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Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog
Today, marketers and agencies have countless opportunities to engage audiences with rich formats across channels and devices. And to help them capture the full opportunity, they have an abundance of ad technology solutions to choose from. In fact, the average number of ad tech platforms deployed by organizations grew from 4.3 to 4.7 this year.1

 But marketers also know the real opportunity lies in creating unified, cross-channel digital experiences that span multiple touchpoints. 75% of marketers and agencies believe that an integrated platform can meet all their marketing needs - a 23% increase from 2012. And they believe the benefits range from improved customer insights, better campaign performance, and more efficient use of marketing resources.

 In our new collection of insights, “Exploring the Value of Integrated Platforms,” you can see how top marketers and agencies are approaching unified buying to transform their businesses and maximize the impact of their marketing. In this collection, you can see how marketers are investing in integrated ad technology platforms to unlock the full potential of digital marketing for their organizations. We look at the latest trends in adoption, case studies and perspectives from industry leaders to answer questions like: What do today’s organizations want from digital marketing platforms? What is the value of an integrated digital platform? How are marketers investing in newly available technologies? How are they measuring success?

 In the coming weeks, we will add more research, best practices and perspectives to the collection. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

1 "Unraveling the Digital Display Industry: Understanding the Tools and Benefits of Digital Marketing", DoubleClick by Google, Dec. 2013

We know it's already been a big week for reflecting back on 2013 on YouTube. But with the year fast coming to a close, we wanted to shine the light a little bit brighter on the great work done by brands.

Remember those adorable dancing babies? Or that time Usher was thrown through a high-rise window? And who could we forget the car salesman threatening to kill a disguised Jeff Gordon?

2013 was a year in which brands re-invented ads on YouTube - by making ads people chose to watch. And as a result these ads became bigger than ever, and helped shape cultural moments throughout the year.

To celebrate this amazing year, and gear up for what's sure to be an even bigger 2014, we put together a recap of some of the top brand moments from 2013:

To see the full list of top ads from 2013, visit our YouTube Ads Leaderboard. For even more top lists of the year from around the world, visit the YouTube Rewind 2013 Channel.

And if you want to keep up to date on the most popular and relevant content on YouTube, subscribe to our weekly digest, YouTube Re:View.

Posted by David Kagan & Jim Habig, Product Marketing Managers, YouTube

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog
Last week we dove into the new audience capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager that enable you to define, reach, and more deeply understand your customers. Tags plays a critical role in this process, as they allow you to track and measure the impact of your advertising. Today, we’ll dive into how we’re making tagging a much easier and more streamlined part of your digital marketing campaign management.

 As it stands today, tagging is one of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of digital campaign management. In fact, on average, marketers host 14 tags on their sites, 68% of which are third-party. Implementing these tags often involves back-and-forth emails, implementation that can take weeks or months, and a lack of transparency about which tags are installed where. And when tags are implemented incorrectly, it can cause further campaign delays and additional implementation cycles.

 We recently introduced two features that will greatly reduce the inefficiencies involved in tagging your campaigns: DoubleClick’s integration with Google Tag Manager, and Tag Assistant.

 Making conversion tagging easy with Google Tag Manager integration

 To streamline the conversion tagging process, DoubleClick Campaign Manager is now integrated with Google Tag Manager, Google’s free tag management solution. With Google Tag Manager, rather than implementing many individual tags across your site, you can implement one site-wide container tag that uses rules to determine which Google and third-party tracking and measurement tags to dynamically fire. The integration allows you to easily push DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag - Floodlight - directly to Google Tag Manager, making tag deployment faster and and more efficient, while still respecting current campaign management roles.


Deploy tags more quickly: You can push Floodlight tags with one click to Google Tag Manager, reducing implementation time from weeks or even months to minutes. This means you’ll save time, and your campaigns can go live faster. Once your tags are implemented, you can update them in the Google Tag Manager interface in minutes, and you will see these tags deployed on your site within 15 minutes or less. The tags are fired asynchronously, which means they load without blocking other elements on the page from loading, enabling sites to load faster during high-traffic times.



Implement tags more efficiently: With Google Tag Manager, you can rest assured your conversion tags are implemented correctly, as there is only one site-wide contain tag to implement. This helps reduce human error and ensures accurate data is recorded, thanks to rules within Google Tag Manager that determine which tracking and measurement tags to dynamically fire. And you will be able to deploy Floodlight tags across both mobile and desktop pages, making the experience consistent across all devices.


Respect tagging roles: We recognize that different roles within your organization may be responsible for each step of the tagging process. Our goal with this integration was to respect these roles and give you tools to implement tags correctly as quickly as possible. Advertisers still have control over which conversion tags are pushed to Google Tag Manager, and webmasters still have control over which tags go on the page, as they can approve or reject tags within Google Tag Manager.
Simplifying ad tagging with Tag Assistant

 Beyond simplifying conversion tagging, we’re also improving how you implement ad tags. One of these initiatives is Tag Assistant, which aims at simplifying the QA process.

 Tag Assistant is a Chrome extension that automatically validates the implementation of Google tags on any of your pages. The tool is designed for you to checks tags on the fly and escalate more complex or in-depth issues to support teams.


How it works: Tag Assistant has a predefined list of implementation checks to perform for each tag. When the web page loads, Tag Assistant scans the page, compares your tag implementation against the correct/standard implementation, and cross-references the list of implementation checks. If your tag is implemented correctly, Tag Assistant returns a green status. When a problem is found, a red status is returned along with recommendations and support documentation. The tool not only supports DoubleClick ad tags, but Google Tag Manager, AdWords, and Google Analytics tags as well.

 Next week, join us for a deep dive on the new trafficking workflow in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

If you're an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

We all know that the holiday season is one of the most important and competitive times of the year for the retail industry. There are lots of consumers in the market who are ready to make a purchase, so for Cardstore, a part of American Greetings, it was important to be top of mind with these audiences. The team wanted to break the mold of their traditional approach; they were ready to innovate in order to build awareness and engagement, and turned to Google and YouTube for an effective solution.
With this goal in mind, the company made a swift decision to reallocate dollars from their typical marketing plan to fund their first ever YouTube homepage masthead. This masthead included two panels that consumers could switch between, one to showcase an online video ad and another with a carousel showcasing products from Cardstore.


This creative approach drove a huge number of impressions for Cardstore. As Tim Walter, Senior Marketing Manager at American Greetings, described, “It was a very high profile placement on a well-known brand property. You can’t replicate the traffic you’re going to get on that day.” And beyond just impressions, a 2013 YouTube Homepage Impact research study conducted by Compete also proved that Cardstore saw significant improvements in site visits, brand searches, and conversions following the masthead:

  • Compared to November 2011, Cardstore saw three times more visitors to the site in November 2012. Moreover, the masthead led to over 80% of the day’s site traffic.
  • Cardstore saw a 28% increase in brand searches during the week of the masthead. Google query trends also saw sustained brand query growth through December.
  • Cardstore saw a burst of conversions right after the masthead, and conversions continued to come for the rest of the season from those who were exposed to the masthead.

These strong results helped the team to expand their thinking and consider new strategies. “The success we had with this placement gets us even more excited to try new things with YouTube going forward,” Tim asserted. “We believe YouTube can do good things for us and be a big part of our future success.

Understanding your audience is key to delivering them relevant and compelling messages. In DoubleClick Campaign Manager - the upgraded version of DFA - there are a number of new capabilities to help you define, reach, and more deeply understand your audience, so you can engage them in even more powerful ways. We announced some of these audience features when DoubleClick Campaign Manager launched globally, and today we are going to deep dive into the capabilities.

Define your audience with powerful segmentation tools

With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, you can build segments to define your target audience based on specific actions your customers took, like viewing a certain product on your website, or adding items to their shopping cart. You can also build segments based on combinations of data available in Floodlight custom variables. For example, you can segment users with cart values over a certain amount but who did not check out. Best of all, we’ve enabled existing Floodlight tags to be compatible with building segments, so there’s no need to re-tag in order to take advantage of these features.

Reach your audience with powerful targeting tools

Once you’ve built your audience segments, you can leverage them in real time across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. Segments are shared and synced automatically with DoubleClick Bid Manager, allowing you to apply audience insights to engage your audience across your reserved and programmatic buys. For example, you can combine your first-party segments with powerful keyword-contextual and audience targeting capabilities available in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

And with Dynamic Creative pushed from DoubleClick Studio, a single ad template can support millions of iterations, rotating creative elements like background color, headlines, product images, product descriptions, calls-to-action, and pricing. We optimize to the best combination of variables for each audience segment over time, providing the “perfect ad” for each impression.
Understand your audience with deeper insights
Surfacing strategic insights is crucial for optimizing your campaigns. So we introduced new audience performance reporting that brings audience dimensions to all standard reports. This means all campaign metrics, such as clicks or impressions, can be aggregated or filtered by audience characteristics or specific first-party lists. These reports help you answer questions like, “Did my publisher deliver to the audience that we wanted to target?” and “How many impressions did I deliver to my first-party remarketing list versus everywhere else?” As a result, you can better understand the audience segments with which your message resonated most, and use that information to optimize your campaigns.

DoubleClick Bid Manager customers can also report on audience segments created as part of their reservations buy (and see how they overlap with their third-party lists) with the Audience Composition Report available in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

We are continuing to build powerful audience capabilities into DoubleClick Campaign Manager that enable marketers and agencies to deliver the right message to the right user, on any device.

Next week, join us for a deep dive on the tagging capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Adam Champy, Product Manager