Article Directory » people

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

Read more from the original source:
Google Display Network series: Effectively planning your online display campaigns

Agency perspectives – "Run As Fast As You Can Until You Hit A Wall"

BlogPostman — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Editor's Note: This spring Google hosted ThinkAgency, an event for senior leaders from creative, media and digital agencies to come together and hear about opportunities offered by Google's existing and emerging platforms. Ben Malbon, Executive Director of Innovation, BBH New York attended the event, and shared with us his key takeaways. In part one, he reflects on what he learned from a panel discussion with three Google engineers, including the similarities between engineers and creatives, how product teams are able to stay nimble and function like start-ups, the importance of failure and the risks of planning too far ahead. Here's what Ben had to say. It was a very good day, and I wanted to share how and why. Specifically, I want to pick out a number of themes: around how the Google engineers work and are empowered, around Google?s iterative approach to creativity, and around YouTube and where we – in agencies – might take YouTube next (the latter theme will be in my next post). The Panel Benjamin Palmer, CEO and Founder of the Barbarian Group moderated a panel of three Google engineers: Dan Sturman, an Engineering Director focused on keeping Google's data centers and back-end servers running smoothly; Fuzzy Khosrowshahi, a Staff Software Engineer who, with his partner, created the product that eventually became Google Spreadsheets (his team now handles cloud computing products such as Docs, Spreadsheets, Sites); and Tim Dierks, a Software Engineer who helped create Google spreadsheets, worked on the Print Ads product, and now focused on Google TV Ads. At Google the engineers are the equivalent of our creatives – the most valuable and important people in the business. For many of us it was one of the first opportunities we'd had to see, hear – and question – the people who create Google?s products. Benjamin led the questioning but there was plenty of interaction from the floor, much around the theme of wanting more access for agency creatives to people like Fuzzy, Dan & Tim. In fact, I think putting engineers together with agency creatives and producers would be a highly fruitful exercise as far as driving new and more innovative use of platforms such as video and mobile is concerned. How to remain small when you're big I had imagined finding the panel most interesting from a technology angle – learning from the hallowed "creatives" at Google about emerging developments in mobile and search. But in fact it was the insights into how Google remains small, nimble, and like a start-up in approach (despite its size) that resonated most for me. The engineers characterized the role of senior managers within Google as "getting out of the way" as quickly as possible to loosen, not tighten control over their teams. Equally revealing was that it is OK for mid-level managers to respond to questions from their seniors about what was going on with "I don?t know, I?ll go and find out." If you try and know about everything, all the time, on every project, you?d harm the company?s ability to move quickly. You?d introduce friction. It's ok to fail...if you learn from it I was equally surprised at how open the Google engineers were about failure. I find it has become somewhat of a cliché for agencies to talk up failure; ?fail fast?, ?fail early?, ?learn to fail?, and so on. Easy things to put on Powerpoint charts (especially during a recession), rarely have I seen them executed in practice. So we heard the engineers talk not so much overtly about ?failure? as about the iterative approach they adopt to develop products. The mantra is launch then iterate. ?Failure? becomes ?learning.' They described how they?d launch something, gauge the reaction, try again, gauge the reaction, and so on. Surprisingly, for a business that seems to have so much on its plate, there was a warning around the dangers of long-term planning. One can?t plan a year ahead; technology changes, culture changes, and sometimes the planning of it can take longer than the doing – that?s the biggest danger, you end up doing nothing because you?re always ?planning.? Again, more fuel on the ?iterate and learn? fire. Hitting the wall The overall message within this section was around the folly of trying to second guess reactions once new products were in market. It?s just too much for the human brain to compute. Much better to react swiftly once reactions are known, once the data is in. Related to this was Managing Director Torrence Boone?s observation around the prevailing attitude towards product development: "run as fast as you can until you hit a wall, get over it, and then start running again." There?s certainly a pace and a conviction about how Google seems to approach creativity that I think many agencies demonstrate when at their best, but all too frequently we let the walls slow us down too much. We?re scared of hitting them too hard, maybe. Stay tuned for the next post, in which Ben shares his thoughts on YouTube. To hear additional perspectives from agencies and others on innovation, experimentation and the direction of marketing, visit the Fast.Forward. channel on YouTube. Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

Find People To Follow

BlogPostman — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:31:02 +0000

From the official Google Blog: This morning we announced a replay feature in real-time search that helps you search the public archive of updates from Twitter. Now, we have more Twitter news from today’s Chirp Conference. We’ve just released a new experimental service in Google Labs called Google Follow Finder to help you expand your Twitter network. With Google Follow Finder, simply enter your Twitter account name and you’ll see a list of people you might be interested in following. You can also get interesting suggestions by entering other Twitter user names. Here’s what it looks like: If you see someone you want to follow, just click “Follow on Twitter,” log in, and they’ll be added to your following list in Twitter. This integration is based on Twitter’s new @anywhere frameworks, which make it easy for any site to add Twitter functionality. We’re using the frameworks to provide dynamic information about Twitter accounts and one-click following. Find People To Follow From my perspective, “Find People to Follow” is a great idea executed backwards.

Read the original post:
Find People To Follow

Social Media Marketing Lifecycle Progress

BlogPostman — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:46:49 +0000

From eMarketer: In November 2009, MarketingSherpa surveyed US marketers about their stage in the social media life cycle; a plurality were still in the transition phase. But a substantial percentage had progressed to using social media strategically in their research, objectives and actions. That entailed having a formal process that was routinely performed for social campaigns. Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst, said in the report “ Five Reasons Why Marketers Need to Have a Social Media Strategy ” that marketers often neglect an integrated strategy because of the perception that social media is easy and cheap to do. But much of the real cost of social campaigns is in the people-hours spent fostering and maintaining social conversations. According to data from eROI nd eMarketing & eCommerce (eM+C) , US marketers spent 13% of their online marketing time on social media in 2009, the second-largest share of any tactic. Marketers who spent 13% of their online marketing time during 2009 on social media have surely already questioned the amount of time they plan to commit to social media in 2010.

Read the original post:
Social Media Marketing Lifecycle Progress