our ad network of over one million sites. Meanwhile, many of you have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties. In an effort to make our display media offerings clearer to advertisers like you and agencies, we’re creating a new umbrella name for all these properties, the Google Display Network.

The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites (apart from search sites), where you can buy ads through Google, including YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners (our display partners include all of our AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partner sites that allow text and/or display ads). The Google Display Network offers all ad formats - text, image, rich media, and video ads - enabling you to unleash your creativity and engage potential customers across the Web.

You can run ads on the Google Display Network the same way you always have. Either place bids through AdWords or make reservations on YouTube and Google Finance with the help of a Google account team.

In the upcoming weeks, you’ll see a change in the AdWords interface reflecting this new term, and you’ll see Google Display Network where you might have seen Google Content Network mentioned. We’ve also launched a new website showcasing the sites and benefits available to you on the Google Display Network.

We’re working hard to offer the best display advertising solutions and we look forward to introducing new features on the Google Display Network that help you reach your advertising goals.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

Carnival Cruise Lines Charts their Course with the Google Content Network

Catherine Schenquerman is an avid traveler and a savvy digital marketer. As the interactive marketing manager for Carnival Cruise Lines, she has been able to merge her love of travel with her interest in experimenting with innovative digital marketing strategies.

Since 2006, Carnival Cruise Lines has worked with its digital agency, Razorfish, to implement successful Google search campaigns that both generate new leads and build brand awareness. But Catherine and her team wanted to explore ways to drive bookings as well. They wanted to be more precise about how they connected with customers at the critical moment in the purchasing cycle, when customers were planning vacations and were about to book a cruise. Catherine sat down with Razorfish to review innovative approaches they could try, and they decided to explore contextual targeting using the Google Content Network.

Experiment, Measure and Iterate

The Razorfish search marketing team quickly got to work. First, they set out to optimize the core components of the campaign within ad groups, and then apply those to their content campaign on the Google Content Network. These optimizations resulted in nearly 400 new ad groups with tightly-themed keyword groupings, each with roughly 8–12 keywords per ad group. The new groupings allowed Carnival to better tailor its messages and precisely focus each message on specific sites and content.

Carnival and Razorfish used two Google Content Network tools to measure and fine-tune its efforts. They began by using DoubleClick Ad Planner, a free media planning tool to help identify websites that its target customers are likely to visit, and then used the Placement Performance Report, which shows performance statistics for ads on specific domains and URLs in the Google Content Network.

Smooth sailing

Within the first few weeks of the Google contextually-targeted campaign, the Carnival team began to see a significant increase in cruise bookings sourced from the campaign. After five weeks, online cruise bookings from the Google Content Network increased 284 percent and delivered a 72 percent reduction in cost per conversion. They also saw a 36 percent increase in leads.

“The Content Network proved to be a great new way for us to extend our reach, by giving us both the push and pull,” Schenquerman explained. “The push to associate our ads with relevant content and help stir demand, and the pull to capture someone who says ‘I want to learn more’– and then to pay for that on a cost-per-click basis, makes a lot of sense.”

Building on the success of their text ad campaign, Carnival recently decided to start running display ads on the Google Content Network. They applied what they learned from their search campaigns to run high performing display ads. Razorfish and Carnival Cruise Lines have been very successful in bring the science of search to the art of display.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Coffee break with clients: Swanson® Chicken dips into click-to-play video

In part 4 of our "Coffee break" series, we caught up with Kaylyn Miller, Associate Search Director at MEC, who shared with us how her team incorporated click-to-play video ads into a recipe campaign for Swanson® Chicken, a division of Campbell Soup Company. The video campaign was established to distribute a new cooking video during two key dipping occasions - New Year's and Super Bowl. The campaign ran for six weeks, starting in mid-December and concluding at the end of January. During our interview, Kaylyn shared the following:

What were the goals of using click-to-play video ads?
We were tasked with distributing the Frank's® Red Hot® Buffalo Chicken Dip recipe, made with Swanson® Premium Chunk Chicken. We were already successfully directing users to print the recipe using paid search. However, we knew that keyword targeting could be a powerful tool for video distribution as well. Our goal was to use contextual targeting on the Google Content Network for cost efficient video views. Knowing that this strategy worked well for clients in the entertainment industry, we were striving to keep playback rate and cost per view in line with Google’s entertainment benchmarks.

How did you set up and execute the campaign?
We began by looking at the most relevant ad groups from our paid search campaign, including buffalo chicken dip, appetizer and dip, chicken recipes, New Year's recipes and Super Bowl recipes. The ad groups were then modified to include broader keywords to effectively target the Google Content Network. From there, additional ad groups were created, such as hot wings, cooking videos, easy recipes and general recipe words to obtain greater reach.

Three distinct starter images were created for the video - Everyday, New Year’s and Super Bowl (images below) - based on the events of a given week. We used the best practice of making the starter image a YouTube-like still, instead of a display ad, to increase consumer engagement.

Click to view images - Everyday, New Year's, Super Bowl

How did the click-to-play video campaigns perform?

The campaign's performance exceeded our expectations. In the 6 weeks it ran, the click-to-play video campaign received more than 34,000 video views with 42% of the videos viewed to completion. In addition, this was a good test for us to see how CPG would perform since there aren’t many benchmarks for this category to-date. We saw a lower cost per view and higher play rate than Entertainment industry benchmarks, a space where we assumed users would be more engaged.

In addition to success found through video viewing, we also found success in on-site engagement. While recipe prints are the main goal of the paid search campaign, they were secondary for the video campaign. We were pleased to find that the consumers who were engaged in the video carried that engagement over to the site. The download rate associated with video plays was 203% higher than the stand-alone paid search campaign, keeping the cost per recipe print in line with the search averages, despite the more premium CPCs found in the video campaign.

What did you learn from this campaign?
This campaign validates that click-to-play videos can supplement paid search to expand reach while maintaining consumer engagement for a client.

If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different?
We may have used a portion of the search budget to drive traffic to sites where the video was being distributed by our Social Media and Display teams, but most likely the video wouldn’t have been promoted through keyword targeting.

For more information on click-to-play video ads, visit the AdWords Help Center. For more information on how to prepare this recipe for your next dipping occasion, visit buffalochickendip.com.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

New Tool for Brand Advertisers on the Google Content Network

Over the past year, we've focused on building new solutions on the Google Content Network for campaigns focused on branding. Last year we introduced frequency capping to help you manage how often your Content Network campaigns reach the right people. We then launched an “above the fold” filter to allow you to show ads only in places that appear on potential customers’ screens when the page loads. We also developed innovative tools to measure the impact of brand campaigns.

Today, in response to feedback from many of you who run branding campaigns, we're announcing a new filter that allows you to show your ads only on AdSense sites among the 1000 largest on the web as defined by DoubleClick Ad Planner. This new feature will ensure that your ads reach a large number of users, but only on well-known sites best suited for branding goals.

To activiate the new filter, select ‘non Ad Planner 1000’ within the ‘category filters’ section of your AdWords account. Keep in mind that not all sites in the Ad Planner 1000 are in the Google Content Network and that your ads will only show on those sites that are.

It's important to note that the Ad Planner 1000 does not take performance statistics into account, and that by enabling this filter, you may be excluding many sites that are relevant to your advertised products. Additionally, with this or any of our other brand filters enabled, your campaign will run on fewer sites, so you may need to raise your bids if you’d like to maintain your impression levels. We recommend experimenting to determine which feature or combination of features best meets your goals.

We hope this new feature gives you greater control and assurance over where your ads appear and makes the Google Content Network an even more powerful environment for effective branding campaigns.


Posted by Sean Harvey, Product Manager

Jordan's Get Your Basketball On campaign on the Google Content Network

Jordan Brand, a division of Nike, has one of the most recognizable logos in the sporting goods industry. A silhouette of Michael Jordan mid-jump graces the footwear, apparel, and equipment that make Jordan one of the most coveted basketball brands in the US.

Building energy

Although his likeness still appears on merchandise, Michael Jordan retired from his legendary role in the game in 1999, posing a challenge for Jordan Brand-- keeping Michael Jordan top of mind for younger consumers.

Looking for new ways to excite and engage youth within basketball culture, Jordan Brand turned to its agency partner, Wieden+Kennedy, New York (W+K, NY). Together, they hatched an idea for a campaign that veered from the TV campaigns they traditionally ran. As expected, they built an inventive, unique campaign around a basketball player. But the player was neither Michael Jordan nor another NBA star. It was Leroy Smith.

The man, the campaign

“Sophomore year of high school, Leroy Smith took Michael’s spot on the junior varsity team,” explains Jason Clement, Director of Findability and Search for W+K NY, of the true story that inspired the campaign. “Michael points to that as the moment when he realized he needed to work and train harder to become really good.”

With the campaign’s central character chosen (and the real Leroy Smith on board), the Jordan and Wieden+Kennedy teams crafted a narrative that would pull in their audience. Played by actor Charlie Murphy, the campaign’s Leroy sells motivational DVDs, promising to teach viewers the same skills he used to dominate Michael Jordan. The DVDs, along with posters, an iPhone app, and music videos can be found on his site, www.getyourbasketballon.com. And of course the campaign’s Leroy also has a YouTube Channel, a Facebook profile, and a Twitter feed to communicate with his fans. But to create buzz and hype, Wieden and Kennedy and Jordan chose not to brand the campaign.

Leroy Smith Banner ad that ran on the Google Content Network

The ultimate forum

And it was the discovery of this content that was key to the campaign’s success. The campaign’s six-week run opened with “Leroy” himself pitching his motivational DVDs in infomercial-style television ads during the NBA playoffs. Google AdWords search ads sent interested users to Leroy’s site. To reach additional basketball fans where they were actively spending their time, the Jordan and W+K NY teams used the Google Content Network to place a wide array of display and text ads on blogs and fan sites. By using keyword targeting to automatically place their ads on relevant sites on the Google Content Network, the team was able to find the right locations for their creative more efficiently.

The strategy proved effective. They found a lot of niche basketball blogs where he could reach their target with very, very little waste and get them excited about the campaign.

Once their ads were running, the reporting and optimization controls within the Content Network enabled the W+K NY team to see which sites were working best and adjust their targeting appropriately. As excitement over the Leroy Smith campaign grew, it was clear that it was striking a chord with its audience. A number of blogs had double-digit click through rates. People were taking screenshots of the ad on their blogs and then writing posts about how much they liked having the ad on their site.

When all that enthusiasm was translated into numbers, the Leroy Smith campaign had generated 188 million impressions and 296,000 clicks over the six weeks it ran. And users were highly engaged with the content, showing very low abandonment rates once on site. Video proved compelling as well, with 27,000 YouTube channel views and 229,000 views for Leroy Smith’s “Get Your Basketball On” infomercial video.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Upcoming webinar: Uncovering opportunities with display advertising

Display advertising is changing rapidly with the emergence of audience data, engaging new ad formats, dynamic creatives, and new technologies. We'd like to invite you to a webinar about our recent innovations in display advertising and how marketers are incorporating it into their strategy.

Specifically, we’ll discuss:

• Google's vision and recent innovations in display advertising
• How to best take advantage of our offerings, from planning to optimizing your campaigns
• How advertisers are incorporating the Google Content Network into their marketing strategy

Date: Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST

Register here

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Case study - Perfecting the art of matching the right ad to the right site

For an agency today, it's very difficult to reach a client's customers online because their customers are consuming media everywhere. To reach users as they browse millions of websites across the Internet, agencies need to buy and to tailor ads across thousands of websites, and they need to measure how well these campaigns performed on all of these sites as well.

At Google, we've built tools and platforms to address these challenges for agencies. Google is focused on delivering performance to advertisers and agencies through the Google Content Network (GCN), our ad network of over a million AdSense sites, which includes some Google properties like Google Finance and YouTube.

One of the ways we deliver high performing ads is through contextual targeting, the science of matching the right ad with the right website content. For example, we might show an ad from a tech company on a tech review site because the ad will be relevant to the user and therefore, perform well for the advertiser. We've been working on helping agencies match the best ad through more precise contextual targeting that enables advertisers to focus on very specific themes. Over the past year, we've made over 60 improvements to our contextual targeting technology. In August, we enabled advertisers and agencies to do more precise contextual targeting, and we've seen that it can be used to effectively drive conversions.

MediaWhiz tested this strategy for American Laser Centers to promote the client's hair removal and aesthetic services. The agency used both text and display ads to raise brand awareness as well as to drive customer action. Instead of creating a few ad groups with many keywords, it created hundreds of small, very specifically targeted ad groups containing around four to six keywords each. The highly targeted groups cut across a wide range of American Laser Centers’ business areas, covering laser hair removal, skin aesthetics spa treatments, at-home hair removal and many more related topics and themes. By using small, focused keyword lists in each ad group, the team was able to increase the relevance of the client's ads on the Google Content Network, helping to attract the exact customers interested in the services American Laser Centers offers.

Using the Google Content Network Placement peformance report, MediaWhiz could optimize and measure exactly how well American Laser Centers' campaign did. According to Erick Maks, advertising director at American Laser Centers:

This strategy of multiple ad groups containing tightly grouped keywords helped American Laser Centers raise its campaign conversion rate by 233 percent in the first three-month period. During the same period, by fine-tuning at the ad group level and reducing waste, it also cut impressions in half—while simultaneously increasing conversions by 365 percent.

The complete case study is available for download here. If you're interested in additional resources, be sure to check out this post on using the Wonder wheel to generate ad group themes, and watch the recording of last year's webinar on more precise contextual targeting.

Posted by Jesse Nichols, Agency Team