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Google Display Network series: Effectively planning your online display campaigns

BlogPostman — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:41:00 +0000

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

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Google Display Network series: Effectively planning your online display campaigns

Carnival Cruise Lines Charts their Course with the Google Content Network

BlogPostman — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:05:00 +0000

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

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Carnival Cruise Lines Charts their Course with the Google Content Network

New Tool for Brand Advertisers on the Google Content Network

BlogPostman — Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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

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New Tool for Brand Advertisers on the Google Content Network

Announcing the Ad Planner 1,000 and Greater Integration with AdWords

Tue, 25 May 2010 16:05:00 +0000

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 1,000 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 1,000 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

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Announcing the Ad Planner 1,000 and Greater Integration with AdWords

Audience Interests Now Available in DoubleClick Ad Planner

BlogPostman — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:47:00 +0000

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. (click to view image) 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 [note: this post has been reprinted from the DoubleClick Blog ]

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Audience Interests Now Available in DoubleClick Ad Planner

DoubleClick Ad Planner’s Audience Measurement Methodologies Submitted for MRC Audit

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:00:00 +0000

DoubleClick Ad Planner is our free, online measurement product that helps advertisers and agencies to create media plans by providing reliable traffic and audience information for websites on which they may wish to advertise. It measures millions of sites in over 40 countries and is used by thousands of advertisers and agencies to build media plans. In recent months, we've been investing significantly in new features for DoubleClick Ad Planner. ( Better site data in DoubleClick Ad Planner , Ad Planner updates provide more data, more ways ) To further our commitment to provide reliable data in DoubleClick Ad Planner, we have submitted it for accreditation by the Media Rating Council (MRC). The MRC is an advertising industry group that works to accredit audience measurement services that are valid, reliable, and effective. MRC accreditation is voluntary and some third-party measurement products have submitted for accreditation, as we have; some have not. Once complete, the MRC accreditation will provide independent confirmation that Ad Planner's methodologies, and the processes supporting this technology, adhere to industry standards. As part of the MRC audit, we're sharing more details about our data sources and methodology. For our traffic measurement, Ad Planner uses a hybrid measurement methodology that combines direct-measured site traffic, through Google Analytics data that publishers have chosen to opt in to provide us, and sample aggregated data from Google products and services. We currently have over 10,000 sites that are contributing direct measured opt-in data to Ad Planner. Our sample data comes from a variety of sources including anonymized, aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features , opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. All of this data is aggregated over millions of users and is powered by computer algorithms. The breadth and reliability of this aggregated data means that our traffic measurements are among the most accurate in the industry. To learn more about Ad Planner's data, we invite you to read our recently updated methodology document . To start using Ad Planner, visit us at www.google.com/adplanner . Posted by Wayne Lin, Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Planner

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DoubleClick Ad Planner's Audience Measurement Methodologies Submitted for MRC Audit