Our team is always looking for ways to improve the DoubleClick for Publishers platform to make Digital Advertising easier for our partners. Whether it’s making ad operations more efficient or providing more data and metrics for your sales strategy, our goal is to continuously innovate and improve upon DFP. Over the last couple of weeks we announced a series of enhancements to the DFP platform (Mobile, Video, and Desktop) to help publishers make the most revenue from their inventory, and today we’d like to let you know about a couple more.

Conversion Reporting
The value of online advertising is often judged by the click-through rate and number of impressions received by an advertiser’s campaign, but those metrics don’t tell the full story. What a lot of advertisers really want to know is, did a user convert; i.e. did they take a specific action such as make a purchase, sign-up for a newsletter, or download a file? That’s where conversion reporting comes in.

Now available in DFP Premium, conversion reporting allows publishers to showcase the value of their inventory while providing advertisers new ways to measure campaign performance. Using this new tool, DFP users can select specific activities to count as conversions and then provide their advertisers customized performance metrics for their campaigns.

Reach out to your account team if you’re interested in learning more about this new opt-in feature.

Custom Fields
Publishers of all sizes use DFP to run their advertising business and we understand that no two publishers are the same. So, to help our partners manage the complexity of trafficking ads on their sites, we provide a wide variety of fields to organize and package inventory for specific orders, line items, and ad creatives. But sometimes, publishers need extra fields to implement innovative solutions for their clients.

The new custom fields feature provides publishers just that, the ability to create custom metadata fields to manage their inventory in new ways. DFP users can simply define a new field on the order, line item, or creative level and then use those fields to save data, create reports, or map them into DART Sales Manager to be used for sales proposals.

To get all the details about his feature, contact your account team or read about it in the DFP help center.

Bulk Edits
Ad operations teams are the hub of a publishers advertising business. They manage and respond to a constant flow of requests, changes, and new orders for their site, and sometimes spend a lot of precious time making edits in their system. We understand that editing line items can be a tedious and time consuming process, so we build two new features to make modifying your setup faster: in-line edit and bulk line item edit.

The in-line edit and bulk line item edit features were designed to reduce the number of clicks and page refreshes needed to make changes. In-line edit allows you to make multiple changes to any line item directly from the orders page and save them all with one click. Also from the orders page, bulk line item edit allows you make the same change to multiple line items quickly and easily. For the full detail of these changes visit the DFP help center.


Posted by
Beah Burger, Florent de Gantes - DFP Product Management Team
Gaurav Kc, Josh Israel, David Plass - Software Engineering Team

The role of technology should be to make things easier, to simplify the complex. Our goal at DoubleClick is to do just that, make digital advertising easier for our partners. With DFP that means helping our publishers maximize the value of every impression regardless of format or screen size. It also means providing a flexible and customizable platform for publishers of all sizes and business models to build their own advertising solution.

Today we’re happy to announce the DoubleClick Third Party Partner Directory available on the DoubleClick site. This directory lists all the DoubleClick approved platform partners who have developed innovative solutions and services for DFP. Publishers can pick and choose from over one hundred preferred partners to extend the functionality of their advertising platforms.

"Joining DFP's partner ecosystem was an easy choice for Brightcove. By plugging into DFP's API's, we can easily offer a turnkey integration with our Video Cloud online video platform to the world's top publishers who use DFP," says Chris Johnston, VP Digital Media Solutions at Brightcove. "Through this partnership, premium publishers can easily monetize their video content with Video Cloud across every platform and device with full IMA3 support for Flash and HTML5."

We understand that Publishers may choose external service providers in addition to DoubleClick to manage their ad operations. So, we built DFP with an open architecture (including our new DFP API, Data Transfer, Mobile API’s and Video SDK’s) to support a vibrant and innovative third party ecosystem and to provide publishers the flexibility to easily extend the functionality of their advertising solutions.

"At Allrecipes.com, we are constantly evolving and perfecting our Ad Operations process. As one of the first publishers to transition to DFP, we were pleased with the functionality the DFP API offered our internal team as well as support for the third party vendors with whom we work. With DFP and the new API, our team was able to automate more internal processes and enhance and extend our capabilities with third party systems." - Adila Esbhani, Director, Ad Operations, Allrecipes.com

“We work with a variety of technology vendors at The Weather Company, but Google DoubleClick truly supports our business with its open infrastructure and access to third-party partners. When we upgraded to DFP, many of our preferred technology vendors were already set up, and we were able to easily find, test and integrate new Mobile and Video applications to create our own customized advertising solution,” says Charlie Stafford, Advertising Technologies Manager for The Weather Company. “We have a lot of vendors with whom we work but Google is one of the few that I can say has truly partnered with us to make our goals their own.”

Last year we launched the DFP partner program to provide publishers choice and it’s great to see how much it has helped our partners (both publishers and third parties) succeed.

To see the full list of approved platform partners visit the DFP Partner Directory. Or, if you are a third party service provider and have an application or service that is ready for DFP, please submit your application here to be included in the DFP Partner Directory.


Posted by John Park, Partner Program Manager

This week we’ve been highlighting new DFP enhancements that are helping publishers tackle the challenges of the rapidly evolving digital advertising landscape. On Monday we announced recent advances in DFP Mobile and yesterday we covered how DFP Video is enabling publishers take advantage of the high-growth video advertising opportunity. Today, we’d like to highlight a bunch of great new features available on DFP and DFP Small Business.

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Our engineering team constantly strives to innovate and improve our platform to make digital advertising easier for all our partners. The following updates are available now to help publishers of all sizes maximize the value of every impression. A complete list changes is always available on the DFP and DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP

Master and companion roadblocks for creative sets: This new opt-in feature allows you to create roadblocks where a master creative is always delivered first. Also, master/companion roadblocks give you controls to manage how companion ads are delivered. Set the line item to require all creatives in the set serve together, to always deliver the master with at least one companion, or to serve as many companions as possible when the master is served. Read the full details on the DFP help center.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business

Google AdMob SDK v6.2 updated for iOS: The new Google AdMob SDK v6.2 has been updaded for iOS and is now available for download on the developers.google.com site. With this release we’ve added compatibility for iOS 6 including adoption of Apple’s new Identifier for Advertising (IDFA). The full list of updates to the SDK can be reviewed on the Google AdMob Ads SDK release notes page.

New Options for Image Creatives: We’ve added two new, optional fields for image creatives.
Alt Text: You can now include Alt Text to better serve your users utilizing screen readers or to show text to users with images disabled on their browser.
3rd-Party Impression URL: Add a 3rd Party impression URL to image creatives delivered by DFP.

Orders Screen Updates: To improve the user experience and improve the load time of the orders screen we’ve made the following changes.

Default Orders screen change: The 'My Orders' filter now reflects orders which you’ve created as well as ones you’ve been assigned to as primary/secondary trafficker or primary/secondary salesperson. In the near future the default Orders screen will become the ‘My Orders’ view and a new ‘All Orders’ filter will be added to reveal all the orders you have permission to view.

Tabbed View for Orders: To increase the visibility of an order’s details, we’ve introduced tabs to the order view. Now, when you navigate to an order you’ll see two tabs: one providing an overview of the order’s line items and another displaying the order’s settings (such as trafficker and salesperson assignments).

Mobile Update: We’ve added a new targeting option for mobile line items. Now you can target mobile ads by specific mobile carrier. Read more about this targeting option on the DFP or DFP Small Business help centers.


Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

On Monday, we unveiled news on how mobile is evolving in DFP, enabling publishers to execute upon their multi-device strategy. Today we’re focusing on another high-growth area - video advertising - and sharing what’s possible with DFP Video advanced features. Stay tuned for more DFP and DFP Small Business announcements later this week.

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Publishers everywhere are thriving upon the incredible momentum in video advertising. They’re tackling the operational challenges of delivering video campaigns to smart phones, tablets, and connected TVs, as well as pushing the creative envelope with eye-catching interactive ads. A little over a year ago we launched DFP Video, and since then we have seen month-on-month impression growth climb to 65% from non-Google publishers on the platform.

At the recent IAB Ad Operations Summit, we highlighted a few examples of how advertisers and publishers are bringing their A-Game to video. We wanted to share some news about DFP Video that will help publishers bring amazing ads to audiences anywhere.

Amazing ads unlock the value of the engaged viewer
We all know that viewers love to have a choice in what video ads they watch. We just launched a beta for publishers to traffic any video ad as a skippable ad. Why would a publisher want to make advertising skippable? We found that skippable ads on YouTube lower content abandonment rates by 40% as well as deliver more engaged viewers to advertisers.

Audiences want a better ad experience
Advanced Ad Rules and Podding Choices help publishers create a relevant ad experience for various viewer and content scenarios. For example, publishers can lower the number of ads shown to subscribers versus non-subscribers, or choose to show a bumper to promote a new miniseries to audiences watching episodes categorized as “drama”. Publishers have also used Ad Rules to match the commercial break pattern for a new online episode with the ad experience on TV for a set period of time.

Any(where) you want it, that’s the way you need it
We’re indulging in a bit of a Journey moment to share that video ads served to mobile devices in DFP Video have grown 59% month over month from September to November. In a big step towards a more seamless ad experience across all screens, we’re bringing increased sophistication to our HTML5, iOS, and Android Interactive Media Ads (IMA) SDKs that show video ads in mobile web and in-app environments. These SDKs will be as comprehensive as our newest version for Flash. For publishers requiring a more plug-and-play approach, many video technology companies have partnered with us to implement these SDKs, so that publishers can work with the provider that best suits their needs.

We’re pumped to roll out our video A-game for DFP. More and more publishers are telling us what they’ve gained from managing their video, mobile, and desktop ads from DFP’s unified platform - so if there’s anything that catches your eye, contact your account representative to find out more.

Posted by
Rany Ng, Group Product Manager, Video Monetization

In our second edition of 'Programmatic in the future', join us tomorrow, 12/6 at 1:30ET/10:30PT as Mario Diez, CEO at Quadrant One, the industry’s premier private exchange marketplace, weighs in on what the potential of this technology is for publishers everywhere. Log into your Google+ account and look for the Hangout on Air in the Think with Google +page stream. Hit the play button to tune in.

Last week, Curt Hecht, Chief Revenue Officer at The Weather Company, shared his views on on the value of transacting through programmatic channels in a conversation with Rob Beeler, Content Czar at AdMonsters.

In case you missed it, here’s what he had to say:



Here are some of the key takeaways from that conversation:

Programmatic may be an enhanced bridge to additional transactions
The direct sales team works with marketers to identify the right balance between sponsorships and programmatic buys, based on the marketers’ objectives. Additional analysis around yield and commission structures also factor into this discussion.

Programmatic helps smooth sales transactions
Setting up additional channels to transact with marketers has enabled The Weather Company smooth out the sales cycle. While a lot of inventory may be directly sold, in the face of a storm, programmatic technologies allow The Weather Company to fill inventory at times of unprecedented demand.

People are important for success
Curt reiterated several times, the importance of people in designing solutions and products that help meet marketers’ needs. His ad operations team is also critical for yield management, optimizing campaigns and ensuring they meet revenue goals.

Data is at the epicenter of success for publishers at scale
Curt says that publishers need to understand their data and the yield they can get from it. They should then analyze what technology can help them unlock the value of that data.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

We're constantly innovating to help publishers of all sizes maximize the value of every impression. We're kicking off the week with exciting mobile developments in DFP. Stay tuned for more DFP, DFP Small Business, and DFP Video announcements later this week.

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Over the course of 2012, we’ve begun to see publishers make a significant transition in how they address mobile in the context of their broader ad operations. Prior to this year, we saw publishers look at mobile through a different lens than the rest of their business, defining a mobile strategy in isolation, and usually without much long term planning.

Increasingly, we're seeing the savviest publishers look at mobile as one piece of a multi-device strategy, rather than a standalone channel.

We've designed DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from the ground up to enable this very strategy, enabling publishers to serve their display, mobile, and video campaigns all from a single platform. Today, we're rolling out a few new features that we think will make it even easier for publishers to run campaigns using the same features and workflows on desktop AND mobile:

• Internal redirects to DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA): You can use internal redirects when delivering a DFA campaign from DFP, reducing impression loss, improving ad load times and minimizing the administrative overhead of reconciliation.
• Custom creatives: Custom creatives are useful for delivering bespoke creatives developed in-house or provided by advertisers.
• Data transfer: You can now include mobile impressions - with mobile targeting information - in your data transfer files.

At the same time, we're continuing to add features specifically designed to make the mobile experience better for publishers and users:

• Latitude and longitude geo-targeting data: Latitude and longitude data can now be provided to DFP to improve the precision of geo-targeting.
• Device category targeting and reporting: You can target and report on whole categories of devices at once: feature phones, smartphones, tablets.
• Video interstitials for Android: You can now deliver a fullscreen video ad into your mobile applications on Android as well as iOS.
• Auto-close option for video interstitials: The video interstitial creative type now includes the option to auto-close the interstitial after the video has completed.

As your business continues to evolve, and mobile becomes more of an integrated piece of your operations, we want to make sure you’re supported with the tools you need across all devices. Bridging the gap between desktop and mobile in 2012 allows us to focus on a new wave of opportunities to help our publishers win with mobile in the upcoming year. We have some big things planned, such as being able to run a single campaign across all inventory, and new approaches to tagging for responsive design sites. Stay tuned!

Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

A recent study by eMarketer estimates that more than 25% of US digital display dollars will come through real-time bidding (RTB) by 2016. As brand dollars move to this channel, publishers are left to answer a few key questions.

Over the next few weeks, join us as ad tech experts and leaders in the online publishing business share their views on programmatic buying and its implications for publishers everywhere.

Log in with your Google+ account and tune into the Think with Google +page at 1:30 PM ET tomorrow, November 29. Rob Beeler, VP - Content & Media at AdMonsters, will interview Curt Hecht, Chief Revenue Officer, The Weather Company, about the future of this technology.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

We know your ad ops team is busy. Team members traffic campaigns, handle account relationships, manage reports and billing, and promote yield management -- all while optimizing like mad.

That’s a lot of hats to wear, and a lot to worry about. So when we built DFP, we took the same principles of simplicity and ease-of-use that we build into our consumer-facing products, and applied them to the complex world of ad trafficking. The result is a friendly, easy-to-use interface meant to save time and reduce human error.

We cut the number of workflow clicks, consolidated common views, and made it easier to find critical information. Users can now create orders, enter line items, and target from a single screen -- saving time by using targeting presets, bulk edit and global search. DFP Premium supports 5 levels of hierarchy, so you can group related bits of inventory together easily for targeting and reporting.

The result: more efficiency, fewer human errors, less time needed to traffic a campaign, and more time to focus on advertiser needs. (And to move your own business forward.)

Here's what what some of our customers have to say about how they've saved time and boosted efficiency with DFP:



A few choice quotes, in case you're skipping ahead:

"The biggest benefit of DFP premium has been that it’s incredibly, simply, really easy to use. Our traffickers are delighted to be using the tool, it’s just been a pleasant experience all throughout." - Tutuwa Ahwoi, Ad Ops Manager, National Public Media

"In moving to DFP we have a better UI, we have faster reporting, we have faster data input times, we have access across all devices. Those are things that have led to a 15% increase in operational efficiency our for our business." - Erin Pettigrew, Head of Ad Operations, Gawker Media

"DFP has provided about 10 to 15% more of our time back to my team." - Denise Leggio, Director of Ad Operations, Publisher’s Clearing House
If you're already using DFP, we hope you're seeing improvements to your workflow. And if you're about to start using DFP, we’ll be there to help show you the improvements we’ve made.


Posted by Josh Cohen and Beah Burger, Product Management Team

Announcing the Learn with Google webinar series for publishers

As we’re nearing the end of 2012, we’ve all got business goals to meet. Some of you might even be prepping for your busiest season. Today we’re excited to announce the launch of the Learn with Google series to help our publishers make the most from the web.  We’ll be hosting two upcoming webinars as part of our Learn with Google program:

• Google+ for publishers: Grow and engage your audience with Google+

Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 12:00pm PT / 3:00pm ET

Join us for a discussion on how social media is impacting online publishers and how Google thinks about social. We'll also cover how you can grow and engage your audience on the web and mobile with Google+ using Google+ pages, the +1 button, Hangouts, and Authorship.

REGISTER HERE

• Navigating Google's Mobile Ads Ecosystem

Wednesday, November 28, at 12:30pm PT / 3:30pm ET

Ever wonder who the buyers are in Google's mobile ads ecosystem and how their ads reach your inventory? Join us to learn the inner workings of Google's mobile ads ecosystem, including an overview of Google demand sources and the different channels advertisers can use buy your mobile inventory.  

REGISTER HERE

Visit the webinar page for more information on these two events and to register. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding the Learn with Google webinar calendar to your own Google calendar.

We look forward to hosting many more Learn with Google webinars for our publishers.  

Posted by: Faith Rosen, Product Marketing Manager

More and more of us are using using two screens at once to interact with media these days: for instance searching the internet from a smartphone while watching TV. A recent study conducted by Ispos and Sterling (and sponsored by Google) found that a whopping 90% of our daily media consumption is now done on 4 screens: smartphones, laptops, tablets and televisions.

DoubleClick for Publishers was built with this multi-screen challenge in mind. To better deliver an advertiser’s campaigns, we integrated mobile and video in the same ad server and same user interface. You only deal with one ad server for all formats: desktop, mobile and video. You get one view of all your inventory and one view of your audience, so it's easier than ever to respond to advertiser requests and deliver engaging campaigns across all screens and formats.

Says, Tutuwa Ahwoi, ad operations manager at National Public Media, “One of the greatest benefits of DFP has been consolidation. It’s great to be able to serve mobile, video and display from the same platform. That’s helped us spend less time managing different systems and trying to get avails for our proposals, and helped us get forecasting right and respond with proposals to agencies quicker and faster.”

Better Mobile
DFP Mobile is integrated seamlessly with DoubleClick for Publishers. You can now manage all your ad inventory with one view and one workflow. Features like data transfer, audience targeting, delivery, creative rotation, and frequency capping are all in the same UI. Try using DFP’s powerful forecasting and reporting engine to uncover new mobile sales opportunities. And with the Octagon SDK, your mobile apps can access the extra advertiser demand from Google’s AdMob network.

Better Video
DFP Video gives publishers a powerful platform to manage their user’s video ad experience as they move across screens. By integrating with your video Content Management System (CMS), DFP Video can have full awareness of all your video inventory, so you can package, forecast, sell and report on any combination of data. We’ve extended better controls to DFP Video like competitive exclusions and frequency capping to the stream, pod and content level so you can control your video ad load and sell your inventory in a similar way to TV. Utilizing Google’s resources publishers can access additional demand from AdWords for Video buyers, provide a better user experience with the TrueView^TM ad format, and automatically transcode your videos, using YouTube technology, to ensure videos are delivered in the right format and bitrate regardless of the screen size or connection speed of a device.

Alex Boyce, the GM of Digital says the features have delivered a “significant improvement” over The Hollywood Reporter’s previous ad management solutions and processes. “DFP Video is clearly going to make a significant impact to our overall video advertising revenue by providing a greater level of flexibility and staging efficiency.” After switching to DFP Video, The Hollywood Reporter’s has seen great results with overall video ad operations efficiency improved 25%.

Tomorrow, we'll focus on ad ops -- and how DFP can ease the load. See you then.
Posted by Rany Ng and Marcel Gordon, Product Management Team

Advertisers demand performance from their online ads, whether it comes in the form of generating a more qualified lead or building higher brand awareness. But it can be hard for publishers to deliver better performance manually - especially when you factor in millions of impressions delivered across multiple platforms, formats and devices.

Today’s DFP is helping publishers meet advertiser needs with tools and features that help optimize inventory better than ever, and report on how you’re doing faster.

The result? Happier advertisers, say many of the publishers we spoke to.



“It’s a significant improvement. And our advertisers are happy about it,” says Dmitri Kazanski, Director of Ad Ops for Manta.com. “The switch to DFP has had a positive influence on our sales relationships with advertisers,” echoes Thomas Goldmann, online sales director at German publisher Heise Online.

DFP Optimization: automatically improving campaign performance
In an ideal world, campaigns would self-optimize. That idea was our guide in creating DFP Optimization, an add-on to the core DFP Premium platform.

A more powerful tool than DART Adapt, DFP Optimization leverages Google’s infrastructure and processing capabilities to automatically deliver the best ad, to the best user, at the best time. The system uses advanced modeling and pattern recognition, and harnesses the power of AdWords machine learning and AdSense contextual matching, to deliver ads to users who are more likely to respond to them. “Optimization allows better use of our premium inventory and increases the quality we can make available to our customers,” says Thomas Goldmann from Heise Online.

This drives better campaign performance across desktop, mobile and video, delighting advertisers. How much better? Heise Online saw a 52% improvement in average daily performance of optimized ad campaigns, and Manta.com realized a 70% to 90% lift.

Faster reporting = more timely optimization
Another feature of DFP that’s making publishers and advertisers happy is our faster reporting. DFP now makes performance data available 20-30 minutes after ad delivery (compared with 24 hours on DART). Data is shown in easy-to-interpret charts and graphs, so ad ops teams can flag issues, optimize on the fly and make quicker pacing and delivery decisions.

“I can optimize with data from 20 minutes ago instead of from yesterday," says Kirsten Hardy, ad operations manager for Inside Out Media. That speed improves client relationships, says Erin Pettigrew, Gawker Media’s head of ad operations: “Being able to confirm correct delivery for a client just hours after launch has given much needed confidence to our sales and account teams”.

Tune in tomorrow to see how DFP equips you sell more effectively and meet advertiser demands across platforms and formats.

Posted by Max Loubser, Product Management Team

We hope everyone in the North East is safe and dry and on the way to recovering from Hurricane Sandy. Last week we made this blog post to kick off a week of highlights from our partners, but in the wake of the storm we took a pause. Now that we’re getting back on our feet, we want to share some stories from publishers who have successfully upgraded to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

We announced DFP two years ago with the goal of helping publishers open doors to new revenue. Since then, thousands of our smaller publishers have switched to DFP for Small Business and hundreds of our largest partners to DFP Premium. And we’re happy to say that it’s working.

DFP now runs billions and billions of ad impressions a day across tens of thousands of publisher sites, from niche blogs to the largest names on the web. Desktop, mobile and video ad serving is handled on a unified platform giving publishers a single view of their business and allowing them to quickly respond as users shift to multi-screen consumption. We integrated proprietary Google technology like our machine learning and 10+ years of AdWords research to match the right ad to the right user at the right time and our data centers for lower latency. It all works together to help our customers save time, get a more holistic view of their business and find and capture new revenue opportunities.

Over the past year, we’ve heard a lot of great stories from publishers who’ve upgraded to DFP. And this week on the blog we’ll be sharing some of them. We'll get their take on the DFP features they like the most - features like the improved UI, DFP Optimization, DFP Mobile and DFP Video - and hear from them about how DFP has helped their business grow.

In the meantime, we’ll keep innovating our product and listening to your feedback- and we can’t wait to see what else our publishers are able to accomplish with DFP.

Posted by Brian Adams and Josh Cohen, Product Management Team

Publisher of popular titles like Gawker, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, Gawker Media delivers two billion ad impressions monthly to tens of millions of readers across its eight different properties. Managing ad operations at this scale efficiently is a challenging task. In an effort to increase operational efficiency, Erin Pettigrew, Gawker Media’s head of ad operations, upgraded to the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) platform from DART for Publishers. We recently caught up with Erin on how the team is faring following the move.

Operational efficiency increased an estimated 15%
DFP’s intuitive interface and streamlined workflows have allowed Erin’s team to operate more efficiently by approximately 15%. “With more efficient trafficking, we’re booking more revenue in our system than ever before. And fewer screens and simpler processes means we have a much happier traffic team,” says Erin.

Real-time response to client needs
DFP makes performance data available within 20 - 30 minutes of a campaign delivering (compared with 24 hours on DART). As a result, Gawker Media has been able to monitor and optimize campaign performance and handle client demands in real-time. “Being able to confirm correct delivery for a client just hours after launch has given much needed confidence to our sales and account teams,” says Erin. Furthermore, with access to the DFP interface from mobile devices and browsers, the team can respond to customer requests for campaign changes at any moment, from anywhere.

Increased focus on business optimizations
With DFP’s efficiency-driving features, Erin and her team dedicate more resources towards growing Gawker Media. As she sums up, “With the time that DFP saves, we can focus on other priorities - optimization, troubleshooting and improving client relationships - that help further build our business”.

Read Gawker Media’s full story here.

This post is part of the PubTalk series of conversations with publishers

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Manager

Today at the London ATS Trading summit we announced the launch of Audience Extension, a new feature within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) designed to generate more premium revenue for publishers by leveraging their audiences across the web.

Audience extension enables you to reach your audience across other publishers, bundle these impressions with your own inventory, and resell those packages to your direct advertisers at a premium. Audience extension inventory comes from the vast pool of brand safe inventory via publishers on DoubleClick Ad Exchange.  Audience Extension can be used without leaving DFP; flight dates, targeting and bid parameters are set directly within your core ad server.  

Audience extension is best suited to publishers with high value content channels within their owned and operated inventory that are consistently sold out, or who have defined audiences onsite that have a value to advertisers that transcends the context of their own site. It’s also used by publishers looking to reach a critical mass of users from a given geo-location.

Key Benefits

• A single place to manage, execute and optimize buying across owned & operated and external inventory
• Bid management capabilities integrated in the core ad server
• Integrated data management
• Cross-inventory performance reporting, analytics & insights
• Complexity hidden from sales team & ad operations

Posted by Sean Harvey, Business Product Manager

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). The list below contains some highlights. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Line Item Bulk Edit:  We’re constantly working on improving the trafficking process to enable you to create and change your campaigns more easily and effectively. You can now change the start and end date, the quantity, and the rate of several line items at once by using the bulk edit feature on the order overview page.

New AdMob SDK: The new Google AdMob SDK v6.1.0 for Android and v6.1.4 and v6.1.5 (non-UDID and UDID, respectively) for iOS are available for download. The new versions include the ability to specify multiple ad sizes in an AdView, introduce an app event listener for custom creatives that fire custom app events, and fix bugs reported from previous versions of the SDK.

Available in DFP:

Copy Creative Templates: If there is a creative template that you often use, you can now copy the template if you would like to re-use it for new creatives.

Available in DFP Mobile:

Allow non-matching images in aspect ratio creatives: Offers the ability to upload an image asset which doesn't match the aspect ratio you have selected in the line item.

Suggested ad units: You can now create mobile ad units by approving suggestions generated from actual traffic. When a not-yet existing ad unit generates impressions we will show it after some impressions as a suggested ad unit in the inventory screen of the network where users can approve them to become actual ad units. This saves you time by automatically creating ad units in advance, while still maintaining control over your overall inventory structure.

Multiple sizes for ad units in applications: You can now create ad units with multiple sizes in applications, allowing you to sell high-value custom sizes without compromising your ability to deliver standard banners or use ad networks.

Available in DFP Video:

Pausing / Archiving for Content & Sources: Content and Source will have new status: Archiving. Archiving a content source marks all of its content as archived. You can also mark video content as archived and this will persist until the user sets it back to the "video source setting"

DFP API Hangouts:
On September 18th at 11am PT join the DFP API Team and Ad-Juster in a hangout focused on how Ad-Juster integrates with the DFP API to make Publisher's lives easier. Ad-Juster, a company that helps ad operations teams automate the pulling of countless reports from multiple sources, will present a demonstration of their tool and also discuss how they integrate with the API.  Add questions before and during the live hangout and don't forget to add this event to your calendar. To ensure your computer is ready please follow the instructions prior to the event. Thanks, and see you there!

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

66% of the population accesses the Internet every day on their smartphone (source: Google and Ipsos Our Mobile Planet: Understanding the Mobile Consumer, May 2012), and never leaves home without their device(s).

The prevalence of mobile devices enables users to constantly connect to a publisher’s content, whether on-the-go, at work, or on the couch at home.

For a publisher’s advertising business, this means display advertising has needed to evolve from purely ads in web browsers, to ads across all screens and devices. You have to help advertisers connect with your audience in whatever setting and on whatever screen they're consuming your content.

At the heart of DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), we've built a single platform that enables publishers to seamlessly manage all of their digital advertising under one roof. In the most recent release of DFP, we’re excited to bring even more DFP desktop features to mobile so that trafficking a campaign to your website is no different to trafficking a campaign to your mobile site and application. New features include:

• Frequency capping: You can now enforce frequency caps on mobile web sites and in mobile applications. Frequency caps can be applied to mobile campaigns and to mobile ad units, allowing you fine-grained control over the advertiser and user experience.
• Suggested ad units: You can now create mobile ad units by approving suggestions generated from actual traffic. This saves you time by automatically creating ad units in advance, while still maintaining control over your overall inventory structure.
• Multiple sizes for ad units in applications: You can now create ad units with multiple sizes in applications, allowing you to sell high-value custom sizes without compromising your ability to deliver standard banners or use ad networks.
• Data transfer for mobile: If you are using the data transfer beta, you will now have access to mobile-specific reporting data, including device, carrier and OS information.

In addition to bringing the best-in-class desktop functionality of DFP to mobile, we recognize that mobile is indeed different, and presents publishers with unique advertising opportunities not found on desktop. To help publishers capitalize on new opportunities and the uniqueness of mobile, we’ve recently released the following mobile functionality:

• SDK mediation: You can now connect with major in-app advertising networks, including iAd, via the networks’ own SDKs. You can choose which SDKs to include in your application with our adapter-based approach, minimising application size and giving you control over updates. You also have the option to serve ads from a sequence of ad networks to maximize fill rates and improve RPMs.
• App events: You can now provide a custom advertising experience by extending the Google AdMob SDK. Creatives can pass messages to the application, allowing the application to respond (for example, to change the background color). This enables truly integrated ad formats while still using the SDK to do the heavy lifting.
• Support for pre-loading ads: You can now pre-load ads from DFP Mobile. This enables you to improve the user experience, whether to mitigate the effect of slow mobile connections, or to match the smooth user experience of the rest of your application.

With DFP, we’re committed to giving publishers the tools they need to seamlessly manage and deliver all of their digital advertising in order to take full advantage of the multi-screen world. 

Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

Our engineers have been hard at work during the last few weeks to provide you with some new, exciting features in DFP. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP:

Teams: Imagine that your organization operates an East and West coast sales team, and you'd like to restrict access to your East coast orders and advertisers so only users on your East coast team can view and edit the campaigns. With the new Teams functionality in DFP, you can now group your network's users into teams, defined by you, enabling you to restrict access to any combination of companies, orders and inventory. Learn more.

Auto-Macro Insertion for Creative Templates: The key to successfully serving third-party creatives and minimizing discrepancies is to make sure that you are properly inserting macros into the third-party code. A macro is a short piece of code provided by DFP that will enable your third-party tags to properly track clicks or track impressions.  In addition to automatically inserting macros for reconginzed third-party creatives, DFP will now also recognize and insert macros for  third-party code in custom creatives and custom creative templates. This provides you with the same macro-insertion support and efficiencies you are used to when trafficking regular 3rd party creatives.

Ad Exclusions: There are situations when you will want to avoid an advertiser running on a competitor's website. For example, if you've got a news story about a plane crash, you probably don't want to run airline ads next to it. Ad Exclusions provide controls to prevent labelled line items to deliver on specific inventory. These labels can additionally be added per default on company level to ensure a smoother workflow for your trafficking operations.

Creative Upload for Standalone Creative Library: The recently launched Standalone Creative Library now supports the ability to upload creatives and creatives sets directly, which can be stored for later use.

Local Time Zone Trafficking: In addition to being able to change the role and language you use DFP in, you can now change a DFP user's time zone to match the user's location. When you do, the displayed times throughout the trafficking sections of DFP will be adjusted to match the time in the location you've set for the user.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Additional Reporting Scheduling options: We’ve added further  granularity to reporting scheduling options to give you more insights into the health of your inventory. You can now schedule your reports with additional breakdowns such as year-to-date, quarter-to-date, month-to-date, and lifetime.

SDK Mediation for Mobile: SDK Mediation is a form of ad network optimization for mobile in DFP which allows you to set up a waterfall (or daisy chain) of networks, where one network after another is called until an impression is filled. Use this new feature to send impressions from mobile applications to ad networks via the ad networks' own SDKs.This is useful when:

• An ad network only accepts requests from its own SDK
• Certain custom formats are only available in the ad network's SDK
• Information provided by the SDK, such as location information or a unique user ID, enables higher CPMs

Available in DFP Mobile:

Frequency Capping: Frequency capping is now available for mobile in two ways:

• Line item frequency capping: For mobile web, this uses cookies in a similar fashion as desktop (the DoubleClick cookie where possible; otherwise the DFP first party cookie). For mobile applications, this uses a double-anonymised identifier generated by the Google AdMob SDK.
• Ad unit frequency capping: Ad unit frequency capping now works for mobile in cases where there is an identifier available.

Available in DFP Video:

• Fallback Image for VAST Non-linear ads: It’s now possible to display a fallback image when VAST non-linear ads fail to render.
• VPAID Creative Validation: DFP will validate hosted linear and non-linear VPAID creatives and notify the user if it's invalid.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist