The DoubleClick Ad Exchange delivers revenue uplift to EMEA Publishers

Exchange-based buying has experienced huge growth over the past several years as advertisers focused on improving the targeting and effectiveness of their buys. Most large agencies have set-up dedicated “trading desks” to focus on this method of buying and in tandem, many publishers have aligned their strategies to profit from these trends.

Since the launch of the Ad Exchange, we’ve heard inspiring stories from our European publishers about the revenue uplift they’ve experienced when using the product. Today we’re pleased to share exciting research results which shows the impact of the Ad Exchange on European publishers’ revenue.

The results published in this whitepaper show that when publishers make ad space available in the Ad Exchange, and the Ad Exchange wins the auction, the revenue is 73% higher than if the Ad Exchange hadn't been used. This takes into account competing sales channels such as direct sales teams, other networks and backfills.

And what about inventory that would have gone unsold? The DoubleClick Ad Exchange demonstrated significant success in monetizing these ads. For inventory for which there was no other demand, it delivered a fill rate of greater than 90%.

Many of the tools we roll out are designed to help publishers maximize revenue across their multiple channels. Most recently we introduced minimum CPMs and pricing recommendations. These followed the introduction of private ad-slots and direct deals. We believe that these new tools will continue to help our Ad Exchange publishers make the most out of their inventory.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Product Management Director 

Enhanced advertiser-level controls and insights in DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Today, we’re happy to announce the roll-out of a new advertiser classification system that automatically scans and classifies each creative using sophisticated machine learning technologies to determine the associated advertiser or advertisers. This means that publishers can more easily and reliably block specific advertisers across all campaigns and buyers.

We focused on an algorithmic solution to this complex challenge, versus a more manual “self-declared” approach for buyers, which can often lead to inaccuracies such as misspellings or misclassifications. This quarter we are introducing this feature with coverage for the top 50 advertisers with a large expansion in advertiser coverage planned soon.

Further taking advantage of this new advertiser-level data, we’re now also able to give our publishers better insights into individual advertiser spending, CPMs and performance to help inform their overall sales efforts. Ad Exchange’s existing multi-dimensional reporting tool now includes an “advertiser” field dimension. This new field will allow publishers to slice and dice their data and see which advertisers are driving the most revenue by geography, domain, channel and a variety of other criteria.

Current Ad Exchange publishers can learn more about this new feature in the help center. If you’re not using Ad Exchange, you can contact your DoubleClick account representative to learn more about all of the ways we’re helping publishers profit from non-guaranteed sales on their terms.

Posted by Drew Bradstock, Product Manager

Bringing AdMob Mobile Inventory to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange

(Cross posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog)

In 2009, we launched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange as a way to simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, drive performance for our advertiser and publisher partners, and open up the display marketplace. In the two years since, exchange-based trading has taken off -- we’ve seen the volume of trades on our own exchange grow by more than 150% in the past year. At the same time, display, as a medium, has evolved.

Display started as just banner ads on websites, but has grown to include a range of formats as diverse as the web itself -- rich media ads that bring a page to life, in-stream ads that play before your favorite online video, and ads that run in the mobile version of your daily newspaper. To reflect this growing diversity, we have been expanding the types of formats in the Exchange. We support the most popular types of rich media ads, including units that run in-page with video, or expand when you click or mouse over them. It’s also possible to buy ads across the mobile web. Earlier this year, we announced that in-stream video formats were coming to the Exchange, and we’ve seen huge demand since launch: the number of buyers for in-stream video has tripled over the past quarter.

Today, we are announcing another step forward -- in the coming weeks, AdMob developers will be able to make their in-app inventory available on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Initially, a small number of pre-qualified buyers will be able to compete for this inventory. Over time, we'll be rolling it out more broadly. Ultimately, this will give app developers and publishers access to a wider pool of buyers like demand-side platforms and agency trading desks, improving their potential returns, and helping grow the overall mobile web economy. And marketers on our Exchange will be able to buy, in real time, ads that run inside people’s favorite mobile games, news apps and more. With this important addition, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be truly cross-format...and will become the first exchange to support this full range of ad formats.

VivaKi, one of our key partners on the Exchange, is gearing up to start buying in-app ads on the Exchange. “We are delighted to be working with Google as they open up the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to include AdMob in-app inventory, and to deliver this opportunity to our clients,” says Kurt Unkel, Senior Vice President, VivaKi Nerve Center. “We anticipate this experience will help us bring mobile to scale to our partners, and will provide insight into the operational elements and the creative assets that work best in this environment.”

A cross-format exchange is just one of the ways we’re looking to simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, but one we think will create tremendous value for advertisers and publishers. We will continue to work with our partners to help them get the most out of what the evolving display market has to offer -- today, tomorrow, and in the years ahead.

Posted by Chip Hall, Director, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Introducing Minimum CPM Recommendations on DoubleClick Ad Exchange

With the growth of exchange-based buying and real-time bidding, media buyers are becoming increasingly sophisticated at optimizing their bids. In tandem, we’ve heard from our publisher partners that they would like to better manage their minimum CPM, sometimes called the reserve or floor price, which dictates the minimum price at which buyers can purchase their inventory.

But setting the best minimum price can be tricky. Setting it too high can price publishers out of transactions, while setting it too low can sometimes leave money on the table. Many publishers optimize their minimum CPM using a trial and error approach, which can be time consuming and potentially costly.

Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of Minimum CPM Recommendations for DoubleClick Ad Exchange publishers. This feature automatically recommends an optimal minimum cpm for each eligible ad slot in the Ad Exchange auction. It also automatically generates a graph that provides better visibility into how different floor prices might affect a publisher's bottom line.

To deliver these recommendations, we created an algorithm that analyzes all historical transactions for each publisher's ad slots, also taking into account factors like traffic patterns, to better understand and predict supply and demand trends. As always, we are also careful to ensure that individual advertiser bids are not exposed and that the integrity of the Ad Exchange auction is protected. Initial results with early beta testers indicate an average 20% revenue lift for adopted recommendations.

Ad Exchange publishers can take advantage of these insights today directly from the My Ads tab. If you’re not already using Ad Exchange, contact your publisher sales representative to learn more about all of the ways that DoubleClick Ad Exchange can help you profit on your terms.

Posted by Nemo Semret, Software Engineer

+1: Now making Display ads more relevant

Yesterday, we announced several exciting new additions to Google+, including open signups. We’d like to announce one more addition for our DoubleClick Ad Exchange publishers, +1 on display ads from AdWords.

Starting in October, the +1 button and social annotations will begin to appear on display ads from AdWords that win in the Ad Exchange auction. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections. We believe that these recommendations could lead your audience to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

For example, take Susan, who sees an ad for a good deal on flights. She +1’s the ad, thinking her friends might value this deal. Now, when Susan’s friends and contacts are signed in to their Google accounts, they’ll be able to see Susan’s picture across the bottom of the ad, with a note saying she +1’d it.

The +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads.

Susan’s friends and contacts will also be more likely to see the ad. While the dynamics of the AdWords and Ad Exchange auctions aren’t changing, the +1’d ad will now be included in AdWord’s bid on the Ad Exchange for the pages Susan’s friends visit, as we know that recommendations from friends can be a strong signal of an ad’s relevance.

All eligible ads from AdWords and other networks will continue to compete in the ad exchange auction, and we’ll continue to show the ones that have the highest CPM. +1 button clicks are not counted as clicks on ads. Although you won’t receive any revenue for +1 button clicks, +1’s will help Ad Exchange to deliver more useful AdWords ads to your users.

On mobile, the +1 button will replace the existing ‘g’ logo and recommendations will appear for several seconds, then fade out.

If you’d prefer not to see the +1 button on ads that AdWords delivers, you can opt out by contacting your account manager.

Display ads become much more powerful when people can see which of their social connections have chosen to endorse them, leading to a better advertising experience and higher returns for you.

If you’d like to learn more about the +1 button on AdWords display ads served via the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, please visit the Ad Exchange Help Center.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Product Manager

New tools to help publishers maximize their revenue

(Originally posted on the Official Google Blog)

What do a celebrity blog, a video interview on a newspaper site and a cable channel’s smartphone app have in common? They’re all supported by advertising...and they’re all examples of how the lines between media formats are blurring.

These increasingly blurry lines are not only resulting in highly engaging forms of content for users, but many new revenue opportunities for publishers. A wave of innovation and investment over the past several years has also created better performing ads, a larger pool of online advertisers, and new technologies to sell and manage ad space. Together, these trends are helping to spur increased investment in online advertising. We’ve seen this in our own Google Display Network: our publisher partners have seen spending across the Google Display Network from our largest 1,000 advertisers more than double in the last 12 months.

With all these new opportunities in mind, we’re introducing new tools for our publisher partners—in our ad serving technology (DoubleClick for Publishers) and in our ad exchange (DoubleClick Ad Exchange).

Video and mobile in DoubleClick for Publishers
Given the changes in the media landscape, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen incredible growth for both mobile and video ad formats over the past year: the number of video ads on the Google Display Network has increased 350 percent in the past 12 months, while AdMob, our mobile network, has grown by more than 200 percent.

Before now, it’s been difficult for publishers to manage all their video and mobile ad space from a single ad server—the platform publishers use to schedule, measure and run the ads they’ve sold on their sites. To solve this challenge, we’re rolling out new tools in our latest version of DoubleClick for Publishers that enable publishers to better manage video and mobile inventory. Publishers will be able to manage all of the ads they’re running—across all of their webpages, videos and mobile devices—from a single dashboard, and see which formats and channels are performing best for them.

A handful of publishers have already begun using the video feature and it appears to be performing well for them: we’ve seen 55 percent month-over-month growth in video ad volume in the last quarter. In other words, publishers are now able not only to produce more video content, but to make more money from it as well.

Direct Deals on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange
Another way publishers make money is to sell their advertising via online exchanges, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, where they can offer their ad space to a wide pool of competing ad buyers. This has already proven to generate substantially more revenue for publishers, and as a result we’ve seen significant growth in the number of trades on our exchange (158 percent year over year).

However, publishers have told us that they’d also like the option of making some of their ad space available only to certain buyers at a certain price—similar to how an art dealer might want to offer a painting first to certain clients before giving it to an auction house to sell. So we’re introducing Direct Deals on the Doubleclick Ad Exchange, which gives publishers the ability to make these “first look” offers. For example, using Direct Deals, a news publisher could set aside all of the ad space on their sports page and offer it first to a select group of buyers at a specific price, and then if those buyers pass on the offer, automatically place that inventory into the Ad Exchange’s auction.

Looking back at that blog, news site and app, we’d like them to have one more thing in common—being able to advantage of new opportunities to grow their businesses even further. These new tools, together with the other solutions we’re continuing to develop, are designed to help businesses like them—and all our publisher partners—do just that, and get the most out of today’s advertising landscape.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

Introducing Ad Exchange Direct Deals

The rise of Ad Exchanges has made it easier for buyers and sellers to connect, using technologies such as real-time bidding (RTB) to help unlock more value for every impression. Exchanges have also provided a number of efficiency benefits such as the elimination of Insertion Orders and trafficking headaches for every transaction and the ability for publishers to manage controls across a broad set of buyers. Increasingly, publishers have been innovating on this platform by making exclusive tiers of inventory available to select buyers via exchanges, a model typically known as a “private exchange”. Private exchanges allow publishers to better leverage their brands and sales relationships and provide buyers with enhanced access to premium inventory.

While we’ve offered the ability for sellers to list inventory privately in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange auction for more than a year, it was clear that the industry was also ready for yet another evolutionary step in exchange buying. Both buyers and sellers wanted even more flexibility, control and pricing certainty for select transactions, while continuing to manage all of their exchange deals in an integrated fashion. In response, we’ve continued to evolve DoubleClick Ad Exchange to meet these needs by rolling-out a new solution called Ad Exchange Direct Deals.

This new type of exchange deal allows publishers to offer inventory on DoubleClick Ad Exchange to specific buyers at a fixed price, instead of determining the price via auction. This inventory is also offered on a pre-auction basis, which means that publishers can give these select buyers “first look” access, while still making the ad impression available in our open exchange if it remains unsold. Publishers typically negotiate these fixed price exchange deals directly with sophisticated exchange buyers, such as large agencies or ad networks buying in real-time.

Direct Deals allows publishers to forge relationships with new, data-driven, buyers and benefit from the efficiency of an exchange transaction, such as “insertion-orderless” buying and automated clearing of payments. At the same time, publishers can use standard Ad Exchange protections from unwanted data collection, restricted advertiser categories, malware and latency. Advertisers gain more seamless access to high quality publisher inventory and pricing certainty.

Premium publishers, such as The Washington Post and About.com, have been early testers of this feature working with leading exchange buyers such as Criteo, who specializes in expanding search budgets into display. For Criteo, this feature has meant new opportunities to connect with publishers. “Working directly with publishers has always been critical for Criteo, as a way to access the best inventory and deliver the highest CPMs to publishers. We are delighted to be using Direct Deals as a new way to achieve this, with all the advantages of a real-time mechanism,” said Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer at Criteo.

Direct Deals joins a number of other sales models supported by DoubleClick Ad Exchange, including branded, anonymous and private auctions. Sellers using the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) platform for direct sales can also benefit from dynamic integration with DoubleClick Ad Exchange to ensure that the most profitable impression is delivered for every impression. We are excited to introduce this new level of flexibility to Ad Exchange to help buyers improve the effectiveness of their campaigns and sellers profit from real-time display buying on their terms. DoubleClick Ad Exchange advertisers and publishers can contact their account manager to join the Direct Deals beta program.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management

New reporting enhancements on DoubleClick Ad Exchange

If you’re a DoubleClick Ad Exchange publisher, you’re undoubtedly on the lookout for new ways to gain better insights and visibility into your transactions and revenue. Today, we’re pleased to introduce a new level of flexibility to Ad Exchange reporting with the expanded beta of Multi-Dimensional Reporting.

Multi-Dimensional Reporting can help you analyze the trends that matter most to your business by easily enabling you to “slice and dice” your Performance Reports across multiple criteria, including ad units, ad sizes and countries. All Ad Exchange publishers can now add up to three dimensions to their reports and create combinations such as ad unit by country and branding type.

To get started, simply click Add Dimension within the Performance Reports screen and select a dimension. Today, you can select up to three criteria and we will be expanding this number later in the year. We hope you find this feature useful in getting more insight from your Ad Exchange reports.

Posted by Rivka Spivak, Product Manager

Video: Learn how real-time bidding is defined and trends in RTB in under one hour

(Cross posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog)

Last week, we participated in an IAB Interactive Insights Webinar titled, “The Arrival of Real-Time Bidding.” In this webinar, Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management for DoubleClick Ad Exchange joined guests from Forrester Research, Inc. to define real-time bidding (RTB) and walk attendees through its impact on the marketplace for online ad inventory. Joining from Forrester Research, Inc. were Senior Analyst Joanna O’Connell and Analyst Michael Greene. Joanna explored how advertisers view the RTB trend and Michael explored how publishers view it. Scott, our foremost expert on RTB, discussed how Google works with advertisers and publishers on RTB.

For those of you who missed the webinar, we’ve posted the full recording here:

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

A year of the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange: improving large publishers’ returns

Fifteen months after launch, the new version of DoubleClick Ad Exchange is showing strong momentum -- we’ve tripled the number of transactions since last year -- which translates into more dollars for publishers. We’ve embedded new technologies into the Exchange, allowing us to expand upon research we conducted in mid-2010 showing that publishers could expect a 136% increase in effective CPMs (eCPMs) by making pre-emptible ad space available through the Exchange. Our updated finding? According to a new white paper released today, when publishers make inventory available in the Ad Exchange, and the Exchange wins the auction, they generate, on average, 188% more revenue compared with upfront sales of non-guaranteed ad space to networks and other third-party buyers.

The white paper’s findings reflect how publishers are materially benefiting from upward pricing pressure, a result of increased demand as more AdWords and Google Display Network buyers come online. Yields are also going up thanks to higher spending through agency trading desks and new third-party technology providers. And real-time bidding continues to be a major draw, now accounting for 56% of buyer spend.

We are also continuing to add features to the Exchange that put publishers even more firmly in control of what types of ads appear on their site, enabling them to build and protect their brand. Recent enhancements include:

• Private Ad Slots: Customizable, invitation-only auctions that allow publishers to make certain ad spaces available only to trusted advertisers and assign variable pricing floors depending on the buyer
• Category Blocking: Greatly expanded blocking capabilities based on 170 fine-grained vertical categories
• Troubleshooting Toolbar: A new browser toolbar that allows publishers to quickly identify the source of ads for easy blocking

Download the white paper.

Posted by Campbell Foster, Product Marketing Manager

DoubleClick Ad Exchange White Paper: The Value of Dynamic Allocation & Auction Pricing

We’re often asked to quantify the incremental value DoubleClick Ad Exchange can provide compared with publishers’ existing yield management techniques. According to proprietary research conducted in the first half of 2010, the combined effects of auction pressure and Dynamic Allocation in DoubleClick Ad Exchange resulted in an average CPM lift of 136% compared with fixed, upfront, pre-negotiated sales of non-guaranteed inventory.

In a new white paper, we take a step back to explain how publishers are managing yield across their pool of non-guaranteed inventory today, and what steps they can take to create efficiencies and boost overall revenue. Key elements of the white paper include:

• How publishers segment and sell ad inventory. How manual optimization processes often fail to capture all available revenue opportunities
• Dynamic Allocation explained. What it is, how it works, and what it means for publishers’ bottom lines.
• Auction pricing mechanics. Real-time pricing’s core advantages over the use of historical CPMs for non-guaranteed ad space.
• A brief look forward. The potential for DoubleClick Ad Exchange and its ecosystem of publishers, technology providers, advertisers and agencies.

Download the white paper.

Posted by Campbell Foster, Product Marketing Manager

Announcing the New DoubleClick Ad Exchange

You may have read on the Official Google Blog that the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange is open for business.

The new DoubleClick Ad Exchange helps to open the ecosystem and establish a new marketplace for buyers and sellers. For a large publisher managing multiple sales channels and ad networks, the Ad Exchange provides real-time yield management to maximize returns. Participating ad networks and agency networks get access to a large pool of inventory and the controls they need to precisely achieve their marketing goals.

We've been working for some time on rebuilding the Ad Exchange on Google technology to deliver an improved platform, with new features and functionality for our customers. Both sellers (publishers) and buyers (ad networks and agency networks) stand to benefit from the new features we've incorporated.

Key benefits for sellers include:

• Real-time dynamic allocation to maximize yield. Publishers can automatically generate the highest return for every impression, using real-time data and bids to allocate ad space to the sales channel that pays the most at that second.
• Access to many more advertisers. The Ad Exchange offers publishers access to new buyers, including AdWords advertisers, bringing higher quality ads and more competition for ad space on their sites.
• Hassle-free payments managed by Google. We manage the billing and payments from networks so publishers get one monthly payment and minimize having to manage multiple relationships.
• Greater controls. Publishers can decide what advertisers, networks, ad formats, and bid types to allow.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced reporting. We use the simplicity of Google's user design principles to help publishers easily find out how their sites are performing, to help them make the right decisions about their ad space.

Key benefits for buyers include:

• Access to more publishers and more ad space. Hundreds of thousands of AdSense publisher sites are now available on the Ad Exchange to Google-certified ad networks. And as more publishers join the Ad Exchange to take advantage of its yield management capabilities, more high quality inventory is being added all the time.
• Real-time bidder. The Ad Exchange has a new real-time bidder feature that allows buyers to use their own data, optimization and ad serving technologies to bid on their desired inventory on an impression-by-impression basis, choosing only the sites, audiences, or particular type of ad space they want to reach.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced buyer reporting capabilities. Redesigned reports are simple to use and understand, so buyers can easily see how their campaigns are performing to help them make the right decisions.
• More control and precision. Buyers control where their ads appear and don't appear. They can use frequency capping, pacing and other features to precisely control ad delivery.
• Centralized clearing system. Google makes all payments to publishers, reducing complexity with a single billing and payment point. Buyers benefit from managing one business relationship instead of many.
• A new API - Ad networks and agency networks will have access to an API which enables them to integrate their own functionality and systems when working with the Ad Exchange.

We're excited about the open marketplace that the new Ad Exchange creates and believe that it will add substantial value to the display advertising ecosystem.

Forrester's VanBoskirk on Media, Ad Exchanges

DoubleClick Ad Exchange recently hosted two roundtable dinners to engage with publishers, agencies and marketers, foster direct dialogue between buyers and sellers of online display media, and learn more about issues on the minds (and budgets) of disparate members of the advertising community. We invited Forrester's Shar VanBoskirk to present. (Visit our Web site to see Shar discussing the future of online media, among other topics).

Among the ideas that Shar presented at the two dinners:

• New media advertising, which now accounts for 8% of total ad spend, will become more important as younger consumers become mainstream. Across all channels (SEM, display, emerging, video, etc.), CAGR through 2012 projects to be 27%, with video at nearly 80% CAGR over the same time period.
• Marketers expect interactive effectiveness to increase, and their budget projections and plans over the next three years reflect this.
• Interactive continues to serve marketer needs more effectively, from selling products and services online to driving Web site traffic to lead-gen and relationship building.
• Exchanges will drive the next generation of sales – what is a relatively new concept now will become a core component of media buying and selling in the future.

Posted by Campbell Foster