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