Turning successful television advertising into online video campaigns can be a challenge for any agency. The Martin Agency was faced with precisely this challenge for wireless communications company, Alltel, and turned to in-stream online video (InVideo) ads on the Google Display Network for great results.

Alltel runs several advertising campaigns on a number of media; it had content running on television and wanted to take advantage of it by testing it online.

At the same time, The Martin Agency was looking to experiment with InVideo ads on the Google Display Network, which includes YouTube, because they had heard it was simple to implement. The agency has been using Google TV Ads for its traditional television purchases since February 2009 and was eager to try out InVideo, its online extension. InVideo ads appear before, during, or after online video content, much like the way ads run in television programming.

According to Liz Hamner of The Martin Agency,

In-stream online video ads provide an opportunity to be even more efficient and targeted with our client’s marketing budgets. We can even test different creatives and optimize based on viewer clickthrough, video completion rates, and other metrics.

Alltel began testing Google InVideo ads in Q3 2009 and found that the auction model allowed efficient placements for these ads. It found that InVideo ads provided great results and allowed prime placement on content such as TV shows on YouTube, movies on crackle.com, clips on aetv.com, and games from Zynga at 50 percent of the cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) offered by other online video networks.

As a result of the campaign, Alltel generated a large volume of clicks at 50 percent of the cost of other online video providers. Additionally, Alltel drove a high clickthrough rate of nearly
2 percent, surpassing its initial goal of an industry average of 0.1 percent.

For more information on developing InVideo ad campaigns, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

In last week’s post of our Google Display Network series, we showed how DoubleClick Ad Planner can help you effectively plan your display ad campaigns and reach the right audience. Today we’ll talk about creating compelling display ads and the options available on the Google Display Network (GDN). Let’s look at each category of options you have today:

Great impact through rich media and video. Rich media and video formats engage users at a whole new level, drawing them in and encouraging interactivity in a way not possible with other ad formats.

Example of a great rich media ad run by Volvo and the agencies Euro RSCG New York and Media Contacts:


If you use rich media and video formats to engage your customers, here’s what we offer through our DoubleClick Rich Media and Video solutions:

• Choose from a variety of rich media formats, based on your campaign objective.
• Access DoubleClick Studio, a free rich media production and workflow tool.
• Analyze data on more than 100 unique interactions in every creative unit with Audience Interaction Metrics.
• Integration with DoubleClick for Advertisers, a robust ad management, serving and reporting solution, simplifies trafficking, reporting and billing of your rich media campaigns.

If you’re already working with another rich media vendor, we have many approved vendors we work with.

Build display ads in minutes. Creating display ads can be resource-intensive, and for many marketers, it may not be in the budget. So we introduced Display Ad Builder in 2008, a free tool for creating professional-looking display ads in minutes. Here’s what you can do with Display Ad Builder:

• Create image, video (InVideo, Click-To-Play), Flash and rich media (including expandable) ads using hundreds of fully customizable templates or templates tailored for specific industries.
• Stay true to your brand with your own images, text, videos and logos.
• We automatically convert the ads you design into most standard IAB ad sizes.

Display Ad Builder is also great for testing different messages and creative elements, or to get insights for more complex display campaigns managed by your in-house team or agency.

Stand out by blending in. Text ads are a versatile ad format that are easy to create and edit, in minutes. They’re especially effective as an extension of your existing search campaigns. Simply opt your search campaign into the GDN and your ads will show to users as they surf relevant web pages via our contextual targeting technology. Text ads also complement display campaigns by engaging users who ignore display ads (i.e. banner blindness). Further, they give your campaign wider reach since not every publisher may accept display ads, or may only accept a limited number of display ad formats and sizes on their site.

Whether your goal is to drive awareness, or to generate immediate sales, learn how the robust creative toolbox available on the Google Display Network can help. We’ll see you next week when we talk about how you can reach your audience with the targeting technologies available on the GDN.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Yesterday, we announced some upcoming changes to how you share AdWords reporting information with your clients. We believe that most of your already provide this information to your clients and won't need to make any changes to your systems. Visit the Inside AdWords blog to learn more.

Posted by Jason Shafton, Product Marketing Manager

We’ve launched the AdWords Policy Change Log in the Help Center. This new site makes it easier for you to stay informed about upcoming AdWords ad policy changes. For all AdWords policy changes going into effect, we’ll post a short summary of the change, including the affected region.

If we anticipate that your account will be directly affected by an upcoming policy change, we’ll still email you a service announcement as necessary to make sure you’re aware of the change.

Posted by The Google AdWords Team

Back in May we announced the Ad Planner 1000, a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by DoubleClick 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.

To keep agencies and advertisers up to speed on the newest additions to the Ad Planner 1000, our friends at DoubleClick post monthly updates on their blog, highlighting interesting and seasonal trends. For example, the month of June saw significant growth for sites like fifa.com, Apple and HTC, and kayak.com. Curious why? Visit the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog to learn more!

Stay tuned to the Agency Ad Solutions Blog and the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog for each month's updates.

Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

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

Please join us on Thursday, July 22, 2010 for the next ThinkCPG with Google webinar - Case Studies & Learnings for Consumer Packaged Goods.

During this webinar we will learn from three separate case studies as measured through third-party research:

• Search Match Market Consortium Study - Food: What is the offline impact of search advertising when brands take advantage of their search opportunities? What is the impact when they are dark? What is the impact to private label sales? Presented by: Debra Eskra, Director of Testing & Media Solutions, SymphonyIRI Group
• Quaker Instant Oatmeal Display Case Study: What kind of impact did the Awaken Your Senses campaign, which was promoted on YouTube and the Google Display Network, have on Quaker Oatmeal and Private Label sales? Presented by: Sarah Bild, Marketing Manager, PepsiCo-Quaker Oats
• CPG Gfk Benchmark Study from Germany: How do we evaluate Search and YouTube across all media? How does Search and YouTube ROI stack up against traditional media? Presented by: Jens Monsees, Head of Industry for CPG Germany, Google, Inc.

Date: Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10amPST / 12pmCST / 1pmEST
Click here to register

Posted by Jenny Liu, CPG Marketing

The broad match modifier is now rolling out globally in most languages¹ after a successful open beta test in the UK and Canada. To recap the original broad match modifier beta launch announcement:

The broad match modifier is a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords which have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.

To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words** in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer's search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants.

The graphic below illustrates the relative reach of different keyword match type strategies.



** Be sure there are no spaces between the + and modified words, but do leave spaces between words. Correct usage: +formal +shoes. Incorrect usage: +formal+shoes.

Here’s what one major UK retail company said about their experience using the feature:

"We're always interested in ways to increase our volumes while keeping our CPA down. As a result, we've added broad match modified keywords to several campaigns where previously we only had phrase and exact match keywords. After a few weeks of testing, we're pleased to see these campaigns showed significant increases in conversion and volume, whilst keeping the CPA down. Therefore, we will be looking to scale our use of modified broad match keywords in all our campaigns to take full advantage of these great results."

If you mainly use broad match keywords in your account, you should know that switching your existing broad match keywords to modified broad match will likely lead to a significant decline in your click and conversion volumes and will not directly improve Quality Score. To maintain volume, keep existing broad match keywords active, add new modified broad match keywords, and adjust bids to achieve your target ROI based on observed performance.

You can begin using the feature by logging into your AdWords account, through the AdWords Editor and through the AdWords API. For more details, guidelines on usage, and answers to common questions, check out the original blog post and the AdWords help center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Product Marketing Manager

¹ Except Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Arabic and Hebrew languages, which are coming soon. We’ll update this post when the feature becomes available.

(cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog)

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.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

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 Googleʼs 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 Googleʼs 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 donʼt know, Iʼll go and find out." If you try and know about everything, all the time, on every project, youʼd harm the companyʼs ability to move quickly. Youʼd 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; ʻfail fastʼ, ʻfail earlyʼ, ʻlearn to failʼ, 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 ʻfailureʼ as about the iterative approach they adopt to develop products. The mantra is launch then iterate. ʻFailureʼ becomes ʻlearning.' They described how theyʼd 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 canʼt plan a year ahead; technology changes, culture changes, and sometimes the planning of it can take longer than the doing – thatʼs the biggest danger, you end up doing nothing because youʼre always ʻplanning.ʼ Again, more fuel on the ʻiterate and learnʼ 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. Itʼs 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 Booneʼs 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." Thereʼs 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. Weʼre 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