Buying and selling ads based on audience has transformed the display industry in recent years. Buyers use new technologies to run highly relevant campaigns to users across ad networks and exchanges. This benefits publishers greatly, because it allows them to deliver more useful ads to their users ultimately helping increase RPMs on their indirectly sold inventory.

Publishers are increasingly taking control of their audience data as one of the key assets of their digital businesses. But publishers tell us they still want better tools to improve the integration, transparency, and control over their own audience data for both direct and indirect ad sales.

Today we’re announcing the first in a series of features in the upgraded DFP service that help publishers manage and control audience data through one platform, integrated directly with their primary ad serving technology.

This first release is focused on first-party segments - as a publisher, you will have the ability to define your own user audience based on criteria that you define (e.g., sports enthusiasts, travel readers). First party audience segmentation was available in the existing DFP service, and is now integrated seamlessly with the upgraded DFP service.

First-party segmentation involves no implementation or integration effort by you. Simply define the criteria you want for your audience segments, in DFP and DoubleClick technology does the work of populating them directly from the ad tag. Once you’ve defined your audience you can use it to increase the direct sales value of undersold inventory, and gain insights on how different audience segments are engaging with content across your site. We have designed it to be seamless, easy to use and to put you in control of your data.

First party segmentation is a great tool for our publishers, but it’s just the first step in the work of building out DFP’s audience capabilities. In the coming months you’ll see more information from us as we release a series of new features that are directly integrated with the upgraded DFP service.

Posted by Sean Harvey, Product Manager

This morning, I had the pleasure of addressing the third-annual Admeld Partner Forum in New York. When we completed our acquisition of Admeld this past December, we said that we’d be looking at how to bring the best of their products and ours together to help us achieve our shared vision: helping our publisher partners make the web work for them, and get the most out of what online advertising has to offer. 

Over the past couple of months our teams have been hard at work figuring out exactly how this might happen. Today, we’d like to put our cards on the table and share what we’ve done and where we’re headed. 

Investing in the team: We realize that helping our partners succeed requires not just the right products, but the right people. So we’re investing in the team, bringing together our sales and services teams from across the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Admeld. This enables a continued focus on high-touch service for Admeld’s publisher partners, and also boosts Admeld’s presence across the globe.<

Tapping new pools of demand: Next quarter, we’ll start offering AdX Connect, a way for Admeld clients to start getting access to demand from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We’ll also be enhancing the advertiser, buyer, and bid transparency levels in the exchange, so that they are comparable with those currently provided to Admeld publishers.

Connecting the dots with DFP: We’re taking two big steps towards tying together Admeld and DoubleClick for Publishers: making it much easier for publishers to leverage SSP-style ad network optimization functionality directly within the DFP platform, and building an API so that Admeld’s mobile optimization capabilities will be more fluidly integrated with DFP mobile.

While we’re excited about these changes, they are just the initial steps. Our long term goal is to create a single, seamless platform for publishers that allows them to manage all their inventory -- across desktop, video and mobile -- with the control and flexibility their businesses require. Our publisher partners make the web the wonderful place that it is today, and by empowering their continued growth and success, we all come away winners. 

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

When advertisers are evaluating whether to advertise on a publisher’s site, they want to ensure their ad will perform well. Advertisers decide whether to keep buying on your site or a competitors’ based on if their campaigns are reaching the most valuable audience and meeting their campaign goals.

As a publisher, ensuring your advertiser's campaigns are receiving the impressions, clicks, and conversions they expect can be a daunting task. Ad operation teams spend hours at the controls of their ad server adjusting delivery settings, flight dates, and targeting, in effort to help their advertiser’s campaigns perform well. But solving this equation manually for hundreds or thousands of campaigns at once is virtually impossible to do.

The answer may lie in technology....and we think we can help.

Today, we’re excited to introduce DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Optimization, an advanced optimization system that supercharges ad performance to help publishers increases the value of their premium inventory, and boost yield for non-premium inventory.

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. DFP Optimization helps advertisers improve campaign performance, while helping publishers maximize clicks, conversions, and revenue.

Heise Online, one of Germany’s leading IT publishers, saw clicks on their optimized campaigns increase by 52% using DFP Optimization. This increase helped their sales teams improve the site stats they share with prospective clients, and were able to charge new premiums for its highly valuable inventory. Thomas Goldmann, Sales Director at Heise Online said “DFP Optimization has had a positive influence on our sales relationships with advertisers. Optimization allows better use of our premium inventory and increases the quality we can make available to our customers.”

DFP Optimization is fully integrated with the DFP ad serving platform, and can be easily implemented across all of a publisher’s inventory. After activating DFP Optimization, the system will continually learn, process, and adapt; this happens all without any manual intervention from your ad operations team. The system provides validation for publishers and their clients through a built-in control group that demonstrates the percentage lift for each optimized campaign. With this powerful reporting tool, you and your clients will know the solution is working.

To learn how you can begin increase the value of your inventory with DFP Optimization, please contact us.

Posted by Alex Vogenthaler, Product Manager

As the size and quality of publisher networks have grown, so has their need to operate more efficiently and profitably. With this in mind, we’ve rolled out a series of updates for publisher networks in DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

First, we’ve revised our policies to allow publisher networks to use the Ad Exchange even if they own & operate few (or none) of the sites they represent. As always, every partner site has to meet the same high-standards of quality as every AdX publisher.

Second, we’ve built a set Network Partner Management tools that make it easy to add new partners, manage hundreds of domains, and monitor their performance.

For current clients, using these features requires no changes to your existing tags. In addition, reporting, payment and site management remains in your hands.

If you’d like to learn more about these new capabilities, please sign up for one of the webinars below, contact your Ad Exchange account representative, or tell us how to contact you and we’ll have someone reach out.

US Webinar
Tuesday, March 13 at 11am PST (1pm CST / 2pm EST)
Register HERE

EMEA Webinar
Tuesday, March 13 at 2pm GMT (3pm CET)
Register HERE

Posted by Drew Bradstock, Product Manager