Today we’re excited to announce a complete revamp of DoubleClick Verification to help marketers protect their brand and budget, and empower them with confidence to invest in digital.
As a digital marketer today, you can deliver the right message to the right user at the right time and place. But with the rich options in formats, inventory sources, and types of buys, it’s crucial that your messages reach your audience as intended, and that you're getting what you planned and paid for.
We launched DoubleClick Verification in 2012 to ensure just this. Seamlessly integrated into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, DoubleClick Verification was built to give advertisers more confidence with their digital investment. It’s designed to be a natural extension of campaign workflow, to be a part of every campaign to ensure that brands and budgets are protected. Today we’re excited to share with you 8 major new features in DoubleClick Verification.
Robust insights: Verification covers all the potential brand safety and waste issues that can hamper a digital campaign. This means you get insights about contextual and geographic issues, viewability, and spam and fraud.
- Custom classifiers allow you to create custom categories based on what’s suitable for your brand. DoubleClick Verification has always reported on a rich set of predefined, industry-standard categories that give you contextual insight into where your ads served - like adult, violence, alcohol, politics, etc. Custom categories go beyond this by allowing you to specify more granular categories. For example, an airline may want to avoid advertising next to content about plane crashes specifically.
- Digital Content Labels: Just as movies are given ratings such as PG, PG-13, and R, websites, videos, and mobile apps are classified according to the brand safety of the content. You can now target inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager with labels that range from "DL-G", which corresponds to content that's suitable for general audiences, to "DL-MA", which corresponds to content suitable only for mature audiences. Digital Content Labels provide a consistent definition for brand safety across all Google advertising products - including DoubleClick, YouTube, GDN & AdMob.
- Viewability and Report Builder integration: Active View, Google’s solution for measuring and buying viewable impressions, is now built directly into DoubleClick Verification, as an important part of the solution to analyze and eliminate all potential waste. In addition, you can now add Verification data to Report Builder reports, allowing for more customization and the ability to schedule reports.
Coverage across formats, screens, and channels: DoubleClick Verification works in all the ways your campaigns work - protecting your brand in all scenarios across formats, screens, and channels.
- Video verification (coming soon): With double-digit growth predicted for digital video advertising for the next four years*, video verification is critical for marketers. You will now have access to insights unique to video like player size and location. 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.
Objectivity and transparency: We’ve built DoubleClick Verification to ensure utmost objectivity and transparency.
- Updated spam filtering & fraud detection: At Google, we take fraud protection very seriously. With over 100 engineers committed to this effort, we removed more than 350 million bad ads from our system last year**, and in February, we acquired spider.io, a company that has built a world-class ad fraud fighting operation. DoubleClick Verification draws from Google’s extensive spam and fraud expertise, and we’ve recently updated spam filtering with pre- and post-bid filtering capabilities. With a growing set of sophisticated filters, pre-bid blocking avoids buying fraudulent impressions in the first place, and post-bid filtering automatically purges fraudulent impressions from reporting and billing, so you get accurate reporting and don’t have to pay for these impressions.
Action in real-time: DoubleClick Verification empowers action in real-time through automation.
- Ad blocking automatically prevents ads from serving in unwanted locations and contexts across display, mobile web, and video inventory. Serve-time blocking protects your reservation-based campaigns in real-time. Pre-bid blocking protects your programmatic buys by blocking the bids on impressions that would serve in undesired contexts. And your settings are synced between your reservation and programmatic buys.
- Custom alerts and notifications deliver straight to your inbox exactly the information you need to know to ensure that your campaigns are running as expected and that you're getting what you paid for. For example, you can set a preference to receive an alert if more than 5% of your ads appear on violent content, or if more than 3% of your campaign is serving in off-target geographies.
MEC, one of the world’s leading media agencies, has been testing many of these features - including ad blocking - and has already seen great success. Nick Foord, Analytics Consultant, told us, "Buying digital media is much more complex today than it used to be. Transparency into where ads are serving is critical to ensuring our ads are being served in the right place, and next to the right content.” Steve Richards, Digital Technology Manager added, “Appearing in an inappropriate place online could really damage a brand’s reputation. Ad blocking has removed a huge amount of risk for us, and allowed us to take a proactive approach to protecting our clients’ brands.” Look for more details on MEC's success story in the coming weeks.
To learn more about DoubleClick Verification:
- Download the new whitepaper, “5 Keys to Protecting Brand and Budget,” which guides marketers through the process of evaluating a winning verification solution.
- Watch the training videos on Ad Blocking and Active View in Verification, and look out for additional deep dives on the blog in the coming weeks.
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*“US TV Ad Market Still Growing More than Digital Video,” eMarketer, June 12, 2014. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-TV-Ad-Market-Still-Growing-More-than-Digital-Video/1010923
