Tag: display ads

Google Launches Conversions API For DoubleClick To Improve Offline Attribution

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google has introduced a Conversions API for its display ad network DoubleClick, allowing advertisers to connect offline activities like in-store purchases and phone bookings to their online campaigns. Advertisers can integrate offline customer data through Google-approved third-party partners, which include Oracle Data Cloud, Neustar, and LiveRamp.

What Brands Should Do
Taking advantage of this new API, DoubleClick advertisers can leverage attribution insights to adjust their campaigns, such as excluding existing customers from a campaign focusing on acquiring new customers, retarget customers who have placed a call but didn’t make a purchase, or offer discounts to frequent store visitors.

While still a relatively novel practice, offline attribution has quickly become a crucial part of digital ad measurement, with major players in digital advertising such as Facebook and Snapchat recently launching their own offline attribution tools to court advertisers. Brands should take a data-driven approach toward their digital marketing efforts and take note of new tools as they become available.

 

Source: DoubleClick Advertiser Blog

 

New York Times To Improve Banner Ads With New Dynamic Ad Unit

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The New York Times says it is moving away from standard banner ads and replacing them with a proprietary display ad format called Flex Frame. Designed to be more “native” on its website, the new format will appear along the top of webpages, in between paragraphs, and in feeds of content elsewhere on the site. The horizontal display ad unit will dynamically adjust in size and layout across different devices and window sizes.

What Brands Should Do
The Times is commendable in its efforts to modernize its display ad business and improve the experience for users and effectiveness for marketers. This initiative offers an example of how publishers are trying to deal with the rise of ad-blocker usage by improving the ad experience and adopting new ad formats like this helps brands better engage audiences, and brand marketers should be aware of new ad products available and work with publishers to make sure their ads are being delivered in a consumer-friendly way.

For more information on how brands can deal with the increasing consumer aversion toward ads, check out the Ad Avoidance section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Wall Street Journal

 

Spotify Extends Full-Screen Display Ads To Mobile

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Spotify is bringing its full-screen desktop display ads to mobile in an attempt to grab more attention of mobile users. Starting today, the music streaming service is offering a new mobile ad unit dubbed Overlay Mobile, which allows advertisers to buy display ads for both iOS and Android mobile devices. Spotify says this new ad unit provides 100% viewability, as it serves as the “welcome back” ad and only appears when a user has the app open.

What Brands Need To Do
This new mobile ad product shows that Spotify is following its audience, as 65% of global streams are now on mobile devices. The streaming service shared earlier today that it now has 30 million paying subscribers out of a total of over 75 million active users, which leaves around 45 million Spotify users on the ad-supported free tier. If your brand wants to reach those Spotify listeners on mobile, this new ad unit should provide an effective way to do so.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image courtesy of Spotify for Brands

Instagram Display Ad Sales Soon To Overtake Google And Twitter

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
According to a new eMarketer report, Instagram is set to generate $2.81 billion in ad sales by 2017, making it bigger than Google and Twitter in terms of U.S. display ad sales. Such an optimistic projection is no doubt fueled by Instagram’s efforts in making its platform more brand-friendly in the past few months, including debuting new “Carousel” multi-photo ad unit with clickable links, launching its first official content vertical, and retooling its search and explore page to offer brands more ad opportunities. Its inherently visual platform also grants brands a natural environment for native ads, while its parent company Facebook presumably provides a strong data support for targeting and measurements.

What Brands Should Do
With the increasing usage of ad-blocking extension, we have long advised brands to look into native advertising to bypass the blocking for higher engagements and better viewability. In this ever-shifting market landscape, quickly adopting emerging ad platforms is becoming increasingly important for brands of all types.

 

Source: AdWeek

Standards Stand-off Over Online Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

standoffEarlier this year, MSNBC .com President Charles Tillinghast said that while high end video, custom brand units, and low end contextually targeted text links maintained steady sales volume, the trouble was in the middle of the market: Traditional display ads. These original online ad units were standardized by the IAB and helped drive the explosive growth of the online ad industry. Tillinghast says the proliferation of ad networks has created over supply of inventory and commoditized publisher’s display ads. To counter this, he said MSNBC.com would create additional nonstandard ads with more sophisticated interactivity and targeting that would not be made available to ad networks. To that end, the Online Publishers Association has announced a month later standards for new, large ad formats that have started to appear on member sites. Saul Hansell of The New York Times conveniently summed this up: “When the going gets tough, the ads get bigger.” Continue reading “Standards Stand-off Over Online Ads”