Introducing Search for Placements in Ad Planner

This week we are launching a group of new changes in DoubleClick Ad Planner. The existing Search by Audience tab is being replaced with a Search for Placements tab. This new tab has all the functionality of the existing interface but also brings many new features into the application.

The new Search For Placements Tab in Ad Planner

Here are some of the great new capabilities we’ve added:

Site Language: In addition to being able to restrict on a language for your Audience you will be able to restrict your search to pages where the content is predominantly in a specific language.
Site Content: Find sites similar to other URLs or a set of keywords.
Topic Exclusion: Find sites that do not belong to the categories you choose.
Advanced Ad Formats: We now support filtering on advanced Video Ad options such as TrueView and Duration.
Attributes: Additional placement level properties for selection.
Browser Class: In an increasingly smartphone and tablet centric world you can now restrict results to those sites that support these types of browsing.

Besides these great features we’ve also brought YouTube content into Ad Planner. You can now search for the best YouTube categories and channels that meet your advertising needs.

A search for YouTube content on Ad Planner

With these changes we are putting more display ad inventory at your fingertips than ever before. By providing the ability to plan Video side by side with your traditional display purchases you can build comprehensive media plans that offer you better reach and engagement. For additional details on the new release check out the Ad Planner help articles.

Roshan Khan, Product Manager

Counting All the Cookies in Ad Planner

We’re always looking at ways to improve data in DoubleClick Ad Planner. For example, back in April we changed the algorithm for calculating unique visitors (users). Now we are also updating the way we estimate unique visitors (cookies). Generally you should see this value go up across the board which will more accurately represent the relationship between real people and cookies.

Previously we looked at a sample of cookies for a site and built a model to extrapolate overall statistics for that site. Now we have a much smarter process where we look at the overall number of cookies on a site and use that to estimate overall traffic, resulting in bigger, more accurate, values. As before, we look only at the aggregate number of cookies, not the cookies themselves.

The Ad Planner product team is continually striving to bring the most accurate and comprehensive view of sites on the internet to our users. The end result of this latest effort is that now you’ll see more accurate cookie values represented in Ad Planner.

Roshan Khan, Product Manager

Going Beyond Placements with Ad Planner

Since its release DoubleClick Ad Planner has strived to simplify the display planning experience by helping you find the most relevant sites on the internet for your campaign. But even the best placements get extraneous impressions - folks who are unlikely to convert in a direct response campaign or outside the target audience for a brand. Why can’t you always reach the right people as well as the right placements? Well - now you can.

Here at Google we’ve been working on some novel technologies to enable audience based buying. Thanks to this effort audience buying is now available to all AdWords users. And today we’ve brought the ability to plan for an audience buy into Ad Planner. You can now select from over 1,000 interest categories across the more than 500 million daily users of the Google Display Network (GDN). Advertisers like ShoeDazzle have used audience buying on the GDN to improve conversion volume as much as 400% and interest targeting consistently shows CTR far greater than the display ad average. This phenomenal performance is driven by the power of Google audiences across the GDN.

Through Ad Planner you can now set up a campaign that will reach your users across the GDN regardless of the site they are on. That means greater ROI for advertisers who want to reach their audience at scale for brand or performance goals. This will also result in more meaningful, relevant ads for users, ultimately translating into higher conversion rates. And it means an easier time building the campaign by allowing you to focus on defining your audience rather than sorting through a list of sites and placements.

Log into Ad Planner and take a test drive on the new Audience Planning tab. While you’re doing that we’ll be working on the next set of exciting features for interest categories powered by Google.

Posted by Roshan Khan, Product Manager

A Look Back at Trends from the April Ad Planner 1000

We’re back on this month with some interesting observations for the April Ad Planner 1000 list. It appears that the change of season had its impact particularly on sports, weather and technology sites as 2011 moved into the spring season in the northern hemisphere.

Major League Baseball here in the United States started the 2011 season strong with their website, mlb.com, experiencing a 58% increase in the number of visitors. Other American sports fared well as they were heading into their respective playoff seasons: basketball's nba.com (+6%) and the National Hockey League's nhl.com (+19%) saw upswings in their site traffic numbers during the month of April.

Deal sites have been experiencing steady growth in traffic month over month according to the AP 1000. In addition to the popular groupon.com (+4%) and livingsocial.com (+11%) sites, coupons.com (+23%), shopathome.com (+18%) and snapdeal.com (+8%) witnessed considerable increases in visitors to their site from the month before. Everyone loves a good deal apparently.

Changing seasons and its effect on weather-related sites also seems to be a consistent trend for sites in the AP 1000. Perhaps people who have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of better weather drove traffic to German weather site wetter.com (+33%), weather.com (+11%) and accuweather.com (+10%).

The arrival of spring seemed to motivate people to get the start on home improvement projects and so we observed increases in the number of unique visitors to retailers such as lowes.com (+14%) and homedepot.com (+6%) in the month of April.

Check back with us next month for May’s AP 1000 to see what April showers will bring to the most visited sites on the web.

Posted by Alex Lin, Product Specialist

A new way to measure unique visitors to a site in Ad Planner

With DoubleClick Ad Planner our goal is to identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions. We’re constantly looking to add to and improve the quality of data presented in Ad Planner, and we’re pleased to announce a significant change to our algorithm that will improve how we derive the unique visitors (users) metric.

The unique visitors (users) metric is the estimated, unduplicated number of people who visit a site over a specific month. This measurement is key to understanding what percentage of your target audience you can reach at any given site.

We are rolling out our improved algorithm across all of the sites in Ad Planner today, April 19, 2011, and as a result we expect that you will start seeing an increase in the number of unique visitors for most sites. We’ve spent the past year on intensive research to build this new model and are very excited to finally put it into effect.

Note that the methodology for all other metrics in Ad Planner remains the same with this change. For more information on how we compile the data in Ad Planner reference this article in the Ad Planner Help Center.

Posted by Roshan Khan, Product Manager

Travel and Taxes are Top of Mind in February’s Ad Planner 1000

The second installment of the Ad Planner 1000 list for 2011 saw similar trends to January in a few major areas, while a couple major events drove attention to additional sites.

Travel is still on the rise, as the popular travel aggregators priceline.com, travelocity.com, travelzoo.com (+10%), and booking.com (+7%) had a strong showing for a second consecutive month.

While not as drastic as the previous month, well known outlets such as sears.com (-16%), walmart.com (-13%), costco.com (-13%), bestbuy.com (-11%), overstock.com (-10%), macys.com(-9%), and jcpenney.com (-7%) still saw declines in visitors to their sites.

Also following last month’s trend, the upcoming tax season continues to boost irs.gov (+45%) and TurboTax sales keep driving up intuit.com (+10%). Folks are also turning to tax advisors, with hrblock.com making its 2011 debut in the top sites list at #803.

Sports in February saw an end to the football season (with a thrilling Green Bay victory), and a subsequent drop to nfl.com (-49%). To pick up the slack, the 2011 NBA All-Star Game was played in Los Angeles this month and drove up traffic for nba.com (+12%).

After multiple delays and rescheduling, the long-awaited final mission of Space Shuttle Discovery finally took off on February 24th. This event and the anticipation leading up to it also likely launched interest in nasa.gov (+24%).

Finally in tech news, the 2011 Mobile World Congress took place in mid-February in Barcelona. Google announced Android 3.0, its first OS built for tablets and android.com debuted on our list at #680.

Posted by Alex Lin, Product Specialist

Less Shopping and More Travel: Two Top Trends for the January 2011 Ad Planner 1000

A new year often means new resolutions, a time to recover from the excesses of the holiday season and plan for the new year. As reflected in January’s Ad Planner 1000, anyway, it seems that less shopping, tax season and travel are particularly top of mind with people navigating the web.

With the holiday season over retail sites took a hit in January as it appears consumers have scaled back on purchases - at least in the online world. Popular sites in the AP 1000 such as target.com (-40%), shoplocal.com (-38%), kohls.com (-38%), bestbuy.com (-35%), walmart.com (-35%) and sears.com (-32%) all saw significant declines in the number of unique visitors to their site from the month before. But special deals to counteract the expected drop in retail sales can work magic - as it did in for the deal site, livingsocial.com. Its Amazon.com $20-for-$10 offer resulted in over 1.3 million vouchers sold and a 47% increase in the number of visitors to its site for that month.

And while people are spending less, they might be hoping to see tax refunds, and thus the appearances of two tax-related sites in the January list: the irs.gov entered the list at #449 and intuit.com, makers of the popular TurboTax software, entered at #321.

It’s possible that finding new jobs and new destinations are popular resolutions this year if the surge in traffic to career and travel sites are any indication. Job search site indeed.com (+26%) saw more than a quarter of their unique visitors increase in January and sites careerbuilder.com (+21%) and monster.com (+20%) also fared well with increases in traffic from the month before.

The increase in visitors to travel-related sites was particularly notable in January’s AP 1000 list. Tripadvisor.com (+33%), booking.com (+33%), orbitz.com (+31%), travelocity.com (+31%) -- all saw more than a third more unique visitors to their site than in December. While sites hotels.com (+29%), expedia.com (+21%), easyjet.com (+20%) and priceline.com (+16%) also saw notable boosts in traffic.

Check back with us next month to see when we publish the data for February’s AP 1000. We’re looking forward to seeing how cupid’s arrow will work his magic on sites in the AP 1000 list.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing

December’s Ad Planner 1000 Shows Big Gains for Greeting Card, Consumer Electronics and Weather Sites

The end of the year and holiday season made their mark on trends in this December’s Ad Planner 1000. Check back each month for the latest list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by DoubleClick Ad Planner.

Holiday greetings went digital in December as a number of online card and greeting sites saw sizeable increases in traffic to their sites. The site 123greetings.com went up 79% from November to December in terms of unique users to their site. Other sites found their way into the Top 1000 thanks to the holidays: jibjab.com (#207), jacquielawson.com (#456), and myfuncards.com (#763).

But perhaps sending a virtual greeting wasn’t enough so many flocked to Skype as a way to reach out to loved ones during the holidays. Skype.com experienced a 32% surge in visitors to their site during the month of December.

And judging by the popularity of consumer electronic sites and retail sites in this month’s AP 1000, many people are receiving gadgets and books as Christmas gifts. Online book retailer, barnesandnoble.com saw a 24% increase of unique users to their site while amazon.com went up 10% in their site traffic from November. Consumer electronic sites, samsung.com (+23%), apple.com (+11%) and logitech.com (+11%), all saw significant increases as well.

No surprise then that shipping companies witnessed notable increases in their site traffic as well in the month of December. The United States postal service site, usps.com, went up 33%, ups.com and fedex.com increase visitors to their site 31% and 22% respectively. That trend was reflected in Japan, as the national postal service site, japanpost.jp increased 20% in the number of visitors from the prior month.

Another trend observed in December was an upsurge of interest in weather-related sites. As storms impacted most of North America in the month of December, it’s no surprise that people went online to check the latest weather conditions: wunderground.com (+38%), accuweather.com (+33%) and weather.com (+22%).

Interested in what January has in store for the top 1,000 global sites? We’ll return with the latest trends in the AP 1000 when January’s data becomes available next month.

Posted by Alex Lin, Product Specialist

November Insights from DoubleClick Ad Planner

Insights abound in the latest global Ad Planner 1000 list for November 2010. This is a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by DoubleClick Ad Planner. Access the list here for more detailed information on each of the top 1,000 sites.

Perhaps not surprisingly with the holidays coming up in December, department store sites and retailers saw significant gains in unique visitors on the global list. Walmart.com went up a whopping 44% in November and other retailers saw significant gains as well kohls.com (+35%), jcpenny.com (+34%), target.com (+31%), sears.com (+31%) and macys.com (+20%).

Other categories, such as news, travel and hospitality didn’t fare so well. Here in the U.S. with the November elections you would think that sites such as the huffingtonpost.com (down 24%) would experience a big increase in the unique visitors from the previous month but that wasn’t the case. Apparently it was a slow news cycle in November, at least when it came to online news sites.

Other news-oriented sites that experienced notable declines in the number of site visitors in November include:

• aolnews.com (-32%)
• abcnews.go.com (-31%)
• nytimes.com (-27%)
• telegraph.co.uk (-26%)
• time.com (-25%)
• boston.com (-25%)
• usatoday.com (-24%)
• cbsnews.com (-18%)

We also observed that technology news sites, mashable.com (-33%) and techcrunch.com (-31%), lost almost a third of their site traffic from the month before.

Travel and hospitality sites also saw declines in the number of unique visitors to their sites during the month of November. Travel search sites priceline.com (-26%), orbitz.com (-25%), kayak.com (-24%) and booking.com (-20%) all saw significant decline from their October site traffic. Hotel sites marriott.com (-25%) and hilton.com (-19%) also saw their traffic fall from October to November as well as the hotel booking site, hotels.com (-23%).

If you want to dive into the data even deeper, we now publish 21 top 100 lists in 16 languages. Select your preferred language to access the latest top 100 country lists. We have top 100 lists for November for Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States.

These 21 lists are available in British English, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.

Expect to see more observations with your favorite sites when we publish our next monthly update with December's data.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

Signal to Noise tunes into local and foreign markets with DoubleClick Ad Planner

San Francisco-based interactive agency, Signal to Noise, wasn’t quick to jump on the DoubleClick Ad Planner bandwagon when the product was first available in 2008. It took a little time but the agency’s media team found Ad Planner really useful to supplement its other media planning tools when it came to managing campaigns targeting specific U.S. cities, foreign countries and other languages.

A major online retailer asked Signal to Noise to expand their online display campaigns to Canada, including websites in French. But the agency had no access to media planning data outside of the U.S. unless they were willing to make an expensive upgrade to their existing services.

When Allen Stern, media director for Signal to Noise, took another look at Ad Planner, he was impressed. “When we started to expand into Canada and to do French language campaigns, I tried Ad Planner again, and I was very surprised; I thought it was great!” he says. “All of a sudden, Ad Planner became a great tool for us.”

Stern’s team used DoubleClick’s free online tool to identify likely sites in Canada for his client to place its ads, mostly banners in English and French. He used Ad Planner’s flexible features to search for sites in Canada, in the French-speaking province of Quebec, or simply by language.

“We identified sites and put a plan together. Ad Planner actually helped us allocate budgets. Those ads worked great and have continued to drive ROI,” says Stern. “So our client was very pleased, and we continue to deliver media plans for Canada.”

It was the same story when his agency needed to understand the media landscape
in France and Germany. Once again, Ad Planner helped Stern find and track
appropriate sites, and saved the agency thousands of dollars in subscription fees
for other tools.

And even though his team can’t read French or German, that’s not a problem; Ad
Planner can still delve into a site’s statistics and tell them—in English—whether it’s a good prospect to add to a campaign.

Read the full case study to learn more about Signal to Noise’s success with clients’ campaigns using DoubleClick Ad Planner.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

DoubleClick Ad Planner Makes Regional Campaigns Easier

DoubleClick Ad Planner just made it easier to plan media buys for regional ad campaigns through two important upgrades.

First, the product has been localized to support 15 languages. In addition to American English, Ad Planner can now be displayed in British English, Russian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and Turkish.

Second, the Ad Planner team has published lists of the top 100 sites in each of 21 regional markets. Named the “Ad Planner 100,” these lists provide a quick reference to identify the most popular sites by country. Check out the Ad Planner 100 lists for the countries you advertise within:

Australia Belgium Brazil Canada China France Germany

Hong Kong Italy Japan Korea Netherlands Poland Russia

Spain Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey United Kingdom United States

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Introducing the DoubleClick Ad Planner Marketplace

Today we're excited to announce the beta launch of the DoubleClick Ad Planner Marketplace for advertisers and agencies using DoubleClick for Advertisers. The Ad Planner Marketplace is a new solution connecting buyers and sellers of online advertising to make the process of traditional online media buying simpler and more efficient.

Buying online media can be incredibly inefficient with 28% of total media spend going to administrative costs, according to ThinkEquity. And in terms of planning media, it can be hard to access data to find the best sites that attract your target audience and to get detailed information on a site’s available inventory.

At DoubleClick, we're further developing Ad Planner with these challenges in mind. Ad Planner is a good resource for site research, providing robust data on sites and their available ad placements. The launch of Ad Planner Marketplace takes this one step further by offering additional information about publisher inventory including the availability of inventory, audience profiles for inventory and the ability to place order requests for inventory.

Still in beta, Ad Planner Marketplace is just the first step in building out a completely streamlined media planning and buying solution on the DoubleClick for Advertisers platform.
Currently with the Ad Planner Marketplace you can:

• Search for ad placements that meet your campaign goals
  
• Review information on publishers’ placements including:
  
  • Audience Statistics: Unique Visitors, Demographics, Audience Interests
    
  • Advertising Information: Impression volume, Available ad sizes, Available ad types and formats, and CPM rates
• Send order requests to reserve and purchase site placements directly in Ad Planner from participating publishers in the Marketplace.

The Ad Planner Marketplace beta is currently available to users of DoubleClick for Advertisers. In this beta release, ad placements are only available from publishers selling in US dollars. Expect to be updated in the coming months as we continue to add features and make enhancements to the Ad Planner Marketplace.

If you are interested in signing up for the beta, fill out this form [update 6/1/2011: we are no longer accepting beta requests for Marketplace]. If you are not already on DFA, contact us for more information.

Posted by Seth Demsey, Product Manager

Trends and observations in the September Ad Planner 1000

The September edition of the Ad Planner 1000 offers a few obvious trends as students across the northern hemisphere have returned to school and are putting their thinking caps on.

As the school year gets into full swing, homework and school projects abound and usage of reference sites increases correspondingly. September was a good month for reference.com which was up more than 23%, thesaurus.com followed closely with its 21% increase in the number of unique visitors, wiktionary.org went up almost 18%, merrian-webster.com more than 17% and thefreedictionary.com enjoyed more than a 16% increase in site visitors for the month of September.

The return to school did not seem to bode well for online gaming and entertainment sites as we observed a decline in site traffic with many of these sites. Perhaps much of play time has gone from the online realm to the offline world of the playground.

Battle.net was the most embattled as it saw a huge drop in site visitors (-38%), while 4399.com was not far behind with a steep 35% decline, duowan.com dropped 24%, pcgames.com (-24%), addictinggames.com (-18%), sdo.com was down 17% and nick.com and zylom.com saw 16% fewer visitors to their sites in September. To a lesser extent, miniclip.com (-13%), armorgames.com (-9%) and juegos.com (-8%) also saw drops in visitors to their site during this month.

“Did you catch that season premiere last night?” is likely a common refrain heard around water coolers everywhere. Thanks to the new television season, network sites re-entered the Ad Planner 1000: nbc.com at #679, cbs.com at #712 and abc.go.com at #748. Tvguide.com also benefited with enough of an increase to site visitors to crack the list at #820.

Sports trends have usually shown their mark on the Ad Planner 1000 from month to month and September is no different. In the U.S., football fervor is underway and the biggest beneficiary is nfl.com with a whopping 61% increase in unique vistors to their site. Espn.com fared well (+26%), as did cbssports.com which debuted in the Ad Planner 1000 this month at #672. On the other hand, as playoff contenders emerge in the baseball post-season, the narrowing field of teams to follow seems to have affected mlb.com which saw site traffic go down 16%.

In other trend news, social networking sites Facebook.com remains atop the Ad Planner 1000 this month with a healthy rise in the number of unique visitors of 11%. Twitter fared well too with 12% more visitors in the month of September.

Expect to see more of these interesting observations with your favorite sites when we publish the next update to the Ad Planner 1000 in a couple of weeks.

Posted by Wayne Lin, Product Manager

New Ad Planner 1000 List for August

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Alex Lin, Product Specialist

What’s new with the Ad Planner 1000 for July

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

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

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

Blockbuster Season

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Wayne Lin, Product Manager

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

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

What’s new in the Ad Planner 1000

In May we introduced the Ad Planner 1000, a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. It’s a great reference for checking out the most popular sites on the web and observing interesting trends in this latest list of the top 1,000 global sites from month to month. Here are some of our observations from the latest Ad Planner 1000 sites for May 2010.

‘Tis the Season
April showers might bring May flowers but it also brings an end to the tax season. So not surprisingly we saw a precipitous drop (-62%) in the number of unique users going to irs.gov from April to May 2010.

May also spells the end of the television season. Could that be the reason behind the rise in traffic to online video sites as viewers are scrambling to keep up with their favorite shows’ season finales? In the list of top 1,000 May 2010 sites we saw increases in traffic to top video sites vimeo.com (+22%), hulu.com (+20%) and netflix (+13%) and saw nbc.com entering the top 1000 as well.

Games that People Play
The World Cup comes once every four years so the build up to the event makes it no surprise that fifa.com broke the Ad Planner 1000 in May, coming in at 441 on the top 1,000 list. Not to mention goal.com which was already on the Ad Planner 1000 and experienced a 21% increase in unique visitors.

But soccer is not the only game in town these days, at least not here in the U.S. Playoff season is here and naturally the NBA is reaping the benefits. Basketball fans are flocking to nba.com and as a result the number of unique visitors is up 22% this month. We can’t say the same for hockey, however, as unique visitors to nhl.com went down 11% from April. Perhaps this signals waning interest from hockey fans whose teams failed to make the playoffs this season?

While people were playing games outdoors, plenty were staying in. Zynga.com, a popular online gaming site, rose 22% in the month of May.

So that was just a taste of trends for May - check out the latest Ad Planner 1000 and observe interesting trends for yourself.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

Announcing the Ad Planner 1000 and Greater Integration with AdWords

Today, we are introducing several new features that integrate DoubleClick Ad Planner data with other Google advertising solutions. These features help streamline the process of planning and building online ad campaigns while offering advertisers access to better data for more informed media planning decisions.

Ad Planner Top 1,000 Most Visited Sites

The Ad Planner 1000 list is a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. Published monthly, this list details the number of unique visitors, page views and reach for each site for the top 1,000 sites globally. It’s a great way to quickly reference the most popular sites on the web.

This latest resource represents yet another step in the evolution of Ad Planner in providing reliable traffic and audience information for websites. In conjunction with our Ad Planner 1000 list, the Google Content just released an Ad Planner 1,000 targeting feature. These two features combined provide an example of how Google is working to provide more actionable data for online display advertisers.

Exporting Google Content Network Placements to AdWords
Many Ad Planner users are also AdWords users, and one of the top requested features is to provide a simple and easy way to buy Google Content Network placements advertisers find through Ad Planner. The newly launched Export to AdWords feature enables advertisers to simply export Google Content Network placements from Ad Planner into AdWords. These exported placements will be set up as a new campaign or ad group within AdWords.

For advertisers running text ads or display ads on the Google Content Network, this provides an easy way to build media plans of managed placements. Now translating the great audience research data in Ad Planner into your AdWords campaigns is easier than ever.

Creating Lists in Ad Planner
To help you create your own list of favorite sites to save and add your media plans, we also recently launched “Lists” in Ad Planner. With “Lists”, you can store sites and placements in lists for future use in media plans. To get you started, we’ve made the Ad Planner 1,000 list available to all Ad Planner user accounts for use as a handy reference or for download.

Our goal with the Top 1000 Sites and other recent updates is to deliver new tools for greater planning efficiency and data to make more informed advertising decisions.

Visit www.google.com/adplanner to check out our new features.

Posted by Rohit Kundaji, Software Engineer and Wayne Lin, Product Manager

Audience Interests Now Available in DoubleClick Ad Planner

Advertisers can now build media plans to reach audiences with interests relevant to their campaigns using DoubleClick Ad Planner. Audience interests represent the aggregate interests of visitors to any given website. With today's release, the top ten audience interests for each site are now listed on the profile page for each of the millions of sites profiled in Ad Planner. This provides an important complement to the demographic data that's already widely available. By combining an understanding of a website's demographic appeal with the range of interests of the audience the site attracts, advertisers can get a more complete picture of who they will reach by advertising on the site.

To date in Ad Planner, advertisers have used site categories, which describe the content of websites, as a proxy for audience interests. For example, to plan an ad campaign for a pet product, advertisers would look for sites with content about pets for their media plan. While this may be an appropriate proxy, it also may overlook some great sites, since when people are interested in a topic, they don't only visit sites about that topic. Audience interests in Ad Planner helps advertisers find a wider range of sites for their media plan without compromising their ability to reach the right audience.

With the "Search by audience" tab in Ad Planner, selecting the "Pets" interest will reveal a list of sites that have a high affinity with audiences interested in pets. While some of the sites will be about pets, many additional sites will be about other topics. Take the screenshot below, which is from the Ad Planner profile for a site about politics. Although the site is not about pets, it scores a high (36.9x) affinity with audiences who are interested in pets, which means visitors to this site are 36.9 times more likely to be interested in pets than the average Internet population. A category filter on pets would never locate this site, but an interests search on pets would.

Audience interests gives advertisers a new tool for selecting the best sites for their media plans. To learn more about how we generate the data for audience interests, please refer to our methodology document. To try out the new audience interests features, visit www.google.com/adplanner.

Posted by Ben Chambers, Software Engineer