The mission of DoubleClick Ad Planner, Google's free research and media planning tool formerly named Google Ad Planner, is to provide the deepest, most accurate insight into online audiences possible. This insight helps display advertisers select the best sites for their media plans and drive results for their campaigns.

One of the many data points that DoubleClick Ad Planner provides is site traffic data. In line with Ad Planner's mission, we've improved how we estimate and share this data in order to provide media planners, buyers and researchers with improved data quality and more data visualization options. This builds upon the traffic improvements we made in January of 2009 and is part of our continuous effort to provide trusted insights into online audiences.

This release includes the following two significant improvements:

• Traffic estimates across a number of metrics are now more accurate (Unique user and reach estimates remain the same)
• Direct measured traffic is now included for publishers who opt-ed in their Google Analytics data

Upgrading Site Traffic Estimates

To improve the quality of our site traffic estimates, we have upgraded our traffic estimation model. Our model uses a hybrid methodology that combines sample user data, from various Google products and services, with direct measured site-centric data. The model's direct measured signal is pulled from Google Analytics customer accounts that have chosen to opt-in to sharing their data with Ad Planner. This hybrid approach allows us to use direct measured data to train our traffic estimation models and produce the best estimate for any given site. For more information about how we use opt-in Google Analytics data check out our past blog posts on how Google Analytics data is used in Ad Planner and on replacing traffic estimates with direct measured Google Analytics data.

This latest upgrade improves the accuracy of our estimates by over 10%. We look at a large amount of data and metrics to evaluate our estimates and are continuously working on improving them. We believe our model to be among the more accurate sources of traffic estimation in the industry.

Publishers who would like to complement their site listing with direct measured data are welcome to do so by opt-ing in their Google Analytics data in DoubleClick Ad Planner Publisher Center. We invite publishers who are new to Ad Planner to learn more about using Publisher Center to manage their site profile.

Providing Direct Measured Site Traffic Data

In May 2009, we announced Ad Planner Publisher Center, which made it possible for publishers to opt-in their Google Analytics data to Ad Planner. We've now upgraded site profiles in Ad Planner to display this data in the worldwide charts for Daily Unique Visitors on site profile pages. For publishers who opted-in, their direct measured data is displayed as a solid line in their chart. For example, Gamezhero, a website offering free online games, opted-in their Google Analytics data in June. Here's what their worldwide chart for Daily Unique Visitors looks like now:

In the coming months, we plan to bring direct measured site traffic data to country-level profile views in addition to the worldwide profile views that are currently supported.

Understanding the Data in Ad Planner

To offer additional transparency into how Ad Planner generates its data, we've published a new help document about our methodology. The document provides more details behind how Ad Planner generates site traffic data, in addition to other data, such as demographics, ad information, categories and descriptions.

Getting Started

Give DoubleClick Ad Planner a try at www.google.com/adplanner. We think you'll find it to be a powerful research and media planning tool that makes it easy to find audiences and create well-informed media plans.

Over the past year we've built upon the central role of DoubleClick's technology products within Google's display advertising business. For example, we released our next generation ad serving platform for publishers, we strengthened the ties between media planning, ad serving and reporting, and we opened the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange for business.

As a next step in our ongoing effort to invest in DoubleClick's technology products, we've brought Google Ad Planner under the DoubleClick brand. This better aligns Ad Planner's media research and planning tools with our efforts to enable the end-to-end planning, buying, serving and measurement of display ads across the web. In the future, we plan to bring Ad Planner's capabilities deeper into the campaign management process in innovative and useful ways.

As always, anyone can use Ad Planner whether or not they are a DoubleClick customer. The product remains free and open for everyone. The URL to access Ad Planner remains the same: www.google.com/adplanner.

For more than 10 years, DoubleClick has been focused on helping publishers succeed in the often complex business of selling digital advertising. We have been working hard to provide online media sellers with worry-free ad delivery as well as the tools to grow revenue, improve business efficiency and provide the insights needed to capture new opportunities. During our frequent customer meetings and events, we also took a lot of great notes about the new innovations that publishers told us would help them break through their barriers to growth and take their businesses to the next level.

When Google acquired DoubleClick in March of 2008, we realized that we had the unique opportunity to combine our strengths and make even faster progress towards tackling the complexity of online advertising. Today we announced the release of our next generation ad serving platform, the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google. This upgraded platform combines Google strengths -- such as UI design, algorithms, and processing power -- with DoubleClick's display advertising experience to help publishers more profitably deliver, measure, and optimize the advertising on their websites. This next generation solution also embraces Google's open ecosystem approach to better connect publishers to third-party developers, advertisers, and each other.

We believe these innovations will break down some of the most common barriers to publisher revenue and profit growth:

1. High Costs: Errors and discrepancies, long training times and complex processes drive up the cost of sales
   Google's experienced usability research team invested thousands of hours and spoke with hundreds of end-users to develop a whole new interface designed to help publishers eliminate costly errors, reduce training time and execute campaigns more quickly. The new DFP allows most key trafficking tasks to be accomplished from a single screen and features visualization tools to simplify complex tasks like geo-targeting and rich media campaign setup.

2. Missed Opportunities: Lack of visibility into ad competition and inventory prevents optimal decision-making and causes lost sales
   Thanks to the speed and processing power offered by Google's infrastructure, we can now provide more reporting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from with a new level of granularity. Publishers can now track ad delivery down to the city level, review hourly or daily trends and analyze tens of thousands of their own custom targeting criteria. Add this all up and DoubleClick customers should have an average of 4,000 times more data at their fingertips. We have also used this unprecedented volume of data to improve the accuracy and depth of the new DFP's forecasting engine and availability forecasting reports.

3. Manual Processes: Excessive time and resources required to monitor and optimize ad performance
   We created the first intelligent ad server to help publishers more effectively optimize campaign delivery to save time and strengthen advertiser relationships. Our ad server now receives hints directly from the forecasting engine to adjust delivery in anticipation of changes in site traffic, helping to improve on-time ad delivery with less manual intervention from ad operations teams. DFP's optimization technology gives publishers the opportunity to utilize advanced Google machine learning algorithms to deliver even greater campaign performance lift for advertisers.

4. Limited Access: Closed systems limit customization, access to third party knowledge and effective advertiser relationships
   Publishers can now integrate our ad platform with their business systems easily, or take advantage of a broad new range of third party solutions. The new DFP features a modern and flexible web-services API that allows developers to use any programming language. This public API is supported by a dedicated developer relations team which hosts a developer forum and blog and provides client libraries in a number of programming languages to further support innovation and development. The new API documentation is available today and dozens of third party vendors have already started working on tools based on this new API.

As part of this announcement, we will also be upgrading Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business, a simplified version of the DFP platform designed to meet the needs of growing publishers. This means that the DFP community will be larger than ever, helping to fuel a broader base of knowledge and innovation around our platform. Smaller publishers will also have a seamless upgrade path to the premium DFP solution, designed to meet the needs of the world's largest and most sophisticated media companies.

Lastly, the new DFP integrates with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange's "dynamic allocation" feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their unsold and non-guaranteed inventory to bids from multiple ad networks. The DoubleClick Ad Exchange also features a real-time, impression by impression auction across many buyers including AdWords and the industry's leading ad networks.

Click here to learn more about some of the features and benefits of our next generation platform.

Looking Forward

The new DFP will serve as the foundation for our long-term commitment to advertising technology innovation. We will continue with the rapid release of additional features and modules for this platform throughout 2010 and beyond as we upgrade current DoubleClick publishers.

Finally, we think that an upgraded platform deserves an upgraded look. We're today making some changes to the DoubleClick logos - including typset changes, incorporating our new "by Google" theme, and retiring the "DART" brand. These changes reflect Google's continued investment in DoubleClick's products for agencies, advertisers and online publishers; and the central role of DoubleClick's technology products within Google's display advertising business.

We are very excited to embark on the roll-out of the new DFP platform and look forward to hearing more feedback from our publishers in the weeks and months to come.

You may have read on the Official Google Blog that the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange is open for business.

The new DoubleClick Ad Exchange helps to open the ecosystem and establish a new marketplace for buyers and sellers. For a large publisher managing multiple sales channels and ad networks, the Ad Exchange provides real-time yield management to maximize returns. Participating ad networks and agency networks get access to a large pool of inventory and the controls they need to precisely achieve their marketing goals.

We've been working for some time on rebuilding the Ad Exchange on Google technology to deliver an improved platform, with new features and functionality for our customers. Both sellers (publishers) and buyers (ad networks and agency networks) stand to benefit from the new features we've incorporated.

Key benefits for sellers include:

• Real-time dynamic allocation to maximize yield. Publishers can automatically generate the highest return for every impression, using real-time data and bids to allocate ad space to the sales channel that pays the most at that second.
• Access to many more advertisers. The Ad Exchange offers publishers access to new buyers, including AdWords advertisers, bringing higher quality ads and more competition for ad space on their sites.
• Hassle-free payments managed by Google. We manage the billing and payments from networks so publishers get one monthly payment and minimize having to manage multiple relationships.
• Greater controls. Publishers can decide what advertisers, networks, ad formats, and bid types to allow.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced reporting. We use the simplicity of Google's user design principles to help publishers easily find out how their sites are performing, to help them make the right decisions about their ad space.

Key benefits for buyers include:

• Access to more publishers and more ad space. Hundreds of thousands of AdSense publisher sites are now available on the Ad Exchange to Google-certified ad networks. And as more publishers join the Ad Exchange to take advantage of its yield management capabilities, more high quality inventory is being added all the time.
• Real-time bidder. The Ad Exchange has a new real-time bidder feature that allows buyers to use their own data, optimization and ad serving technologies to bid on their desired inventory on an impression-by-impression basis, choosing only the sites, audiences, or particular type of ad space they want to reach.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced buyer reporting capabilities. Redesigned reports are simple to use and understand, so buyers can easily see how their campaigns are performing to help them make the right decisions.
• More control and precision. Buyers control where their ads appear and don't appear. They can use frequency capping, pacing and other features to precisely control ad delivery.
• Centralized clearing system. Google makes all payments to publishers, reducing complexity with a single billing and payment point. Buyers benefit from managing one business relationship instead of many.
• A new API - Ad networks and agency networks will have access to an API which enables them to integrate their own functionality and systems when working with the Ad Exchange.

We're excited about the open marketplace that the new Ad Exchange creates and believe that it will add substantial value to the display advertising ecosystem.

Over the last several months, we've been working hard to develop a new tool for creative teams who build rich media ads and the media agencies and publishers they work with. The result of our efforts is DoubleClick Studio, a free rich media production and web-based workflow tool designed to streamline development processes for creative teams and to provide more control over turnaround times. We've designed DoubleClick Studio to significantly improve upon the existing Ad Kit, and pave the way for future innovation in rich media.

To learn more about DoubleClick Studio or to fill out a form showing your interest, please visit studio.doubleclick.com. As creative teams migrate to this new tool, users will also be able to log in here, download components for Flash, and access the web-based workflow.

Here are a few of the features we think creative teams will really like:

• Improved workflow that gets preview links into client's hands faster
• A fully searchable archive of work structured by clients, campaigns and creatives
• Integrated QA processes that get errors identified and fixed earlier in the process
• Full range of intuitive Flash components and full APIs in both AS2 and AS3
• Direct upload to DART for Advertisers ensures smooth transition to traffickers for approved creatives

Testimonials

Josh Race of Ogilvy RedWorks, a member of the DoubleClick Studio beta program, has this to say: "DoubleClick Studio has a clean interface and you will never get lost trying to figure out where you are, which is uncommon amongst ad-serving tools. Our developers are all now self-sufficient and not depending on the one guy who knows his way around some wonky interface."

Will Campbell, also a beta member and owner of ARC Media Group, a creative agency based in Southern California, says, "DoubleClick Studio can greatly improve the workflow for any interactive studio working with Flash. From development to getting creatives ready for publishing it has increased our productivity and decreased the amount of steps we take to accomplish different tasks. It really shows that DoubleClick has given a lot of thought into not only increasing productivity on the development side, but also improving the workflow on the administrative side."

Benefits for Media Agencies

Although not direct users of the authoring tool, media agencies will also benefit from DoubleClick Studio and its integration with DART for Advertisers (DFA), enabling agencies to streamline the process for getting rich media campaigns approved and live. With DoubleClick Studio rolling out on a global basis, it is now easier than ever to manage local, regional and global campaigns on a single authoring platform. Here are some of the benefits:

• Direct link between DoubleClick Studio and DART platforms for instant transfer of creative
• Automated creative checks reduce approval time for campaigns to go live
• Preview links include a view into all rich media events that can triggered by the ad for easy testing, review and sign-off

More Details

For a quick tour of DoubleClick Studio, take a look at this short video from Shamim Samadi, product manager for DoubleClick Rich Media.



For those of you who have used DoubleClick Rich Media tools in the past, we will continue to support the Ad Kit though we do not plan to make future upgrades. We also want to note that, while we intend for DoubleClick Studio to make rich media production more efficient for agencies, advertisers and publishers who would like to own the entire process themselves, we remain fully committed to the highest levels of customer service.

To learn more, visit studio.doubleclick.com or contact your DoubleClick representative.

Today we're happy to announce the general availability of DoubleClick Network Builder, a complete toolkit for building and managing networks of partner sites to create new revenue opportunities, expand reach and increase efficiency.

We first introduced this initiative a little over a year ago in response to the audience fragmentation challenge facing many of our publisher clients. This challenge is even more pronounced today. The overall number of websites and blogs has continued to grow in tandem with online audiences, increasingly fragmenting consumer time and attention across more and more online destinations. In response, many publishers continue to leverage their brands to build vertical networks of partner sites to expand their overall reach and grow advertising inventory.

With the potential revenue opportunity that vertical networks offer also comes a number of operational challenges. These include efficiently managing network inventory, partner management, billing and reconciliation and reporting. In our customer surveys, publishers also expressed the need for better inventory forecasting and reporting that was more tightly integrated with the systems they were already using to sell their owned and operated content. Similarly, our ad network customers voiced the need for a better solution to manage their numerous and often complex partner relationships and inventory.

With these needs in mind, we built DoubleClick Network Builder to provide a comprehensive solution for brand-name publishers and ad networks to solve many of the challenges involved in managing networks including:

• Integration with core ad systems - Seamless integration with our DART for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform unifies data and workflow across both owned and operated content as well as partner sites. This streamlines and enhances key sales and operations tasks including inventory packaging, forecasting, reporting, and trafficking. Publishers also benefit from DFP's industry-leading reliability, scalability, and service.
• Efficient network management and control - We designed DoubleClick Network Builder to help increase efficiency and visibility through intuitive partner management, automated tag generation, simplified network inventory setup, and extensive controls for revenue adjustments.
• Managing partner relationships - DoubleClick Network Builder's partner portal allows large publishers and networks to more easily provide the service and transparency needed to retain partners, enabling more rapid and profitable network growth. The partner portal provides partners with the ability to login and view their sites' performance, access detailed reporting, pick-up tags and receive messages from the network.
• Managing complex financial reporting and partner payments - DoubleClick Network Builder's revenue and financial reporting can help publishers drastically simplify the partner payment process and improve overall profitability. DoubleClick Network Builder gives publishers the flexibility to accommodate a number of complex partner financial terms and features a complete set of reconciliation tools including expense deductions and partner payout calculations. The product's detailed revenue reporting makes it easy to monitor the performance of site partners and provide visibility across the network and for each individual partner.

Since October 2008, we have been testing a beta version of DoubleClick Network Builder with a number of premium publishers and networks, including Real Girls Media and InvestingChannel. These publishers realized a number of immediate benefits including significant improvements in the efficiency and accuracy of their network operations, enabling more rapid growth. Today, we're excited to extend these benefits by making DoubleClick Network Builder available to all publishers using our DART for Publishers ad serving platform. If you're a publisher who is ready to start using DoubleClick Network Builder to help create and manage your network, contact your DoubleClick account manager or click here to learn more. If you aren't already a DoubleClick client, please contact us here.

Today, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) announced that over two dozen members plan to introduce larger format ads on their sites by July 2009. They've proposed the following units:

• The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.
• The XXL Box (recommended dimension is 468 wide x 648 tall), which has page-turn functionality with video capability.
• The Pushdown (recommended dimension is 970 wide x 418 tall), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.

For publishers and agencies looking to get a head start, these units can be done with DoubleClick Rich Media today and are easily implemented in either the DART for Publishers or DART for Advertisers ad serving systems.

Check out our latest widget. For publishers looking to boost CPMs by increasing the value of premium inventory and optimizing yield for non-premium inventory, DoubleClick's DART Adapt Valuator lets you determine how much revenue you can generate – or retain – by simply flipping the DART Adapt “On” switch. See how much DART Adapt can be worth to your business – and share the widget with your colleagues!

Yesterday, we announced the launch of DoubleClick In-Stream support for Microsoft's Silverlight 2 player framework. The technology will be used to serve ads for the NBCOlympics.com site. This feature gives our publisher clients the ability to run ads against video on whatever framework they choose, be it Windows Media, RealMedia, Flash or Silverlight 2.

There's lots of coverage on the story. Here's a few to check out:

"Microsoft, Google Play Nice: DoubleClick to Serve Silverlight Ads" --Silicon Alley Insider

"Google's DoubleClick to Tackle Microsoft's Silverlight and the Olympics" --InformationWeek

"Google to Deliver Ads to Online Olympic Video" --CNET News.com

More information on DoubleClick In-Stream is available here.

As part of a series of exciting announcements this week, we officially unveiled our DoubleClick Revenue Center positioning which highlights how our suite of publisher solutions can be used to help our clients generate revenue and reduce operational friction. The DoubleClick Revenue Center includes the DART platform at its core and can be expanded to include optimization, support for rich media, workflow tools, and a dynamic advertising exchange. As part of this announcement we highlighted some significant improvements to some of the Revenue Center's core components.

First, we profiled an expanded set of features for our DART Sales Manager (DSM) workflow and finance management tool that further reinforce DSM's position as a powerful "quote to cash" solution for media sellers of all sizes. We also announced Historical Basis forecasting capabilities for our DART for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform which will help our publisher clients to better manage and monetize seasonal and repeating traffic patterns and account for recent traffic fluctuations. The innovative DART for Publishers Dashboard also entered full production with an expanded catalog of widgets that will further enhance campaign visibility for our DFP clients.

Moving further into 2008, we expect that audience fragmentation will become an increasing challenge for many of our publisher clients. To that end we made an announcement earlier this week regarding the formation of a team dedicated to providing the technology and services to address this issue. The group's initial solution, which we plan to launch in the second half of 2008, will provide a new partner management platform for publishers. This new product will combine tools for network management and financial reporting and a full-featured portal for partner sites. Most exciting for our publisher clients is the fact that we will offer seamless integration with our existing DART ad serving platform. ClickZ ran a great article on Monday highlighting this new initiative.

Yesterday I was excited to announce DoubleClick's support for the Silverlight 2.0 framework at the Microsoft Mix conference in Las Vegas. As I said at the conference, Microsoft and DoubleClick are competitors in many ways, but we share a commitment to enabling advertising in rich video experiences.

DoubleClick In-Stream is our framework for serving, targeting, forecasting and reporting on in-stream video advertisements. Over the past six months there's been a steady increase in publishers looking to move their legacy Windows Media video players over to Silverlight, and in the months prior to the announcement of the 2.0 framework's beta release we worked closely with Microsoft's team to port our technology to this new technology.

We expect to make Silverlight 2.0 support available to clients in Q2 2008.

We are pleased to announce that several major enhancements were rolled out on our DART for Publishers (DFP) platform this past weekend in conjunction with our Winter Release. These included several important tools to help our publisher clients increase efficiency and visibility and drive revenue. Our new Historical Basis forecasting feature will provide a greater level of forecasting flexibility and accuracy by allowing our publisher clients to use up to 15 months of historical data in their forecasts. The popular DFP Dashboard, first announced in fourth quarter, also entered general availability. To help our publishers ensure worry-free ad delivery, we also proactively introduced tools to help combat the recent rise in malware-infected creatives.

On Monday, we made an official announcement regarding the availability of the DART for Publishers (DFP) Dashboard. This new interface leverages the latest Web 2.0 technology to provide greater visibility and flexibility for publishers in managing their advertising operations. The DFP Dashboard is fully integrated with the DART for Publishers platform and is included at no additional cost to all existing DFP users. Fred Aun, at ClickZ wrote a great article that highlights some of the key benefits of this new release.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange recently hosted two roundtable dinners to engage with publishers, agencies and marketers, foster direct dialogue between buyers and sellers of online display media, and learn more about issues on the minds (and budgets) of disparate members of the advertising community. We invited Forrester's Shar VanBoskirk to present. (Visit our Web site to see Shar discussing the future of online media, among other topics).

Among the ideas that Shar presented at the two dinners:

• New media advertising, which now accounts for 8% of total ad spend, will become more important as younger consumers become mainstream. Across all channels (SEM, display, emerging, video, etc.), CAGR through 2012 projects to be 27%, with video at nearly 80% CAGR over the same time period.
• Marketers expect interactive effectiveness to increase, and their budget projections and plans over the next three years reflect this.
• Interactive continues to serve marketer needs more effectively, from selling products and services online to driving Web site traffic to lead-gen and relationship building.
• Exchanges will drive the next generation of sales – what is a relatively new concept now will become a core component of media buying and selling in the future.

There's a good overview of my recent keynote at Streaming Media Europe on the Streaming Media blog. During my presentation I was worried that I was going to be blogged -- and I guess that worry came true!

Our own Rob Victor, Product Manager for Emerging Tech, spoke to About.com on mobile and other subjects. Worth a watch...

Wait, wrong football! We're talking American football from the NFL, with in-stream video ads baked in courtesy of DoubleClick In-Stream. Check out NFL Video.