Yesterday, we announced several exciting new additions to Google+, including open signups. We’d like to announce one more addition for our DoubleClick Ad Exchange publishers, +1 on display ads from AdWords.

Starting in October, the +1 button and social annotations will begin to appear on display ads from AdWords that win in the Ad Exchange auction. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections. We believe that these recommendations could lead your audience to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

For example, take Susan, who sees an ad for a good deal on flights. She +1’s the ad, thinking her friends might value this deal. Now, when Susan’s friends and contacts are signed in to their Google accounts, they’ll be able to see Susan’s picture across the bottom of the ad, with a note saying she +1’d it.

The +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads.

Susan’s friends and contacts will also be more likely to see the ad. While the dynamics of the AdWords and Ad Exchange auctions aren’t changing, the +1’d ad will now be included in AdWord’s bid on the Ad Exchange for the pages Susan’s friends visit, as we know that recommendations from friends can be a strong signal of an ad’s relevance.

All eligible ads from AdWords and other networks will continue to compete in the ad exchange auction, and we’ll continue to show the ones that have the highest CPM. +1 button clicks are not counted as clicks on ads. Although you won’t receive any revenue for +1 button clicks, +1’s will help Ad Exchange to deliver more useful AdWords ads to your users.

On mobile, the +1 button will replace the existing ‘g’ logo and recommendations will appear for several seconds, then fade out.

If you’d prefer not to see the +1 button on ads that AdWords delivers, you can opt out by contacting your account manager.

Display ads become much more powerful when people can see which of their social connections have chosen to endorse them, leading to a better advertising experience and higher returns for you.

If you’d like to learn more about the +1 button on AdWords display ads served via the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, please visit the Ad Exchange Help Center.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Product Manager

Publishers from hundreds of countries use DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) to help them manage and deliver their advertising across their content.

The DFP interface is fully localized into 32 languages so whether you speak Français, Español, or Português, publishers have been able to traffic and report on their campaigns in their native tongue.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’re expanding our international character support to ad tags, ad unit, and custom targeting naming, enabling publishers to now use all aspects of DFP in any language.

We hope our expanded support for international characters makes managing your inventory and tagging even easier for our global publishers.

Posted by Hennadiy Leontyev and Harish Pratapani, Software Engineers

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). We’ll be periodically posting lists of the highlights to this blog to help you stay up-to-date with all of the latest DFP developments. Today, we wanted to look back over the last few months and call out some of the great new features that we’ve released in that time.

The list below contains some highlights. For a more complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Trafficking enhancements:

• Postal code targeting: Advertisers spend more money on campaigns that reach the right audience. Plus, users find targeted ads more relevant and useful. We’ve added a new level of granularity to geo-targeting and you can now target your campaigns by zip or postal code allowing you to precisely reach users in specific markets. 
• New flash creative options: Now you can easily create flash expandables and flash pushdowns using our built in templates. 
• Test impression reporting: We know that publishers like to test their ads to ensure everything is working properly prior to pushing a campaign to their live site. The creative preview tool enables publishers to verify the look and feel of a creative on their site before it’s live, but until now, publishers have not been able to test if impressions and clicks are being properly recorded. Now, when DFP receives an impression or click that it does not count because the traffic source was not a visitor to your site (for instance, an impression that you create on a test page), you'll now see a "Test impression received" or "Test click received" indicator in the trafficking screens to help you verify data is being collected. 

Reporting enhancements: 

• Additional export formats: In addition to CSV, TSV, and XML, you can now export your reports directly to XLS and XLSX formats. 
• Improvements to sharing and scheduling reports: You can now invite users or contacts to view a report via email. Having a DFP account is no longer a requirement to share or view reports with your contacts. Scheduled reports can now also be sent as an email attachment and include a personalized messages to your recipients. 
• New breakdown options: We've added the ability to create a delivery report with impressions for ad units broken out by creative size. 

Usability enhancements: 

• Faster and smarter search: Needless to say, search is a huge focus at Google. The same has been true for DFP where search has always been one of our most heavily used features. With our revamped search on DFP we're making it easier to find orders, line items, ad units, and placements using the search box at the top left of any screen. 
• Improved report navigation: The rows in your reports now remain fixed in place as you scroll across columns, making it easier to view and identify information when a report contains a large number of columns. Columns are now grouped into higher-level headings that make them easier to identify (for example, Ad server, Order details, AdSense, or Ad Exchange). 
• New breakouts in competing line items table: When viewing a list of competing line items, your listis now broken out into two categories to help you better understand the effect the line item has on its competition. Your view is now broken out by: (1) the impressions lost to competing line items and (2) impressions gained from competing line items.

Posted by Beah Burger, DFP Product Specialist

(Originally posted on the Official Google Blog)

What do a celebrity blog, a video interview on a newspaper site and a cable channel’s smartphone app have in common? They’re all supported by advertising...and they’re all examples of how the lines between media formats are blurring.

These increasingly blurry lines are not only resulting in highly engaging forms of content for users, but many new revenue opportunities for publishers. A wave of innovation and investment over the past several years has also created better performing ads, a larger pool of online advertisers, and new technologies to sell and manage ad space. Together, these trends are helping to spur increased investment in online advertising. We’ve seen this in our own Google Display Network: our publisher partners have seen spending across the Google Display Network from our largest 1,000 advertisers more than double in the last 12 months.

With all these new opportunities in mind, we’re introducing new tools for our publisher partners—in our ad serving technology (DoubleClick for Publishers) and in our ad exchange (DoubleClick Ad Exchange).

Video and mobile in DoubleClick for Publishers
Given the changes in the media landscape, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen incredible growth for both mobile and video ad formats over the past year: the number of video ads on the Google Display Network has increased 350 percent in the past 12 months, while AdMob, our mobile network, has grown by more than 200 percent.

Before now, it’s been difficult for publishers to manage all their video and mobile ad space from a single ad server—the platform publishers use to schedule, measure and run the ads they’ve sold on their sites. To solve this challenge, we’re rolling out new tools in our latest version of DoubleClick for Publishers that enable publishers to better manage video and mobile inventory. Publishers will be able to manage all of the ads they’re running—across all of their webpages, videos and mobile devices—from a single dashboard, and see which formats and channels are performing best for them.

A handful of publishers have already begun using the video feature and it appears to be performing well for them: we’ve seen 55 percent month-over-month growth in video ad volume in the last quarter. In other words, publishers are now able not only to produce more video content, but to make more money from it as well.

Direct Deals on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange
Another way publishers make money is to sell their advertising via online exchanges, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, where they can offer their ad space to a wide pool of competing ad buyers. This has already proven to generate substantially more revenue for publishers, and as a result we’ve seen significant growth in the number of trades on our exchange (158 percent year over year).

However, publishers have told us that they’d also like the option of making some of their ad space available only to certain buyers at a certain price—similar to how an art dealer might want to offer a painting first to certain clients before giving it to an auction house to sell. So we’re introducing Direct Deals on the Doubleclick Ad Exchange, which gives publishers the ability to make these “first look” offers. For example, using Direct Deals, a news publisher could set aside all of the ad space on their sports page and offer it first to a select group of buyers at a specific price, and then if those buyers pass on the offer, automatically place that inventory into the Ad Exchange’s auction.

Looking back at that blog, news site and app, we’d like them to have one more thing in common—being able to advantage of new opportunities to grow their businesses even further. These new tools, together with the other solutions we’re continuing to develop, are designed to help businesses like them—and all our publisher partners—do just that, and get the most out of today’s advertising landscape.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

The rise of Ad Exchanges has made it easier for buyers and sellers to connect, using technologies such as real-time bidding (RTB) to help unlock more value for every impression. Exchanges have also provided a number of efficiency benefits such as the elimination of Insertion Orders and trafficking headaches for every transaction and the ability for publishers to manage controls across a broad set of buyers. Increasingly, publishers have been innovating on this platform by making exclusive tiers of inventory available to select buyers via exchanges, a model typically known as a “private exchange”. Private exchanges allow publishers to better leverage their brands and sales relationships and provide buyers with enhanced access to premium inventory.

While we’ve offered the ability for sellers to list inventory privately in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange auction for more than a year, it was clear that the industry was also ready for yet another evolutionary step in exchange buying. Both buyers and sellers wanted even more flexibility, control and pricing certainty for select transactions, while continuing to manage all of their exchange deals in an integrated fashion. In response, we’ve continued to evolve DoubleClick Ad Exchange to meet these needs by rolling-out a new solution called Ad Exchange Direct Deals.

This new type of exchange deal allows publishers to offer inventory on DoubleClick Ad Exchange to specific buyers at a fixed price, instead of determining the price via auction. This inventory is also offered on a pre-auction basis, which means that publishers can give these select buyers “first look” access, while still making the ad impression available in our open exchange if it remains unsold. Publishers typically negotiate these fixed price exchange deals directly with sophisticated exchange buyers, such as large agencies or ad networks buying in real-time.

Direct Deals allows publishers to forge relationships with new, data-driven, buyers and benefit from the efficiency of an exchange transaction, such as “insertion-orderless” buying and automated clearing of payments. At the same time, publishers can use standard Ad Exchange protections from unwanted data collection, restricted advertiser categories, malware and latency. Advertisers gain more seamless access to high quality publisher inventory and pricing certainty.

Premium publishers, such as The Washington Post and About.com, have been early testers of this feature working with leading exchange buyers such as Criteo, who specializes in expanding search budgets into display. For Criteo, this feature has meant new opportunities to connect with publishers. “Working directly with publishers has always been critical for Criteo, as a way to access the best inventory and deliver the highest CPMs to publishers. We are delighted to be using Direct Deals as a new way to achieve this, with all the advantages of a real-time mechanism,” said Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer at Criteo.

Direct Deals joins a number of other sales models supported by DoubleClick Ad Exchange, including branded, anonymous and private auctions. Sellers using the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) platform for direct sales can also benefit from dynamic integration with DoubleClick Ad Exchange to ensure that the most profitable impression is delivered for every impression. We are excited to introduce this new level of flexibility to Ad Exchange to help buyers improve the effectiveness of their campaigns and sellers profit from real-time display buying on their terms. DoubleClick Ad Exchange advertisers and publishers can contact their account manager to join the Direct Deals beta program.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management