App install campaigns help brands get their apps installed

Brands can engage with their customers and drive brand loyalty by building branded apps that offer useful or entertaining information. Examples of branded apps include airline apps that provide check-in functionality, banking apps that provide bill pay and check deposit, and retail loyalty apps that drive in-store purchases. By providing functionality that people need regularly in a convenient way, these brands are able to remind customers of their value proposition and build stronger relationships.
But to get this customer loyalty, you first need to get people to install your app.
App install campaigns help you promote your app to your customers, so they can discover and install it. Having your branded app on your customers’ phones means you can be front-and-center on the screen that people check over 150 times a day, leading to increased brand awareness and mindshare.
Today, we’re excited to announce several new features across our DoubleClick Digital Marketing solutions that help you easily build an app install campaign to promote your branded apps.

Step 1: Set up tracking

Before you launch your app install campaign, make sure your app is setup to track installs (and other in-app actions your customers may take), so that you can understand which ads are most effective.

• If your app is in the Google Play Store, you can now automatically track installs of your Google Play app as conversions in DoubleClick, without any code changes.
• If your app is in the Apple App Store or if you work with an app measurement provider, we support integration with popular third party app tracking platforms (initially announced in September), so that you can track installs measured by those systems as conversions for your campaign.

Step 2: Build your ads

Your customers are viewing content across search, display, and video, so your app install campaigns need to reach them in all those places.

• Use the new templated app install creative formats in DoubleClick Bid Manager to generate your programmatic display ads instantly. These templates pull in info about your app from the Google Play or Apple App Store to create app install banners at the click of a button.
• Build, traffic and serve one rich media unit that works seamlessly across web and app environments, with universal ads, now available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.
• Through DoubleClick Search, you can access some of our highest performing ad formats; app install Search ads, launched last May, promote your app on Google Search results or on Google Play Search (Android only), and our new app extensions allow you to link to your app from your Google Search text ads.

Step 3: Reach your customers

Our app install workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager makes it easy to get your programmatic app install campaign up and running. In concert with this workflow, several new features make it even simpler and more effective:

• Create custom lists of apps to ensure that your ads show up in the apps you care about or that drive the best performance -- easily target or exclude lists of apps, giving you control over where your brand shows up.
• Already have an audience list of customers who’ve visited your mobile website? Use same device targeting to reach those interested customers with your app install campaign.
• Leverage the audience targeting solutions within DoubleClick Bid Manager (launched in November) for your app install campaigns, to reach your customers using in-market audiences, affinity segments or demographic groups.
• Drive higher performance and engagement with video ads; we’re launching a new video app install workflow in early March that enables easy campaign setup and targeting of video app inventory across the open exchange.

The new video app install line item workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager

Running app install campaigns can help drive more customers to your branded apps, paving the way for a deeper connection between your customers and your brand. Talk to your media agency and DoubleClick sales rep about getting started with these campaigns.

Facebook start using New Reaction Buttons others then the Like Button

Every day, people come to Facebook to discover what’s happening in their world and around the world, and to share all kinds of things, whether that’s updates that are happy, sad, funny or thought-provoking. News Feed is the central way you can get updates about your friends, family and anything else that matters to you, and the central place to have conversations with the people you care about.



We’ve been listening to people and know that there should be more ways to easily and quickly express how something you see in News Feed makes you feel. That’s why today we are launching Reactions, an extension of the Like button, to give you more ways to share your reaction to a post in a quick and easy way.

To add a reaction, hold down the Like button on mobile or hover over the Like button on desktop to see the reaction image options, then tap either Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry.

We understand that this is a big change, and want to be thoughtful about rolling this out. For more than a year we have been conducting global research including focus groups and surveys to determine what types of reactions people would want to use most. We also looked at how people are already commenting on posts and the top stickers and emoticons as signals for the types of reactions people are already using to determine which reactions to offer.

We have been testing Reactions in a few markets since last year, and have received positive feedback so far. Today, we’re excited to offer it to everyone who uses Facebook around the world. We will continue learning and listening to feedback to make sure we have a set of reactions that will be useful for everyone. We hope you enjoy the new Reactions!

YouTube Movie Trailers Leaderboard: Oscars 2016

As fans get ready for Hollywood’s biggest night, they are turning to movie content on YouTube. Trailers from the best picture nominees have collectively been watched 200 million minutes on Youtube—that’s over 3.3 million hours—and garnered 106 million views. So, which trailer ranks highest among YouTube viewers?

For this special Oscars® edition, Google Youtube have showcased the top trailers from the eight best picture nominees released in 2015, ranked in order of views including both studio channels and popular aggregators. To read more about the method, visit Google Agency blog.

Back to the list now ... the envelope goes to.... “The Revenant," which took home the #1 spot from YouTube viewers on our Oscar Trailers Leaderboard. Mad Max: Fury Road and The Martian followed.

 

For the full list, grab some popcorn and visit Think with Google.

Google Analytics is now supporting The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

This month in Analytics: get started measuring Accelerated Mobile Pages, re-engage audiences likely to convert with Remarketing.

How Google Analytics Support Works

Analytics on AMP is handled by an open source, reusable component that the Google Analytics team helped build. The component can be configured with Google Analytics specific configuration parameters to record pageviews, events, and even custom dimensions. That configuration works hand in hand with a global event listener that automatically detects triggers like button presses. As a result, there’s no need to scatter custom JavaScript throughout your page to detect actions that should trigger events and hits. Instead, you can define which actions should trigger hits within the configuration section and let the magic of AMP do the rest.

How to Get Started

Before you get started with AMP Analytics, you’ll need to get started with AMP itself. The AMP website contains a great introduction to getting started. Once you have an AMP page up, it’s time to start thinking about how you’d like to measure its performance.

We recommend that you use a separate Google Analytics property to measure your AMP pages. AMP is a new technology that’s going to mature over time. As such, some of the functionality that you’re used to in web analytics won’t immediately be available in AMP analytics right away. AMP pages can appear in multiple contexts, including through different syndication caches. Because of that, a single user that visits an AMP version of a page and a HTML version of a page can end up being treated as two distinct users. Using a separate Google Analytics property to measure AMP pages makes it easier to handle these issues.

Once you have your AMP page and new Google Analytics property set up, you’ll want to reference the requirements for using Analytics on AMP pages as well as the developers guide for instrumenting measurement.

What’s Next

Multiple technology partners, including Google Search, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have announced that they’ll start surfacing AMP pages in the coming months. The Google Analytics team is excited to support AMP from day one and look forward to growing our offering as AMP’s capabilities expand.

Google AdWords Switching to 4 Ads on Top, None on Sidebar

seems that Google is rolling out a change to Google AdWords that sees 4 ads at the top of the search results, none on the sidebar at all, and an additional 3 ads at the bottom of the search results.  This replaces the usual mix of top, bottom and sidebar-heavy AdWords ads, depending on the specific search result.

Many of the ads do have additional features like sitelinks, but it is hard to tell if those have increased or not.
It was huge news in December when Google began testing 4 ads at the top of the search results, and quite a controversial one for many.  While advertisers loved it, regular SEOs weren’t so happy since it pushed the organic search results even further down the page.

AdWords hasn’t confirmed it publicly yet, but multiple advertisers are confirming this is what their AdWords reps are telling them.

Programmatic Guaranteed: Available to advertisers and publishers globally

Six months ago at the US DoubleClick Leadership Summit, we announced the start of testing for Programmatic Guaranteed, a new way to use programmatic pipes to execute direct deals. In this time, over 300 advertisers and 200 publishers have tested this capability, and we’ve seen impression volumes double every quarter. Based on your feedback, we’ve made several changes and significantly improved the product. So today, we’re announcing the public beta of Programmatic Guaranteed and opening it to any advertiser using DoubleClick Bid Manager or publisher using DoubleClick for Publishers*.
Programmatic direct spending was expected to reach $8 Billion in 2015 in the US alone - more than 50% of total programmatic display ad spend (1). Initial steps to bring the benefits of programmatic to direct deals have been focused on automating the deal booking process. While that’s a good start, it only scratches the surface of what programmatic technology can do. The true value of programmatic direct will be achieved when the power of real-time, data-driven decisions is combined with access to brand safe, reserved publisher inventory currently available through direct sales. This will not only shorten the time it takes to book and execute high value reservations type deals, but also improve advertising performance.
That was our goal when developing Programmatic Guaranteed. It’s the only product available today that uses real-time bidding infrastructure to bring the power of programmatic to direct sales. Advertisers and agencies get access to premium guaranteed inventory with cross-campaign / advertiser optimization and frequency management across programmatic and reservation inventory. Publishers can lock in revenue through reservations, forecast against programmatic deals, and enjoy the ease of automated billing and collections. All that without the need to email tags, worry about creative controls, resolve discrepancies, or fax I/Os back and forth.
Finally, we’ve found that Programmatic Guaranteed is creating new opportunities for advertisers and publishers to connect. Here’s what some of our partners are saying about Programmatic Guaranteed:

“The way we stay ahead is by constantly experimenting and pushing technology to work for us. With Programmatic Guaranteed we can lock in revenue by selling a guaranteed number of impressions at pre-negotiated rates. We’ve seen great success with an initial batch of advertisers so far. Programmatic Guaranteed is simple and effective, and it’s ideally suited to the direct sales environment because clients really understand it.”

- Joe Alicata, VP Revenue Product and Operations, VOX Media

"As a premium publisher we will automate what today is manual. Programmatic Guaranteed is definitely an end to end solution. It is exactly what a publisher like Conde Nast needs to do more in a digital environment that is constantly changing and becoming more demanding."

- Elia Blei, Commercial Director Digital and Large Markets, Condé Nast

“At Generator Media we aim to provide a holistic solution for our clients. Including Programmatic Guaranteed in our offering allows us to manage valuable reserved buys alongside our open exchange and private marketplace activity. Doing so provides a level of frequency and messaging control previously unattainable across large scale digital media buys.”

- Russell Wagner, Director of Platform Integrations, Generator Media

"Programmatic Guaranteed helps the publisher deliver very high quality inventory to the advertiser. When we start a campaign, we always have to start with the publisher: we then fix the price with the publisher, define the placement, the timeline and then we define the volume. Through this, if you compare direct sales with Programmatic Guaranteed, we are returning better results."

- Andrea Di Fonzo, Managing Director, MediaCom Italy

Programmatic Guaranteed is now available to all marketers and buyers using DoubleClick Bid Manager, and all publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers. If you have a reservation deal that would benefit from the efficiencies of programmatic, reach out to your DoubleClick account team today to get started. We’re excited to bring this innovative advertising tool to the market and we look forward to your feedback on how we can best improve Programmatic Guaranteed during the public beta.

1 eMarketer, Oct 2015

* Programmatic Guaranteed is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

2016 Super Bowl of Advertising on Social

The Super Bowl is one of the world’s biggest marketing events, but what happens onscreen during the game is only half of the story. Now you can watch the Super Bowl unfolding LIVE across social media.

Socialbakers created a special version of the News Feed Pulse to track all of Super Bowl 50’s best-performing content and its advertisers’ most effective content strategies. It’s updated every 10 minutes and is completely free. Here.