The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20151118224909/http://doubleclickadvertisers.blogspot.com/search/label/Measurement

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When advertisers pay for an ad, the chance for it to be seen is a basic expectation. Advertisers shouldn’t have to pay extra to measure and ensure that it was viewable. These expectations drove the launch of Active View back in 2013, an effort to establish a neutral and common set of viewability metrics used by both advertisers and publishers. Since then we've continued to invest in this technology across DoubleClick, YouTube and the Google Display Network, and today we're happy to share two new updates that will help advertisers and publishers run more effective cross-screen campaigns.

Announcing Active View optimization in DoubleClick Bid Manager - A better way to programmatically buy viewable impressions

Today, we're introducing Active View bid optimization in DoubleClick Bid Manager for clients globally. This new bid optimization feature uses the collective intelligence from many signals (e.g. URL, time of day, page category) to predict, impression by impression, the probability that it will be viewable. It then dynamically adjusts bids higher or lower based on that probability to deliver the viewable CPM target that advertisers set for their video and display campaigns. Active View optimization delivers what advertisers actually care about - the total volume of viewable impressions - and doesn’t fixate on a viewable percentage.

This will help solve a common problem: when marketers buy viewable impressions programmatically using current viewability targeting, the decision to bid on a single impression is very basic. Buyers choose a target viewable percentage (e.g. 50%) and their programmatic buying system bids the same amount for any impressions with a likelihood of being viewed above that target - or nothing at all for impressions with a likelihood of being viewed below that target. This means that buyers are missing out on wide swaths of inventory that may actually be viewable and are driving up competition (and CPMs) for the inventory they are buying.

Announcing Active View for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange - Bringing holistic viewability measurement to publishers

We believe that viewability metrics should be a standard currency between buyers and sellers. To enable this, we've been investing in features that allow publishers to see and report on a holistic picture of viewability across their channels and content. We're continuing that momentum today by announcing Active View reporting for mobile apps in DoubleClick for Publishers and on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. With the consumer shift to mobile reshaping how publishers engage with their audience and those interactions increasingly happening on mobile apps, this new measurement solution completes the picture for publishers helping them see how viewability plays out across all of their properties.

At Google, we remain committed to investing in a broad set of measurement solutions for brands and publishers through a combination of product innovation with our own solutions and partnerships with leading third parties. These announcements are two big steps in our ongoing effort to help our clients measure every moment that matters.

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Ari Feldman
Product Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers Reporting and Active View
Deepti Bhatnagar
Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager Brand Measurement and Optimization
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Cross-posted from the Google Agency Blog

If you can’t measure it, how do you know it worked? With this simple principle in mind, we’ve been investing in a broad set of measurement solutions for brands through a combination of product innovation with our own solutions like Brand Lift and Active View and partnerships with leading third parties like comScore and Nielsen on GRPs.

Viewability has long been a focus for us. Built on the foundation of our Active View technology, we launched the ability to buy only viewable impressions on the Google Display Network back in December 2013 and recently completed moving over the last advertiser campaigns from CPMs to viewable CPMs. We’ve worked to ensure viewability rates on YouTube are amongst the industry’s highest. And Active View now works seamlessly across video, display, mobile web and mobile apps (on YouTube and for publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers), and has been adopted by over 80% of advertisers using the DoubleClick platform.

With the MRC-defined industry standard as a base-line for viewability, we are also helping advertisers and agencies go beyond transacting on the industry standard to also measure individual viewability objectives. In order to support this we have begun launching supplementary metrics in Active View, like the ability to see average viewable time and soon when an ad is 100% in view for any length in time. These are the first few in a lineup of supplementary metrics that will provide advertisers with additional data points relevant to their specific campaigns and needs.

Announcing 3rd party viewability reporting on YouTube - bringing you more choice

Today, we're continuing our approach of driving product innovation and supporting choice by announcing that we're broadening the options for advertisers measuring viewability on YouTube. Along with Active View, advertisers will also be able to choose from third party vendors.

Moat, Integral AdScience, comScore and DoubleVerify are a select set of third party vendors that have been approved to report ad viewability on YouTube, beginning with Moat in early 2016. Through these partnerships, we’ll continue to expand measurement options for marketers on YouTube, while maintaining the highest levels of security and privacy for users, advertisers and creators.

“Independent 3rd party verification is extremely important to ensuring that our clients’ media is running as effectively and efficiently as possible. As a long-time partner, IPG Mediabrands is pleased to see Google continue its work to move the industry forward on viewability by allowing independent verification of YouTube, and applaud this recent decision.”
Mitchell Weinstein, SVP Ad Operations, IPG Mediabrands

Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Unilever added:

"Having partners like Google address these challenges helps to push the entire industry forward. This move will generate better industry-wide standards across viewability and third party verification practices and continues the momentum in the right direction."
Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Unilever

Stay tuned for continued investments in the viewability space, including ongoing product innovation updates to Active View as well as additional partnerships. Together with our partners, our goal is to help our clients measure every moment that matters.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari
Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google
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Just a few weeks ago we announced the release of comScore vCE in DoubleClick, the first completely tagless GRP measurement solution integrated directly into an ad server. With comScore vCE in DoubleClick, Brand Marketers in the US get the trusted comScore audience measurement solution for both video and display ads that delivers 100% coverage.

Register now for a webinar on October 21st at 11am PST / 2pm EST, where you’ll be joined by Anne Hunter, SVP Global Marketing Strategy at comScore, Inc. and Paul Trieu, Product Manager at Google, to learn about:

  • How reach, demographics and GRPs can help enhance campaign success
  • Share practical tips for enabling comScore vCE in DoubleClick in DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Campaign Manager
  • Unveil best practices on using comScore vCE in DoubleClick to measure campaigns
  • Perform a demo of the new simple and easy to read reports
  • Host Q&A
Posted by Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing, Video Platforms & Brand Measurement, Google
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Every day, your audience is filling their days with hundreds if not thousands of micro-moments—intent-rich moments when preferences are shaped and decisions are made. As consumers spread their attention across more and more screens and channels, those moments can happen almost anywhere, anytime. People search on their smartphones while in front of the TV. They watch YouTube videos on their tablets while texting their friends. They open a mobile app to shop for the perfect gift, then head to the store to buy it. With mobile devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find and buy anything, anytime.

For marketers, this means the purchase funnel is wildly more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

“Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent.”

It’s hard to plan for nonlinear purchase paths, but programmatic advertising can help, enabling brands to reach the right person with the right message in the moment of opportunity. Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent. That’s a powerful proposition, and it’s why programmatic advertising spend is projected to grow by more than 77% this year.1

In this article, we share four tips for using programmatic to win these micro-moments and examples of brands that are doing it right.

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.
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Mobile has forever changed the way we live, and it’s forever changed what we expect of brands. It’s fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments. Each one is a critical opportunity for brands to shape our decisions and preferences. In these I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go consumer moments, people are turning to mobile apps, in addition to websites, to find what they need.

Given this consumer shift, companies from industries as diverse as Finance, Retail and Travel have jumped into the game, building branded app experiences to engage with their customers. So it’s important that marketers be able to measure and attribute their app-related activities, whether installs, engagement, or purchases, back to their advertising campaigns.

That’s why, today, we’re excited to announce the ability to integrate app install and event data from key third party measurement partners into DoubleClick. Working with third parties (starting with TUNE) we are able to increase the measurement accuracy between different app attribution trackers and DoubleClick, ensuring your data is accurate and reliable.

With this launch, marketers can now use supported third party measurement partners to attribute in-app activities back to the in-app ads they have run through DoubleClick, enabling them to reach their performance goals as they acquire new app customers.

This launch provides customers with:

  • Choice: Use one of several (supported*) app tracking tools, while still accurately attributing installs to your DoubleClick ad campaigns.
  • Accuracy: Get reliable and accurate metrics so you can report on your results with confidence, while getting the benefits of a unified view of all your programmatic or reservation app attribution data inside DoubleClick reporting.
  • Better performance: Minimize cost-per-acquisition to get the best performance for your budget. You can optimize your bids in DoubleClick Bid Manager against your post-view and post-click conversions. You can also create targetable audience lists based on these in-app activities (e.g. customers who’ve installed your app or customers who’ve logged in).

By allowing more choice to advertisers using their preferred third party app measurement tools, we are able to provide more robust and actionable metrics for marketers running mobile app install campaigns on DoubleClick.

To get started with this feature, please follow the directions here for DoubleClick Bid Manager, and here for DoubleClick Campaign Manager (accessible by customers only.)

Posted by Steve Chang
Product Manager, DoubleClick Digital Marketing

*At launch, this feature supports a verified integration with TUNE. Verified support for other third party app trackers is expected to launch later this year.

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As a brand trying to reach consumers in today’s increasingly fragmented media landscape, it is critical that you understand the impact of your ads on brand metrics such as awareness and consideration.

Viewability is the starting point, an initial understanding of whether the ad had a chance to be seen. We have talked before about why measuring the viewability of advertising matters.

In December 2014, we shared insights on the state of display ad viewability across the web. As a continuation of that effort, in May we released new insights from our video ad platforms, including YouTube, to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.


We wanted to take this research a step further, by analyzing the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

To do so, we took our Brand Lift solution, which gives you insights into what impact your ads have on the consumer journey - from awareness, to ad recall, to brand interest - and tied the data to viewability metrics from our Active View technology for a set of YouTube TrueView ads. By connecting these two solutions, we were able to draw out some insights about the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

Sight, sound and motion combined drive higher lift

When it comes to brand metrics, ad recall is a foundation for measuring the impact of your ad. As a brand advertiser, knowing if your ad breaks through with users is a key first step to understanding the overall impact of an ad on a suite of brand metrics. In this analysis, we were able to analyze how being able to hear and see your ad affected a user’s ability to recall your ad.

Our data shows that users exposed to even one aspect of your video ad (audio or video only), exhibit significant lift in ad recall. However, the full immersive experience of sight, sound and motion delivers more ad recall than either audio or video alone. In fact, the impact on ad recall was 23% higher when users were exposed to ads with audio and video together versus ads with just audio alone.

The longer in view, the better you do (on brand metrics)

Time in view also plays a large role when it comes to moving the needle on brand awareness and consideration. We recently introduced the ability for Active View users to measure average viewable time - the average time, in seconds, a given ad appeared on screen - in Doubleclick Bid Manager. By connecting these measurements, we can see the relationship between viewable time and brand metrics.

We found that there is a consistent relationship between how long an ad is viewable and increases in brand awareness and consideration. The longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in these two important brand metrics:


What the results mean for your brand

These results prompt you to think about your brand advertising in a few important ways:
  • Are users viewing your creative for longer periods of time? Brand metrics continue to get higher the longer a user views your ad.
  • Are you buying the right media to have an impact on brand metrics? YouTube’s opt-in TrueView ads are uniquely suited to deliver long-form video content at scale for brand advertisers.
  • Finally, are you thinking beyond viewability to capture effectiveness metrics? You want your ads to move consumers at the moments that matter, and measuring the impact on brand metrics will make for more effective ad spend.
This is just the beginning of understanding what impacts brand metrics for video ads. As brands look to measure the effectiveness of their digital video advertising, a continued understanding of what factors drive brand metrics will be crucial to more effective brand spend.

Read further research on the impact of online video.

To read all of our research on viewability, check out thinkwithgoogle.com/viewability.

To see how viewability is measured, visit our interactive Active View demo.
Posted by Sanaz Ahari
Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google
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Over the past few years we’ve been committed to investing in a suite of new metrics that would be as actionable for brand marketers as the click has become for performance advertising. In that spirit, today we are announcing a new GRP solution, comScore vCE in DoubleClick, and updates to our Active View viewability solution.

Our goal is to enable brand marketers to answer some essential questions about the success of their campaigns:

Announcing an update to Active View - Ensuring your ads are seen

If a human being never has a chance to see your ad, then nothing else matters - the campaign will not succeed. That’s why we’ve been steadily introducing Active View technology across our product suite: the ability to buy based on viewability in AdWords, and reporting on viewability in our DoubleClick advertiser and publisher platforms. In a recent study that we published we found that 46% of all video ads on the web did not even have a chance to be seen. This contextualized the importance of video viewability and the launch of Active View for Video a few months ago.

We are firm believers in the IAB / MRC standard as the minimum viable definition for a viewable impression. We also recognize that there is a need for secondary metrics that complement the single standard and support individual advertisers’ objectives. In light of this, we are announcing that starting today, Active View users will be able to measure average viewable time - the average time, in seconds, a given ad appeared on screen - in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Since introducing Active View, we’ve seen tremendous momentum with over 80% of clients having adopted our viewability technology. These advertiser and publisher clients have told us time and again that they would like to use Active View to measure viewability across all their media buys. So we are working with these clients to expand Active View beyond Google’s media and platforms.

Announcing comScore vCE in DoubleClick: Ensuring you reach the right audience faster

Last year we announced our partnership with comScore to bring to market a completely tagless and digitally actionable metric that would make real-time GRP measurement a reality for advertisers and publishers. Today we are announcing the culmination of that partnership: comScore vCE in DoubleClick.

 comScore vCE in DoubleClick is the first independent, completely tagless, audience delivery measurement service to be directly integrated into an ad server and will give advertisers and publishers a trusted comScore audience measurement solution for both video and display that is effortless to set up and actionable.
This new GRP measurement solution is now widely available for all of our DoubleClick customers across DoubleClick Digital Marketing and DoubleClick for Publishers. This means advertisers can now see if they’re reaching their target audience as it happens. And publishers will be able to make adjustments during the course of a campaign to meet their advertisers’ needs -- no more after the fact reporting and make-goods.

With this tagless and single-click workflow, advertiser and publisher clients will have 100% coverage. Publishers will have the ability to forecast their audience availability to ensure they meet advertiser commitments. For advertisers, in addition to scheduled reports we are introducing new audience cards that surface reports with simple and easy to read visuals.



Measurement Matters

We will continue to look for opportunities to raise the bar on measurement through a combination of product innovation and partnership with industry leaders.

We’re excited about the progress we’ve made in enabling advertisers to ensure that their ads reached the right audience and were actually seen. But our biggest investments in measurement still lie ahead as we work to help advertisers understand what their audiences thought and ultimately did as a result of seeing their ads.
Posted by Sanaz Ahari
Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google
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Today the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) announced a new pilot blacklist to protect advertisers across the industry. This blacklist comprises data-center IP addresses associated with non-human ad requests. We're happy to support this effort along with other industry leaders—Dstillery, Facebook, MediaMath, Quantcast, Rubicon Project, The Trade Desk, TubeMogul and Yahoo—and contribute our own data-center blacklist. As mentioned to Ad Age and in our recent call to action, we believe that if we work together we can raise the fraud-fighting bar for the whole industry.

Data-center traffic is one of many types of non-human or illegitimate ad traffic. The newly shared blacklist identifies web robots or “bots” that are being run in data centers but that avoid detection by the IAB/ABC International Spiders & Bots List. Well-behaved bots announce that they're bots as they surf the web by including a bot identifier in their declared User-Agent strings. The bots filtered by this new blacklist are different. They masquerade as human visitors by using User-Agent strings that are indistinguishable from those of typical web browsers.

In this post, we take a closer look at a few examples of data-center traffic to show why it’s so important to filter this traffic across the industry.

Impact of the data-center blacklist

When observing the traffic generated by the IP addresses in the newly shared blacklist, we found significantly distorted click metrics. In May of 2015 on DoubleClick Campaign Manager alone, we found the blacklist filtered 8.9% of all clicks. Without filtering these clicks from campaign metrics, advertiser click-through rates would have been incorrect and for some advertisers this error would have been very large.

Below is a plot that shows how much click-through rates in May would have been inflated across the most impacted of DoubleClick Campaign Manager’s larger advertisers.

Two examples of bad data-center traffic

There are two distinct types of invalid data-center traffic: where the intent is malicious and where the impact on advertisers is accidental. In this section we consider two interesting examples where we’ve observed traffic that was likely generated with malicious intent.

Publishers use many different strategies to increase the traffic to their sites. Unfortunately, some are willing to use any means necessary to do so. In our investigations we’ve seen instances where publishers have been running software tools in data centers to intentionally mislead advertisers with fake impressions and fake clicks.

First example

UrlSpirit is just one example of software that some unscrupulous publishers have been using to collaboratively drive automated traffic to their websites. Participating publishers install the UrlSpirit application on Windows machines and they each submit up to three URLs through the application’s interface. Submitted URLs are then distributed to other installed instances of the application, where Internet Explorer is used to automatically visit the list of target URLs. Publishers who have not installed the application can also leverage the network of installations by paying a fee.

At the end of May more than 82% of the UrlSpirit installations were being run on machines in data centers. There were more than 6,500 data-center installations of UrlSpirit, with each data-center installation running in a separate virtual machine. In aggregate, the data-center installations of UrlSpirit were generating a monthly rate of at least half a billion ad requests— an average of 2,500 fraudulent ad requests per installation per day.

Second Example

HitLeap is another example of software that some publishers are using to collaboratively drive automated traffic to their websites. The software also runs on Windows machines, and each instance uses the Chromium Embedded Framework to automatically browse the websites of participating publishers—rather than using Internet Explorer.

Before publishers can use the network of installations to drive traffic to their websites, they need browsing minutes. Participating publishers earn browsing minutes by running the application on their computers. Alternatively, they can simply buy browsing minutes—with bundles starting at $9 for 10,000 minutes or up to 1,000,000 minutes for $625. 

Publishers can specify as many target URLs as they like. The number of visits they receive from the network of installations is a function of how long they want the network of bots to spend on their sites. For example, ten browsing minutes will get a publisher five visits if the publisher requests two-minute visit durations.

In mid-June, at least 4,800 HitLeap installations were being run in virtual machines in data centers, with a unique IP associated with each HitLeap installation. The data-center installations of HitLeap made up 16% of the total HitLeap network, which was substantially larger than the UrlSpirit network.

In aggregate the data-center installations of HitLeap were generating a monthly rate of at least a billion fraudulent ad requests—or an average of 1,600 ad requests per installation per day.

Not only were these publishers collectively responsible for billions of automated ad requests, but their websites were also often extremely deceptive. For example, of the top ten webpages visited by HitLeap bots in June, nine of these included hidden ad slots -- meaning that not only was the traffic fake, but the ads couldn’t have been seen even if they had been legitimate human visitors. 

http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html is illustrative of these nine webpages with hidden ad slots. The webpage has no visible content other than a single 300×250px ad. This visible ad is actually in a 300×250px iframe that includes two ads, the second of which is hidden. Additionally, there are also twenty-seven 0×0px hidden iframes on this page with each hidden iframe including two ad slots. In total there are fifty-five hidden ads on this page and one visible ad. Finally, the ads served on http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html appear to advertisers as though they have been served on legitimate websites like indiatimes.com, scotsman.com, autotrader.co.uk, allrecipes.com, dictionary.com and nypost.com, because the tags used on http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html to request the ad creatives have been deliberately spoofed.

An example of collateral damage

Unlike the traffic described above, there is also automated data-center traffic that impacts advertising campaigns but that hasn’t been generated for malicious purposes. An interesting example of this is an advertising competitive intelligence company that is generating a large volume of undeclared non-human traffic.

This company uses bots to scrape the web to find out which ad creatives are being served on which websites and at what scale. The company’s scrapers also click ad creatives to analyze the landing page destinations. To provide its clients with the most accurate possible intelligence, this company’s scrapers operate at extraordinary scale and they also do so without including bot identifiers in their User-Agent strings.

While the aim of this company is not to cause advertisers to pay for fake traffic, the company’s scrapers do waste advertiser spend. They not only generate non-human impressions; they also distort the metrics that advertisers use to evaluate campaign performance—in particular, click metrics. Looking at the data across DoubleClick Campaign Manager this company’s scrapers were responsible for 65% of the automated data-center clicks recorded in the month of May.

Going forward

Google has always invested to prevent this and other types of invalid traffic from entering our ad platforms. By contributing our data-center blacklist to TAG, we hope to help others in the industry protect themselves. 

We’re excited by the collaborative spirit we’ve seen working with other industry leaders on this initiative. This is an important, early step toward tackling fraudulent and illegitimate inventory across the industry and we look forward to sharing more in the future. By pooling our collective efforts and working with industry bodies, we can create strong defenses against those looking to take advantage of our ecosystem. We look forward to working with the TAG Anti-fraud working group to turn this pilot program into an industry-wide tool.

Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager Google Ad Traffic Quality
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Last week during the DoubleClick Leadership Summit (DLS), we introduced cross-device measurement across all of our DoubleClick advertiser products. Today, as the first post of our week-long DLS series, we're excited to announce that these cross-device metrics will be rolling out to all DoubleClick advertisers in the next week.

Mobile continues to reshape how consumers engage on digital: they are increasingly turning to the nearest device to act on an immediate need in the moment and then seamlessly shifting their attention from screen to screen to complete their journey. With the path to purchase becoming increasingly fragmented, it’s essential marketers understand how consumers interact with their brand across all devices. When marketers have access to cross-device insights, they will also make the best decisions about how to invest their marketing dollars.

With this launch, advertisers can access cross-device metrics in all buying tools within our platform -- DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, and DoubleClick Search. 
What advertisers can measure
Cross-device measurement in DoubleClick allows advertisers to gain insight on the true performance of their campaigns across the web, even when users switch devices in their path to conversion. This means advertisers can measure conversions that begin on one device, and continue or end on another, answering questions like:

How many additional conversions is my digital investment delivering that I haven’t been able to measure?
Which sites/campaigns/ads are driving the most conversions across devices? 

Let’s say a user is reading bicycle reviews on her phone, and clicks on a display ad that takes her to a bike shop’s website. Later, when she gets home, she pulls up the shop’s site on her computer to continue her research, and ultimately buys the red cruiser she’s been eyeing. This is an example of a cross-device path to conversion that you will now be able to measure with our tools. In fact, cross-device measurement enhances the most powerful use cases for our customers:
  • If a user clicks on a search ad on desktop, then completes a purchase on mobile, we can measure that.
  • If a user clicks on a display ad for a smartphone app on their desktop, and then later downloads that same game on their smartphone, we can measure that. 

 Principles of cross-device conversion measurement 
We built cross-device measurement for DoubleClick with the following principles at the core:

User-first. We’re investing in these capabilities while prioritizing user privacy. We measure mobile behavior using industry-standard device identifiers that users can see, reset and configure to opt out from interest-based advertising. Additionally, advertisers can only access anonymous and aggregated performance reporting on their campaigns.

Accurate. The cross-device metrics are calculated using fully deterministic data sources. Performance measurements are only displayed to advertisers when there is a sufficient sample size and a strict 95% confidence interval is reached. 

Comprehensive. Built to work across any type of buy (programmatic or reservations), screen, channel (search and display), and format, these tools are consistent with DoubleClick’s core value of giving advertisers a unified view of their audience. 

To learn more about cross-device measurement, register for the webinar on July 9th at 12 PM ET and subscribe to our newsletter. If you have a DoubleClick login you can also read more in our Help Center.

Join us on Wednesday for our second post in our DLS series, focused on the Programmatic Guaranteed and DoubleClick Marketplace announcements. 

Posted by Luke Hedrick, Product Manager, DoubleClick
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A lot of ink has recently poured onto the subject of digital advertising fraud—which is a great thing. Fraud is a real and serious problem, but some, we think, still hold a mental image of fraudsters as one-off bad actors sitting in a dark room racking up clicks on ads on their site to make a few extra bucks. The truth is far more troubling: the majority of ad fraud today is perpetrated by sophisticated organizations that devote vast resources to build and operate large scale botnets run on hijacked devices, to reap multi-million dollar payouts [1,2].

Stopping these bad actors requires an industry-wide, long term commitment to identifying and filtering fake traffic from the ecosystem. This is not a task any one company can take on alone. We need everyone across the industry to take steps toward making digital advertising more secure and transparent. Here are some actions we’re taking to help move the entire industry forward. (We hope others join us.)

Describing threats in common, precise language
Many of the statistics and headline-grabbing disclosures in the market today do a great job of creating panic, but share very little detail to help anyone actually solve the problem.

Imagine if police officers looking for a bank robber could only describe the criminal as “suspicious”. The robber would be free for life. And yet this is disappointingly how advertising fraud is policed today. “Fraud” and “suspicious” are seen as synonymous and applied to everything from completely legitimate ad impressions to fake traffic generated by zombie PCs infected with malware. Before we can stop advertising fraud, everyone needs to start using common, precise language to disclose fraudulent activity.

The IAB introduced its Anti-Fraud Principles and Proposed Taxonomy last September providing the industry with this common language and we strongly support these standards. But these are early steps – as an industry we can’t stop there. When fraud is identified it should be shared in a clear structured threat disclosure, mirroring how security researchers release security vulnerabilities. By increasing the amount of data we share in a transparent, helpful way, others in the industry will be able to corroborate any claims being made, remove the threat from their systems, removing it from the ecosystem. Further, if a public disclosure could lead to further damage, then vulnerable parties should be notified in advance.

Ensuring bad actors can't hide: Supplier Identifiers
If you bought a designer scarf in a store only to find out it’s a knock-off with a fake label, you’d expect a refund. You’d also know which store to avoid in the future. The same should hold true for fraudulent inventory. When fraud is identified, it should also be possible to identify the seller or reseller who should take responsibility for the inventory. 

Today this doesn’t hold true. As an illustration of the problem, we are currently finding significant volumes of inventory misrepresenting where the ads will actually appear and in many instances there is no reliable and verifiable mechanism to identify who in the supply chain is responsible for this misrepresented inventory.
To address this problem, we propose that the buyer of any branded (non-blind) impression should be passed a chain of unique supplier identifiers, one for each and every reseller (exchange, network, sell-side platform) and one for the publisher. With this full chain of identifiers for each impression, buyers can establish which supply paths for inventory can be trusted and which cannot. If a buyer finds a potential issue, and it’s clear where the problem lies in the supply path, then there should be an unambiguous process for refunds. It will also be easy to avoid this supply path in the future.

Ultimately the burden for ensuring the quality of online inventory starts with those who sell it. To this end, we submitted a proposal to create an industry managed supplier identifier to the IAB Anti-Fraud Working Group in February, and we’ve heard others in the industry support this call for more transparency. We've come to take this type of guarantee for granted when we shop in a store – let's work together and make it a standard for digital advertising as well.

Cleaning up campaign metrics
Before investing your hard-earned money in a local business, you’d definitely review their financial reports to understand if it’s a good investment or not. In digital, campaign metrics are the record of truth. They help advertisers evaluate which inventory sources provide the greatest value and outline a roadmap of where ad spend should be invested. But if these metrics are polluted with fake and fraudulent activity, it’s impossible to know which inventory sources provide the best return on spend.

Now, imagine if you invested in that small business only to find out it was actually a fictional front created by an organized crime ring, complete with receipts and a cashier, to cover up their back office money laundering operation. Fraudsters work hard to disguise their bot traffic as being human by having them do things like go window shopping or plan a vacation to create a whole world of made-up conversions and interactions before directing them to their final destination.

As long as fake traffic still appears to be delivering value, advertisers’ spend will continue flowing to the operators of fake traffic sources. Of course our industry should push for 100% fraud free ecosystem. The reality, though, is that some will likely always slip through. When it does, it's also our responsibility to keep it from skewing marketers' metrics. If we can keep reporting systems from giving credit to fake traffic, this removes the incentive for publishers to buy this bad traffic from bad actors.

As an industry, we owe it to our clients and ourselves to ensure that metrics are clean and accurate. Let’s work together to identify fraudulent traffic and invest in systems to filter it out of campaign metrics. 

A fraud-free ecosystem?
Advertising fraud is a real and serious problem, one that creates significant costs for advertisers, takes revenue from legitimate publishers, and enables the spread of malware to users, among other harms. To eliminate it, we must take action to remove the incentive for bad actors to create and sell fraudulent traffic. The steps I’ve outlined above seek to do this by cutting off their access to advertising spend and making it difficult for fraudsters to hide.

Over the coming months, we’ll be taking these steps and working with the industry to help others clean bad traffic from the ecosystem. 

Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager Google Ad Traffic Quality
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If an ad isn’t seen, it doesn’t have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. That is why measuring the viewability of advertising matters. It gives marketers a clear understanding of campaign and messaging effectiveness and allows advertising spend to be allocated to the media where it will have the most impact.

We have long been advocates of viewability as a currency between buyers and sellers, which is why we’ve had viewable-only buying on our network for more than a year and have been investing in our Active View technology.

As a continuation of that effort, today we are releasing new Active View data from across our Google, DoubleClick and YouTube video ad platforms. This new research on the 5 factors of video viewability is being published today on Think with Google to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.


In this research we found that only 54% of all video ads served across the web, excluding YouTube, had a chance to be seen! On YouTube 91% of ads were found to be viewable.


As advertisers shift to paying for viewable video ads, rather than served impressions, understanding the drivers of viewability for video ads is more important than ever.

To learn what viewability is and how it is measured, visit our new interactive Active View demo here.

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Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement
Michael Giordano, Product Marketing, Brand Measurement
Anish Kattukaran, Product Marketing, Video & Brand Measurement


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Since 2008 we’ve been working to make sure all of our services use strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means people using products like Search, Gmail, YouTube, and Drive will automatically have an encrypted connection to Google. In addition to providing a secure connection on our own products, we’ve been big proponents of the idea of “HTTPS Everywhere,” encouraging webmasters to prevent and fix security breaches on their sites, and using HTTPS as a signal in our search ranking algorithm.

This year, we’re working to bring this “HTTPS Everywhere” mission to our ads products as well, to support all of our advertiser and publisher partners. Here are some of the specific initiatives we’re working on:
  • We’ve moved all YouTube ads to HTTPS as of the end of 2014.
  • Search on Google.com is already encrypted for a vast majority of users and we are working towards encrypting search ads across our systems. 
  • By June 30, 2015, the vast majority of mobile, video, and desktop display ads served to the Google Display Network, AdMob, and DoubleClick publishers will be encrypted.
  • Also by June 30, 2015, advertisers using any of our buying platforms, including AdWords and DoubleClick, will be able to serve HTTPS-encrypted display ads to all HTTPS-enabled inventory. 

Of course we’re not alone in this goal. By encrypting ads, the advertising industry can help make the internet a little safer for all users. Recently, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) published a call to action to adopt HTTPS ads, and many industry players are also working to meet HTTPS requirements. We’re big supporters of these industry-wide efforts to make HTTPS everywhere a reality.

Our HTTPS Everywhere ads initiatives will join some of our other efforts to provide a great ads experience online for our users, like “Why this Ad?”, “Mute This Ad” and TrueView skippable ads. With these security changes to our ads systems, we’re one step closer to ensuring users everywhere are safe and secure every time they choose to watch a video, map out a trip in a new city, or open their favorite app.

Neal Mohan, VP Product Management, Display and Video Ads
Jerry Dischler, VP Product Management, AdWords


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Cross-posted from the Google Online Security Blog

It’s pretty tough to read the New York Times under these circumstances:

And it’s pretty unpleasant to shop for a Nexus 6 on a search results page that looks like this:

The browsers in the screenshots above have been infected with ‘ad injectors’. Ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, into the pages you visit while browsing the web. We’ve received more than 100,000 complaints from Chrome users about ad injection since the beginning of 2015—more than network errors, performance problems, or any other issue.

Injectors are yet another symptom of “unwanted software”—programs that are deceptive, difficult to remove, secretly bundled with other downloads, and have other bad qualities. We’ve made several recent announcements about our work to fight unwanted software via Safe Browsing, and now we’re sharing some updates on our efforts to protect you from injectors as well.

Unwanted ad injectors: disliked by users, advertisers, and publishers

Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

People don’t like ad injectors for several reasons: not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing ad injectors in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

But, ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.

How Google fights unwanted ad injectors

We have a variety of policies that either limit or entirely prohibit, ad injectors.

In Chrome, any extension hosted in the Chrome Web Store must comply with the Developer Program Policies. These require that extensions have a narrow and easy-to-understand purpose. We don’t ban injectors altogether—if they want to, people can still choose to install injectors that clearly disclose what they do—but injectors that sneak ads into a user’s browser would certainly violate our policies. We show people familiar red warnings when they are about to download software that is deceptive, or doesn’t use the right APIs to interact with browsers.
On the ads side, AdWords advertisers with software downloads hosted on their site, or linked to from their site, must comply with our Unwanted Software Policy. Additionally, both Google Platforms program policies and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) Seller Program Guidelines, don’t allow programs that overlay ad space on a given site without permission of the site owner.

To increase awareness about ad injectors and the scale of this issue, we’ll be releasing new research on May 1 that examines the ad injector ecosystem in depth. The study, conducted with researchers at University of California Berkeley, drew conclusions from more than 100 million pageviews of Google sites across Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on various operating systems, globally. It’s not a pretty picture. Here’s a sample of the findings:
  • Ad injectors were detected on all operating systems (Mac and Windows), and web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE) that were included in our test.
  • More than 5% of people visiting Google sites have at least one ad injector installed. Within that group, half have at least two injectors installed, nearly one-third have at least four installed.
  • Thirty-four percent of Chrome extensions injecting ads were classified as outright malware.
  • Researchers found 192 deceptive Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users; these have since been disabled. Google now uses the techniques we used to catch these extensions to scan all new and updated extensions.
We’re constantly working to improve our product policies to protect people online. We encourage others to do the same. We’re committed to continuing to improve this experience for Google and the web as a whole.

Posted by Nav Jagpal, Software Engineer, Safe Browsing

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Cross posted from Think with Google.

 Last month at the IAB’s annual leadership meeting, viewability—a metric that shows whether an ad was actually viewed—was the topic on everyone’s mind. This is hardly a surprise. According to the “5 Factors of Viewability” research that we published in December, more than half of ads online today never even have a chance to be seen—something we can and must change. 

 As many of you know, we’ve long been advocates of the industry adopting viewability as a currency, a common metric to help both marketers and publishers improve their business results.

 And we’ve already come a long way. Forward-thinking publishers are introducing ad units designed for maximum viewability, and thousands of advertisers have taken advantage of viewability-based buying on the Google Display Network since we rolled it out last year. Brands and agencies are prioritizing viewability in their buys, and are seeing that doing so drives better results. 

 In fact, in tests we ran this month, advertisers measuring viewability based on the MRC standard for display ads with our Active View technology found that viewable ads saw conversion rates improve by as much as 50%. These viewable ads, with a minimum of 50% in view for a minimum of one second, drove a brand lift of 10.3% while non-viewable ads didn't contribute to lift at all. The business impact to buying based on the MRC standard is real.

 While we have made some progress, there is still significant work for us to do as an industry to establish viewability as a currency. The conversation has started to devolve from a collective agreement to tackle the viewability issue to debates over viewability rates and how to value viewable buys. It’s a bit like arguing over whether a recipe needs one egg or two while ignoring the fact that the oven has caught on fire. We are so close to effecting real change on this issue; let’s not lose our nerve now.

 It is imperative that we, as an industry, take three major steps:

 1. Focus on counting viewable impressions; viewability rates don’t matter

 Marketers are not saying that they want a percentage of their campaign to be seen; rather, they are saying they want to pay only for viewable impressions. In this request, viewability rates don’t matter, but the actual number of measured viewable impressions does. 

 We believe the industry needs to aspire to 100% viewability, full stop. This means buying and selling only viewable impressions. I understand this is a significant challenge, one we're working to solve on our own media properties; without a solution, however, viewable impressions cannot become a currency for the industry.

 2. Adopt a single standard for viewability

 It’s critical that our industry accepts a single viewability standard, common to all. Without that, it will be impossible to determine the true value of a viewed impression; create scale; or optimize, pace, and forecast inventory effectively. 

 Through collective discussion and analysis, our industry and the MRC worked hard to build and agree on a standard definition of viewability, one that we support. But since doing so, not all of us have supported it, with some advertisers and publishers recently suggesting new definitions. What we cannot do as an industry is resort to building around multiple standards. 

 The way to move forward now is to accept the long-discussed, hotly debated, yet proven standard set by our industry. There will be plenty of opportunities for our industry to make adjustments and updates as our understanding of viewability evolves, but we’ll never have that opportunity if we don’t collectively take this first step and establish a true currency. 

 3. Resolve discrepancies in measurement 

 Discrepancies and low measurability rates are not acceptable, yet today they exist when publishers and advertisers compare viewability vendors. To put an end to these discrepancies, we must not only adopt a common standard but also ensure a shared process and method of measurement. A liter of water is always the same regardless of who does the measurement. The same should be true for viewable impressions.

 To get here, we must integrate measurement technology directly into ad serving, with viewability data appearing directly alongside other campaign metrics, accurately reconciled for buyers and sellers.

 Looking ahead at viewability

 As a technology, viewability is still in its earliest stages; there are many exciting opportunities for us to solve collectively. For example, viewability on mobile will be crucial as consumers spend more and more time on their smartphones. Secondary engagement metrics such as viewable time and audibility (after all, video is about sight, sound, and motion) can start to offer an even fuller picture of an ad’s effectiveness. But our industry won’t get there if we’re still debating the standard itself. 

 The best technologies are those that delight their users and then just get out of the way. We’ve come to expect this, for example, in instantly mapping out a route in a new city on our phones or having lunch delivered with just a few taps. My hope is that a year from now, viewability will be a true currency—and just as expected and as simple for everyone. 

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Neal Mohan, 
Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products

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Consumers’ constant connectivity means that people can now satisfy their desire for information and entertainment at any moment during their day. This “in-the-moment” behavior requires marketers to focus on building cross-screen advertising strategies to capture the moments that matter.

With March Madness upon us, today we will shine a light on how one marketer, Turner Sports, developed smart cross-screen advertising strategies to play to the needs of sports fans. We will then explore five new mobile features we are launching in DoubleClick Digital Marketing that enable advertisers to more easily develop and run cross-screen campaigns.

How Turner engaged fans across screens
Turner knows that at the outset of the tournament, consumers watch the games via the March Madness Live desktop stream and mobile app. So driving traffic to the video stream and driving app downloads at the outset of the Tournament are the brand’s most important metrics. 

As the tournament progresses, the focus shifts from the app to live TV tune-ins, to capture the excitement around the final match-ups. By understanding how and where consumers interact with March Madness content, Turner can build a better digital strategy and reach their users more effectively throughout the Tournament.

Turner used Google’s Lightbox format to create an expandable ad that drives people to the March Madness Live mobile app:


Five new features to help marketers run cross-screen campaigns
To help marketers like Turner accomplish their cross-screen advertising strategies, we’re excited to announce five new features across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. 

Build cross-screen creative more easily: 
  • For basic Flash ads: DoubleClick Bid Manager now supports automatic Flash-to-HTML5 conversion. HTML5 ads can run across mobile inventory where Flash ads cannot, expanding your mobile reach while offering a richer, higher performing creative. Initial results from our beta show that converting Flash assets to HTML5 increases mobile reach by 400% and drives a 2-3x increase in average click-through rate (CTR).
  • For interactive HTML5 ads: In the next few weeks, Google Web Designer will be launching starter templates to help advertisers quickly build mobile ad units from a pre-set format. Over 80 ad templates will be available, including 29 in-app templates, and all of them will be certified to work on DoubleClick Bid Manager. We’ll be adding additional templates for responsive GDN Lightbox formats next quarter. Google Web Designer will also integrate with the Asset Library in DoubleClick Studio, meaning users can access the same library of assets from Google Web Designer and DoubleClick Studio. 
Reach your audiences across screens more effectively: 
  • Based on geography: Last November, we announced that for users who opt in to location-based targeting, marketers can use geofence targeting in DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people based on their proximity to a specified chain store. We are now expanding geographic coverage to over 100 countries, increasing the types of business chains available for your campaigns, and improving the workflow for the feature, including building better forecasting and reporting. 
  • Based on brand safety: We are making app buying on brand-safe placements much easier. With app brand safety targeting, we have expanded our Digital Content Label algorithm to include even more Play Store and App Store apps, widening your mobile in-app reach while ensuring your ads only run on brand-appropriate apps.
Track and optimize app install campaign performance: 
  • DoubleClick Digital Marketing will support third-party app tracking solutions in early Q2. This means advertisers can track their in-app installs (app downloads from an in-app ad) using supported third-party app trackers and attribute them back to impressions and clicks for in-app ads run on DoubleClick Bid Manager and Doubleclick Campaign Manager. Contact your DoubleClick rep to learn more. 

 Whether you’re reaching sports fans during the March Madness tournament, or more generally trying to reach your consumers in the moments that matter, these tools can help you build successful advertising campaigns that will run seamlessly across screens.

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Marketing

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With increasing video spend in digital and the higher media cost of in-stream video ads, it’s crucial for marketers to understand where their video ads are running and whether they were actually seen by their intended audience. As a first step to address this need, we announced the availability of Active View, Google’s viewability metric, for Video in January. Today, we are excited to build on this with the launch of Video Verification, now available to customers on the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, globally. Video Verification enables advertisers to gain insights unique to video to help ensure they’re getting what they planned and paid for.

Advertisers can now confirm not only that their ads are viewable, but that every view is as prominent as possible. This means you’ll know whether your video ads are mostly displayed in large players, front and center, or in little players off to the side. With these insights, advertisers can take steps to ensure that every video dollar spent goes toward high-quality, relevant inventory.

With DoubleClick Verification, here’s what advertisers will be able to measure for video ads, including those that run on YouTube:
  • Average player size
  • Average player position
  • Measurable impressions for player size and position
  • Viewable video impressions
  • A graphical illustration of player size
  • Number of impressions that were muted at start
  • Prominence score (low, medium, or high), which is calculated by combining the above metrics
    Video Verification UI. Player size: red = small, blue = large, green = HD

MEC uses DoubleClick Verification to ensure brands are safe, smart, and cutting edge online
As one of the world’s leading media agencies, MEC is committed to getting the highest-quality, most relevant and cost-effective buys for its clients. To ensure their clients’ messages only appear next to brand appropriate content and that their marketing dollars are well spent, MEC started using DoubleClick Verification.

With DoubleClick Verification built right into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, the team has access to unified data, which helps them make better decisions across search and display.
The team also found that they save 48 hours of turnaround time on every campaign since DoubleClick Verification requires no extra work, such as tagging. This makes the team more efficient and ensures campaigns launch on time.

Beyond peace of mind and time savings, MEC has moved from a reactive to a proactive approach to protect their clients’ brands. Tools like ad blocking guarantee that ads only appear next to brand safe content. For example, MEC recently implemented ad blocking for a major healthcare client to ensure their ads don’t appear on websites containing adult content, which could damage the healthcare firm’s brand.

To learn more about the team’s approach and results, read the full case study here.

Below are upcoming events and available resources to help you learn more about DoubleClick Verification:
  • Join Oren Mor, Product Manager for DoubleClick Verification, in a Hangout on Air at 12pm EST / 9am PST on Tuesday, February 24th. Register here.
  • Download the whitepaper, “5 Keys to Protecting Brand and Budget,” which guides advertisers through the process of evaluating a winning verification solution.
  • Visit the Help Center.
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With over half of ads measured not viewed, it’s more important than ever for advertisers to be able to act on viewability measurement. That’s why we’re happy to roll out new product updates we announced at CES, that make viewability more actionable for advertisers using the DoubleClick platform.

As we heard from Neal Mohan earlier this month, “when it comes to impact, having your ad seen is not just important, it’s fundamental.” It’s why we’re investing heavily to help make viewability a common currency across the industry. Over the last year, we’ve enabled advertisers to buy only viewable impressions across the Google Display Network, built Active View viewability reporting into our DoubleClick platforms for display and video, and today we’re building on this even further with two launches that will help advertisers act on these viewability metrics. 

  • Viewability targeting in Doubleclick Bid Manager. Clients of DoubleClick Bid Manager can now measure and target impressions globally based on the historical viewability of an impression. By programmatically targeting viewable impressions, marketers are able to improve the performance of their campaigns, in real-time, eliminating the need to manually reallocate spend to find viewable impressions. 
  • Viewability data in DoubleClick Ad Exchange bid requests. Ad Exchange clients can now see the historical viewability percentage for every impression when available. With this signal, programmatic buyers can make smarter decisions about the value of impressions before they place their bids on Ad Exchange.

Viewability reporting has given marketers the data to understand how many of their ads were seen. Now they can use that same data to programmatically increase the viewability of their campaigns. For brands like TalkTalk Telecom Group, using viewability targeting on DoubleClick Bid Manager has driven strong results.

TalkTalk generates 94% more viewable impressions
TalkTalk Telecom Group, a leading TV, broadband, mobile, and phone provider in the U.K., was eager to boost the viewability of its ads while maintaining costs. Having already implemented programmatic buying to reach potential customers at the exact moment they're ready to commit, TalkTalk wanted to then ensure its ads were actually being seen by targeting viewable impressions. To do so, the company deployed DoubleClick Bid Manager with Active View. TalkTalk generated 94% more viewable impressions, increased CTR 133%, and lowered CPC by 40%.


"Being able to target by viewability with Active View is groundbreaking. Active View enables us to measure the viewability of our ads, and Bid Manager's viewability targeting feature provides us with a solution to increase the number of viewable impressions we buy." - Rich Bailey, online marketing manager, TalkTalk Telecom Group.

To learn more about the team’s approach and results, check out the full case study here.

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Posted by the DoubleClick Product Marketing team
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