At DoubleClick, we've always had a single mission — to help you grow revenue and build sustainable businesses with advertising. That means ensuring we're helping you make the most revenue from every impression, with solutions that keep up with advertiser demands for more programmatic access to inventory, while at the same time delivering on the expectations of users for great experiences with your sites and apps on every screen. To that end, over the last year we launched products like Optimized Private Auctions, optimized pricing in the Open Auction and DoubleClick for Publishers First Look.

Today, we’d like share some updates on how we’re using the power of automation and machine learning to create sustainable solutions that drive greater advertising performance and revenue for our partners.

Smarter yield through machine learning

Programmatic buying has created many opportunities for publishers to maximize revenue, but optimizing manually puts publishers at a disadvantage when programmatic buyers are constantly investing in smarter bidding technology. That’s why we’ve been applying optimization and machine learning techniques developed over the years at Google to help publishers make more money from programmatic demand. In fact, since 2016 we have run hundreds of experiments resulting in over 50 improvements to our auction algorithms. These optimizations have generated 15% more revenue for publishers using DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Actionable insights with Opportunities & Experiments

Data can be an important input for making better decisions, but the best yield management strategies also include constant testing and measurement. To make this process easier, we recently launched a new Opportunites & Experiments tool that puts publishers in control of Google intelligence.

Publisher opportunities and experiments in DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange provide customized, actionable and quantifiable suggestions on how to increase yield. With a few clicks, publishers can safely run an experiment, and if they like the results, accept the change to apply it across their account. Publishers including The Soul Publishing in Russia, TV2 in Norway, and Match.com in the U.S. have grown revenue with Opportunities and Experiments.

"Opportunities and experiments lets us bypass the heavy, manual labor part of the yield optimization process. It lets us skip straight to projecting results of possible changes and testing a yield hypothesis against a control test group in a safe way. Essentially, the feature helps us find the test cases worth our time automatically, letting us focus on increasing yield and revenue,” says Mikaela Rimaila, Programmatic Manager, TV2. "Personally I’d love to do all my yield optimization through this feature, as it adds a safety layer to rule changes, easily giving us the chance to compare and analyse the effects of the test.”

"Opportunities and experiments in AdX has helped streamline our yield optimization process and boosted our indirect revenue. We receive customized suggestions to increase our yield, such as floor adjustments, and have seen significant gains as a result."
- Gregg Murphy Senior Director, Revenue Operations, Match.com

Bringing Exchange Bidding to more partners demand without compromising user experience

We’ve made a lot of progress since announcing our test of Exchange Bidding last year, and today we’re happy to announce the Open Beta of Exchange Bidding, available for publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers^* globally. Exchange Bidding helps publishers bring more of their programmatic demand together into a unified auction and the results have been impressive. On average Exchange Bidding is delivering double-digit programmatic revenue uplift, with some publishers seeing programmatic lift as high as 40% with minimal impact to user experience. Today, 100+ publishers can choose from 7 trusted third party exchanges, including our new partners, COMET, OpenX and Sovrn.

"We've been working with Google on the development of Exchange Bidding for several months now and while it's still early, we are pleased with the level of partnership and transparency we have seen from the Google team. While there are still issues to be resolved and the product is very complex, their efforts have resulted in real and positive changes to the Exchange Bidding product. Based on our experience so far, and the excellent results we have seen to date, we are optimistic that we can deliver material value to our publisher partners via Exchange Bidding."
- Jason Fairchild, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, OpenX

Driving sustainability in the future

Looking back at the results from our latest yield management improvements shows us what’s possible, but I think we can do more. We’ve shown how machine learning can deliver more value to publishers, and in the future, we’ll continue to invest in it to deliver even more innovations. Also, the work our teams have been doing on server side technologies have revealed more opportunities to improve publisher revenue by taking advantage of synergies across our products. Publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange may have noticed our first step in this direction, a unified UI for both platforms. Moving forward you should expect more innovations like these to increase publisher yield.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack Director of Product Management, Publisher Platforms

^*Exchange Bidding is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

When we announced the pilot program for Exchange Bidding last year, our goal was to help publishers earn the most money possible, with the least complexity, while maintaining the best user experience.

We’ve been working on Exchange Bidding in collaboration with our publisher and exchange partners for the last year, and today we’re happy to announce the Open Beta of Exchange Bidding, available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers^* globally. Our partners have been seeing great results during our testing, and we’d like to give you more details about this powerful enhancement to DoubleClick for Publishers.

Greater revenue without compromising user experience

When every millisecond counts, the fastest solutions yield the best results. Relying on client side connections over mobile networks to manage yield can result in annoyed users, lower viewability and lost opportunities.

That’s why we challenged ourselves and worked hard to prioritize speed during the closed Beta. To maximize revenue without compromising on user experience, we built Exchange Bidding directly into DoubleClick for Publishers.

The results speak for themselves. Publishers in our closed beta have seen double-digit programmatic revenue lift on average, with some seeing programmatic lift as high as 40%. Plus, Exchange Bidding is up to 15x faster than client side or server side solutions in the market today. While header bidding solutions add on average 500ms to 1,000ms of delay to ad delivery speed, Exchange Bidding adds only 60ms seconds of delay.

Publishers like Hearst Digital are seeing great results.

“Our goal is to move as much of our advertising code off our sites as possible. Less code loading on the client side is better. Exchange Bidding is great because it helps us move in that direction. It’s simple to setup and works with our existing DoubleClick tags.”
- Scott Both, Director of Programmatic Sales Engineering, Hearst Digital Media

Reduced complexity with all demand in one ad tag

Beyond speed and revenue lift, Exchange Bidding creates greater value for publishers by reducing the complexity of their existing yield management setups. Because Exchange Bidding is built into DoubleClick for Publishers, it works with our existing ad tags, requires no additional coding to a publisher’s site or app or additional line items cluttering up a publisher’s ad server, and puts no additional burden on users.

Instead of taking days or weeks of development and adjustments to set up, publishers can get Exchange Bidding up and running in less than a day. Instead of constantly updating the price and priority of partner line items or adding hundreds or thousands of new line items to implement header bidding, publishers simply create a handful of yield groups that define which third party exchanges can bid on specific inventory. And instead of spending days collecting reporting and billing information from multiple partners, reconciling discrepancies, and waiting to get paid, Exchange Bidding provides publishers unified reporting and consolidated billing on our standard terms.

“Integrating and maintaining client side headers is a significant investment for any publisher. Setting up server side bidding with Exchange Bidding was simple. It also helped us reduce a lot of the operational overheads associated with headers and it promises to reduce latencies and discrepancies whilst improving scalability”.
- Nat Poulter, Head of Programmatic at MailOnline

We only succeed when our partners succeed

We understand that in order to help publishers thrive we must foster a sustainable advertising ecosystem. That means creating solutions that deliver the most revenue possible for publishers, while maintaining great experiences for users, and providing all players in the industry equal access to high quality inventory.

To ensure we were getting the right feedback from all parties, we created an advisory board with members from our initial exchange partners. It’s feedback from this group that helped inform the development of Exchange Bidding and make it work better for every participant.

"We've been working with Google on the development of Exchange Bidding for several months now and while it's still early, we are pleased with the level of partnership and transparency we have seen from the Google team. While there are still issues to be resolved and the product is very complex, their efforts have resulted in real and positive changes to the Exchange Bidding product. Based on our experience so far, and the excellent results we have seen to date, we are optimistic that we can deliver material value to our publisher partners via Exchange Bidding."
- Jason Fairchild, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, OpenX

We’ve seen great results during the testing phase of Exchange Bidding. Today, 100+ publishers can choose from seven trusted third party exchanges including our new partners, COMET, OpenX and Sovrn to compete equally in a unified auction against a publisher’s direct sold campaigns in DoubleClick for Publishers and bids from DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We look forward to working with our existing and new users to make Exchange Bidding the best solution for the industry.

Posted by Sam Cox
Group Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

^*Exchange Bidding is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

Cross-posted from The Keyword

The vast majority of online content creators fund their work with advertising. That means they want the ads that run on their sites to be compelling, useful and engaging--ones that people actually want to see and interact with. But the reality is, it’s far too common that people encounter annoying, intrusive ads on the web--like the kind that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page. These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads--taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation.

We believe online ads should be better. That’s why we joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads. The group’s recently announced Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers, and today I’d like to share how we plan to support it.

New tools for publishers

The new Ad Experience Report helps publishers understand how the Better Ads Standards apply to their own websites. It provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences we’ve identified to make it easy to find and fix the issues. For a full list of ads to use instead, publishers can visit our new best practices guide.

The Ad Experience Report lists when we have identified ad experiences on a site that are likely to harm users or violate the Better Ads Standards.

“We’ve always put our users first and fully support the Coalition’s Better Ads efforts and standards. At the same time, we deal with so many different websites and ad experiences it’s hard to tell at a glance which ads experiences we need to replace. The report’s videos and screenshots are incredibly helpful and make the Coalition’s research actionable for our teams. We’re impressed with the level of detail and transparency Google is providing and are 200% behind this initiative.” - Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Media

As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor.

“Looking at the past few years, we’ve come to realize that to the rise of ad blockers has negatively impacted potential revenue across all of our properties, particularly in Europe. Funding Choices allows us to have a conversation with visitors using ad blockers on how our business works, and provide them a choice to whitelist or contribute to our newsroom. We’ve found that people are generally open to whitelisting once they understand how content gets created.” - Marc Boswell, SVP, Sales Operations & Client Services, Business Insider

Funding Choices is available to publishers in North America, U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand and will be rolling out in other countries later this year. Publishers should visit our new best practices guide for tips on crafting the right message for their audience.

Chrome support for the Better Ads Standards

Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

Looking ahead

We believe these changes will ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to have a sustainable way to fund their work with online advertising.

We look forward to working with the Coalition as they develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards, and are committed to working closely with the entire industry—including groups like the IAB, IAB Europe, the DCN, the WFA, the ANA and the 4A’s, advertisers, agencies and publishers—to roll out these changes in a way that makes sense for users and the broader ads ecosystem.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce