DoubleClick Bid Manager (Google’s Display & Video 360)

Want to run your programmatic campaigns in the most efficient way? Interested in reaching the right audience at the right time with the right message on the right device? Determined to provide reports that can prove the value of your campaigns? Then DoubleClick Bid Manager (now known as Display & Video 360) is what you are after.

For the purpose of this document, I will continue calling it Display & Video 360.

Before we continue explaining how Display & Video 360 works, along with its features, we first need to know the following:

What are Programmatic Campaigns or Programmatic Advertising?

Simply stated, programmatic advertising is the automated process of buying and selling ad inventory through an exchange, connecting advertisers to publishers. This process uses artificial intelligence technologies (more about that later) and real-time bidding for inventory across mobile, display, video and social channels – even making its way into television.

In the Google Trends chart below, you will see that programmatic advertising interest has steadily increased from 2013 to 2015, while traditional display advertising interest has started to see a decline. This trend graph shows how increasingly popular programmatic has become in the marketing space and hints at the reasoning behind current projections on the continual growth of programmatic in the next few years.

 

How does Programmatic Advertising work?

Artificial intelligence technologies have algorithms that analyze a visitor’s behavior allowing for real-time campaign optimizations towards an audience more likely to convert. Programmatic companies have the ability to gather this audience data to then target more precisely, whether it’s from 1st party (their own) or from a 3rd party data provider.

Programmatic media buying includes the use of DSPs, SSPs, and DMPs. DSPs, (demand-side platforms) which facilitate the process of buying ad inventory in the open market, provide the ability to reach your target audience due to the integration of DMPs (data management platforms). DMPs collect and analyze a substantial amount of cookie data allowing the marketer to make better decisions regarding who their target audience may be.

On the publisher side of things, publishers manage their unsold ad inventory through an SSP (supply-side platform). An SSP reports data such as how long a visitor was on a specific site or how many pages were viewed per visit. SSPs will ultimately be in charge of picking the winning bid and will serve the winning banner ad on the publisher’s site.

Now that we covered how programmatic advertising works, let’s move forward to what Display & Video 360 is and some of the interesting details you need to know before starting your own campaign.

What is it?

Display & Video 360 (previously known as DoubleClick Bid Manager) is Google’s Demand Side Platform (DSP), where advertisers can organize and streamline all of their programmatic buying options. With precise targeting abilities, sophisticated brand safety filters, industry-leading fraud protection, and frontline reporting, Display & Video 360 really impact programmatic campaign management.

Targeting:

Display & Video 360 has access to more than 80 Ad Exchanges and over 900 million websites. You can be as broad or as specific with your ad targeting as you want. Finding existing and new website customers based on demographics, interests and purchase intent is a very straightforward task with Display & Video 360. Advertisers can also overlay additional targeting options such as device, environment, page context or page category. With access to 35 third party data providers plus Google’s audience data, reaching the right people has never been easier.

Buying Options:

Display & Video 360 advertisers can choose from a range of programmatic buying options, including programmatic guaranteed, direct deals, and open exchange. Marketplace in Display & Video 360 lets you plan, discover and buy premium media, all from one simple interface. Display & Video 360 is also the only DSP that allows access to buy video inventory on YouTube and pay per view with TrueView.

Reporting & Optimization:

When it comes to reporting and optimization, Display & Video 360 offers more than 35 dimensions and around 50 metrics – that’s without counting the extra 15 metrics available for video campaigns! This basically means advertisers have total visibility of what’s going on with their programmatic campaigns with complete transparency in ad placement, performance, and cost.

Placements:

You will be able to see the number of impressions, clicks, and conversions on all the websites where your ads are appearing.

Performance:

With more than 20 types of reports available in Display & Video 360, the combination of metrics is almost limitless. Advertisers can find an answer to any question by pulling the right report.

Do you want to have a breakdown between post-click and post-view conversions? What about how each creative or device is performing? Or how about understanding the value of each targeting method? With Display & Video 360, you have it all.

Costs/Fees:

There are a few fees that need to be taken into consideration when running programmatic campaigns via any DSP, but Google’s Display & Video 360 is so transparent and user-friendly that advertisers are able to see all costs and fees within two clicks.

Integration:

Display & Video 360 plugs seamlessly into Campaign Manager (the ad server) and Google Analytics 360 (GA360). Advertisers can also sync over their remarketing audiences from Google Ads and YouTube. This has a world of benefits including:

• Creating clever remarketing lists in GA360 which link seamlessly to Display & Video 360, allowing advertisers to
  target those audiences in Display & Video 360 directly.
• Understanding the quality of the traffic programmatic campaigns send to your website using GA360 data.
• De-duplicating conversions via Campaign Manager: Aligning Display & Video 360 with the rest of the Google
  Marketing Platform Stack allows for full visibility of conversion credit.
• Running a complex creative strategy in Campaign Manager and syncing that over to Display & Video 360 seamlessly – no
  hassle with setup!

Limitations:

• Frequency capping across TrueView and non-TrueView insertion orders isn’t supported.
• Frequency caps in Display & Video 360 may be enforced separately across inventory types, such as environments (mobile versus desktop) and inventory sources (specific publishers).
  • Mobile apps: Display & Video 360 supports frequency capping across mobile apps on the same iOS or Android device when the device’s IDFA or Advertising ID is passed in an impression’s bid request. If the mobile device ID isn’t known for an impression purchased on an open auction, the impression will be excluded by the line items that utilize frequency caps.
  • TrueView: For campaigns or insertion orders that contain a mix of TrueView and non-TrueView line items, frequency caps are enforced to the best of our ability for signed-in users across YouTube and Google Ad Manager inventory independently of frequency caps for signed-out users.
    • Frequency caps for ad sequence line items is automatically set to 1 sequence per user, per 30 days for ad sequence line items.
  • Audio: There are no special frequency management considerations for audio, it works the same as other creative types in Display & Video 360. For all creative types, frequency capping only works when the publisher is passing a cookie from the device (same as Device ID). While this is possible with audio, it’s not as common. Check with the publisher to confirm.

If you have the interest and time to learn more about how to create and manage Display & Video 360 Campaigns to benefit your company’s marketing efforts, we strongly recommend it. On the other hand, if you prefer to get in touch with a team of experts to provide advice and even optimize your campaigns, give us a call and we’ll gladly schedule an audit to identify ways of helping you out.