What’s new with the Ad Planner 1000 for July

Welcome to the third installment of the Ad Planner 1000. This July we naturally saw many summer-related trends on the list as the northern hemisphere experienced the warmer weather.

When the Weather Outside is Delightful
It stands to reason that people would spend more time playing sports in the summer than following them on the web. And at least with a couple of popular sports websites in the AP 1000 that seems to be the case. Fifa.com dropped 54% in the number of unique visitors to their site but still managed to stay in the AP 1000 -- perhaps thanks to the early July fervor leading up to the World Cup finals. NBA.com saw a 31% decline from June as the season ended and ESPN.com saw a quarter (-25%) of their traffic evaporate in July.

Sports are not the only game in town as video game maker Blizzard’s release of Starcraft 2 helped battle.net break into the AP 1000 at #484.

Blockbuster Season
Just as many professional sports go dormant in the summer, blockbusters are there to fill the void. Trying to make a decision about which new movie release to check out this weekend? You aren’t the only one: movie listings and film review sites enjoyed a healthy increase in site traffic in the month of July. Fandago.com and moviefone.com both saw a 11% rise and rottentomatoes.com went up 5%. That trend didn’t leave dvd rental and online movie & TV streaming site, Netflix, in the dust though - their site saw an increase (+12%) in traffic too.

Summer Socials
Summer time is a social time as people take vacation, spend time outdoors and fire up the grill. Could that be one of the reason recipe sites allrecipes.com (+20%) and cooks.com (+10%) saw a healthy rise in the number of visitors to their sites?

At the height of the social season Facebook remains at the top of the list. Facebook.com has been at the top of the AP 1000 since we launched in May and is relatively consistent in the number of unique visitors (up 2% from June). Myspace.com (+11%), linkedin.com (+8%), bebo.com (+5%) and orkut.com +3% all saw traffic increases in July while social sites such as twitter.com (-3%), hi5.com (-10%) and friendster.com (-17%) saw fewer people visiting their sites in the middle of the summer.

A case of spring fever giving way to summer loving? Dating sites zoosk.com (+22%) and match.com (+11%) also fared well in July.

So that was just a highlight of what’s going on with the latest Ad Planner 1000. Check back next month for more insights and observations.

Posted by Wayne Lin, Product Manager

Investing in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and buyer safety

DoubleClick Ad Exchange Product Manager, Scott Spencer, recently spoke with John Ebbert at AdExchanger.com about some product enhancements and Google’s ongoing efforts around inventory quality and safety. Here is an excerpt of that interview:

What is Google announcing today?

Basically, we’re going to be rolling out a few more tools to help DoubleClick Ad Exchange buyers buy quality inventory, and to check their campaigns.

Taking a quick step back; when we launched the exchange about a year ago, we engineered it with best-in-market buyer and publishers controls, as well as extensive crawl-and-verify inventory screening. Together with the real time bidder, these were the biggest upgrades we made.

As part of a long line of improvements in this area over the past year, we’re taking the wraps off a couple of additional features to give buyers even more control, quality and transparency.

The first is “Site Packs” – these are manually crafted collections of like sites based on DoubleClick Ad Planner and internal classifications, vetted for quality. These allow buyers to get a set of high quality sites for their particular campaigns, covering anonymous and branded inventory.

Second, we’re making some changes to our Real-time Bidder (in beta). The biggest change here is for Ad Exchange clients who work with DSPs. Historically, Ad Exchange buyers were hidden from publishers behind their DSP. By introducing a way to segment out each individual client’s ad calls, inventory can be sent exclusively to an Ad Exchange buyer even when that buyer uses a DSP. It increases transparency for publishers and potentially give buyers more access to the highest quality inventory, like “exclusive ad slots” – high quality inventory offered to only a few, select buyers as determined by the publisher.

Thirdly, we’re soon going to be rolling out a beta of what we call “Data Transfer” – this is a report of every transaction bought or sold by a client on the Ad Exchange. Effectively, it’s a daily log file of everything that happened. Clients can then review every branded URL that they purchased to ensure everything was what they expected.

A recent report suggested that exchange inventory is unsafe for marketers. How does Google respond?

You won’t be surprised to hear this, but when it comes to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, I disagree. We have high quality DoubleClick and AdSense publishers.

Of course, it’s always possible to find a single page among millions that is objectionable in one way. But we’ve built extensive checks to ensure the quality and safety of our inventory, including strict participation policies, continuous automated scanning of all publisher sites, and automated inventory review to identify improper traffic patterns. A flag can trigger either a human review or an automatic blocking. These validation tools apply to our combined pool of AdSense and Ad Exchange publisher inventory. They operate at a page-level granularity, pre-screening individual ad units, then report to the client in great detail afterwards.

We’ve also developed ways for marketers to choose high quality inventory, like through the Ad Planner 1000 filter, and the ability to buy or exclude specific publishers, URLs or categories of content.

You can read the full interview here.

Posted by Jon Nevitt, Product Marketing Manager

New Tutorial! Ad Planner Export to AdWords Feature

A top request from DoubleClick Ad Planner users has been to make it easy to plan and buy your next Google Display Network (GDN) campaign in Ad Planner. GDN advertisers have particularly found Ad Planner to be an indispensable resource in researching sites for their next media buy. Carnival Cruise Lines is just one advertiser who made good use of Ad Planner in the planning phase of their GDN campaign.

So in response we launched the export to AdWords feature in Ad Planner back in May.

With this feature, you simply export GDN placements from Ad Planner into AdWords. These exported placements will be set up as either a new campaign or added to existing campaign or ad group within AdWords.

This online tutorial will help you learn how to take advantage of this simple way to buy GDN placements found through Ad Planner.

In this tutorial, you will learn about:

• Creating a media plan and finding GDN placements
  
• Exporting your plan to AdWords
  
• Setting up a new campaign or adding to existing campaign in Adwords

You can also find the tutorial via the DoubleClick Learn Center (login required).

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

Introducing mobile ad serving in DoubleClick for Advertisers

As the popularity of mobile advertising rises, so too do the challenges for advertisers. The proliferation of mobile devices along with emerging standards make for a challenging environment in which to execute on mobile campaigns.

Serving mobile ads through DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) is the answer to tackling some of these pain points head on. This latest DFA release allows advertisers and agencies to traffic mobile ad campaigns alongside the rest of their online advertising campaigns.

Serve mobile ads in DFA
Trafficking mobile ads in DFA is easy. You use the same process as you would for any campaign in DFA. Mobile is just another ad type and placement type that you would select within the DFA trafficking interface. You don’t even need to create a separate campaign for your mobile ads in DFA, you can include them in any existing campaign alongside the rest of your online creatives assets.

Serve mobile ads to a variety of mobile platforms
DFA mobile ads are designed to be trafficked on inventory that is optimized for mobile browsers or within a mobile application. Tailor your message to each of the major mobile platforms and automatically serve the appropriate Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) creative size to a broad array of mobile devices. You also have many of the existing DFA targeting features at your disposal such as day-parting, keywords and geo-targeting.

Integrated reporting
With fully integrated reporting you get mobile impression and click data all in the same place as the standard DFA reports. There is also a mobile-specific report which shows a breakdown of stats for your mobile placement by wireless carrier, mobile platform and country.

Mobile-optimized tags
The mobile placement in DFA generates tags that are optimized to run on a wide variety of mobile devices ensuring that your campaign has the reach you desire. These tags work seamlessly with the Doubleclick Mobile publisher platform and have been tested successfully on a number of other leading publisher technology providers. If you’re a publisher and want to accept DFA mobile placements, just log into your site directory account or email sd-support@google.com.

Standard ads go mobile too
As many mobile phones come with full Internet browsers, you’ll often find that your standard ads are being viewed on mobile devices too. So, alongside the mobile placements we’re also releasing mobile browser targeting for standard ads. This gives you the opportunity to control the creative you serve alongside standard web content when it is viewed on a mobile device (e.g., iPhone, iPad or Android devices).

Just the beginning
We’re working hard to add new features to mobile in DFA so expect to see multiple enhancements to your mobile advertising experience in DFA in the coming months.

Posted by Alex Gawley, Product Manager

What’s new with the Ad Planner 1000 list for June

We hope you have been enjoying our monthly updates on the Ad Planner 1000, a valuable resource for determining the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by DoubleClick Ad Planner.

This month, we're pleased to expand the number of Google properties included in Ad Planner and the AP 1000. YouTube.com tops the list at number 2, joining other Google properties already included in the AP 1000 Blogger (49), Orkut (38) and Picnik (540).

Some other interesting updates with this latest Ad Planner 1000:

Did you get caught up in the World Cup craze? The entire world did and it showed. The number of unique users to fifa.com increased a whopping 454% making the site the 42nd most popular site in the world for the month of June. In May, fifa.com cracked the Ad Planner 1000 at 441. Fifa.com wasn’t the only site that benefited from the World Cup in June:

• June was a banner month for Spain as it led up to this month's big World Cup win and Spaniard Albert Contador winning the Tour de France. Marca.com was a winner too with a 79% increase in unique users from the month before.
  
• The World Cup didn’t go unnoticed either in the United States as espn.go.com saw a 48% rise in June. And won’t it will be interesting to see where ESPN falls in the July Ad Planner 1000 thanks to some stateside craze of our own named Lebron James?
  
• In May goal.com jumped 21% in the Ad Planner 1000 rankings and the momentum didn’t stop in June when the site enjoyed a 40% rise in unique users.

Smart phones might be the best thing since the proverbial sliced bread -- weren’t you glad you had yours to keep up-to-the minute on the World Cup? Some big launches in June made its impression on the Ad Planner 1000.

• Did you wait out the long lines and get your iPhone 4 right at its launch in June? Whether you did or not, many of you visited the Apple site in the month of June and so the 19% increase in unique users should come as no surprise.
  
• HTC, the maker of several Android phones, cracked the list at 980, perhaps from the recent momentum of launching some new devices this year such as the Droid Incredible and the Evo 4G.
  
• The carriers benefited as well with att.com and sprint.com experiencing a 20% and 21% increase in site users respectively.
An interesting trend though was the decline in the number of unique users to Nokia (-12%) and Blackberry (-16%).

With school out and the longer days, summer vacation is certainly on the mind. The interest in travel sites was evident by the increase in unique users to the following sites:

• kayak.com (+22%)
  
• booking.com (+15%)
  
• travelocity.com (+12%)
  
• marriott.com (+12%)
  
• hilton.com (+14%)
  
• hotels.com (+11%)

What will July hold for the sites in the Ad Planner 1000? Only one way to find out, check back with us in a couple of weeks when we will publish the new July 2010 list to the Ad Planner 1000.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

Havas Digital uses DoubleClick data to drive better results for clients

Here is a great case study about DoubleClick's relationship with Havas Digital and how it has translated into Havas driving better results for its clients. For more than 10 years, Havas Digital has used DoubleClick services to help deliver and tweak hundreds of online advertising campaigns.

The worldwide group of agencies under the Havas Digital banner uses many services from DoubleClick, including DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) and the data transfer solution that feeds Havas’ powerful in-house digital marketing decision support and optimization system, called Artemis.

Artemis is Havas Digital’s proprietary digital campaign management and optimization system that enables users to collect and evaluate data to gain a better understanding of advertising campaign performance.

The system helps marketers optimize digital campaigns through insights into consumer behavior such as website visits, search clicks, banner or video exposures. Artemis also matches digital exposure data with website sales and customer lifetime value metrics.

DoubleClick’s data transfers power some of Artemis’ most advanced solutions, providing marketers with fresh insights that far outpace run-of-the-mill metrics like click-through and conversion rates.

The best data available
With DoubleClick’s data transfer solution, selected DoubleClick ad server log files are available every morning for download by clients. These files contain the best data available to help analyze online consumer behavior, including detailed information on an advertiser’s impressions, clicks or conversions (or Spotlight events).

After this data is fed into Artemis, seasoned analysts from Havas use Artemis’ automated Advanced Reports to help optimize the media spend for hundreds of name-brand advertisers. Often this involves making recommendations on tricky issues like optimal ad reach and frequency, streamlining the conversion process, attribution weighting for search vs. display, and syncing up numerous channels of online and offline advertising.

Read the full case study to learn more about Havas Digital’s success with clients’ campaigns using Artemis and DoubleClick data transfer.

Global scale and support
With operations in 54 cities around the world, Havas Digital is there for its clients, wherever they are. And DoubleClick is there too, checking in regularly to ensure that Havas Digital has all the fresh, top-quality data it needs. DoubleClick also operates a dedicated network for Havas Digital in Asia Pacific and dedicated custom networks for several clients.

“Our long-lasting relationship with DoubleClick has enabled us to offer the marketplace a truly differentiated service with data-driven decision support at its core,” says Anthony Rhind, Havas Digital Global co-CEO. “The combination of highly granular data from DoubleClick and powerful analysis from Artemis helps us to put solid business results at the heart of our clients’ digital campaigns.”

With high-octane data from DoubleClick fueling the powerful engine of Artemis, this partnership is delivering strategic insights and great results to advertisers around the world.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

What’s new with the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report 2009 Year-in-Review

We published the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report in 2009 to give advertisers and agencies a resource to measure their display campaigns’ performance against industry norms. As a result of feedback and interest from our clients and others in the industry, we’re pleased to offer this year’s edition with a couple of updates:

• Data on impressions served through DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) by creative type. Simple flash is the dominant ad format accounting for close to 70% in the U.S. and 85% in the EMEA region. Static image ads was the next most common format representing 20% of the volume through DFA in the U.S. and 10% in the EMEA region.
  
• The availability of a benchmarks report with detailed EMEA region metrics. Last year we included worldwide overall click-through rates and rich media metrics in the report. Now we are pleased to introduce a separate EMEA Benchmarks Report which covers in-depth display benchmarks across a subset of countries in the EMEA region.
  
• Comparison between overall 2008 and 2009 benchmarks. You will also find in this latest report, a month-by-month comparison of benchmark data for click-through rates, interaction rates, expansion rates and interaction time for the years 2008 and 2009.

When reviewing the data we noticed some interesting trends:

• In 2009, the overall click-through rate for the U.S. did not change from 2008 (0.10%) and what’s more is in a month by month comparison of click-through rates (CTRs) from 2008 to 2009 we saw that CTRs were very consistent throughout the year with a minor spike in January -- possibly a result of the post-holiday sale season.
  
• When it comes to CTR, interaction rate, average interaction time and average display time, we did not observe a great difference between U.S. (see page 2) and EMEA (see page 2) benchmarks.
  
• Consistent with last year’s report, we continued to find a correlation between ad size and clicks and interaction rates -- that is, the larger the ad size, the higher the rate. This finding holds true for both U.S. and the EMEA region.

As with last year’s report, the data for these benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DoubleClick for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. The report covers benchmarks for the entirety of 2009 by ad format, ad size and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions.

For greater detail on the benchmark data, download the U.S. report here and the EMEA region report here. More in-depth benchmarks by industry are available exclusively to DoubleClick clients so contact your account manager to discuss further.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager