DoubleClick Metrics Give Publishers Trending Data
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, May 29, 2012
Google introduced publisher metrics and benchmark data identifying trends in display advertising to answer questions behind industry assumptions on real-time bidding, mobile, video, display and more. The Publisher Edition became the first in a series of publications looking at aggregate global data collected from across the company's display advertising products.
The aggregate data from across DoubleClick Ad Exchange, DoubleClick for Publishers, and Google AdSense platforms analyze categories, such as the rise and the fall of CPMs, based on a variety of verticals and regions, seasonal sell-through rates, and mobile and video impressions.
The goal is to provide insight into the overall publisher landscape, focused on trends in the display business.
For instance, Google expects advertisers to continue investments in RTB in 2012. The amount spent on the Ad Exchange through RTB rose from 58% at the end of 2010 to 72% by the end of 2011. The company attributes the increase in part to the average 188% revenue lift in the U.S. when the Ad Exchange wins the auction compared with fixed up-front sales of nonguaranteed display advertising.
Google also has been monitoring the growth of Web ad impressions globally for both desktop and mobile.
For mobile, the data tries to identify why some publisher verticals grow faster than others. Ad impressions on the Ad Exchange and AdSense platforms rose 250% during Q3 and Q4 2011 on mobile. Globally, all publisher verticals, with the exception of Travel, experienced double-digit growth in Q4. The strongest vertical market in mobile was Shopping, with 69% growth, followed by Food & Drink at 61%.
Video impressions also grew nearly 70% during the second half of 2011 across the DFP video platform. The average video ad midpoint and completion rates came in at 79% and 72%, respectively. About 51% of video ads run between 15 and 30 seconds long, with 36% running more than 30 seconds, and only 13% running less than 15 seconds.
Google also saw a 175% rise in impressions on the 640 x 360 ad unit that fits wide-screen players, and a decrease in standard aspect-ratio video player impressions.
It has been assumed that sell-through rates rise at year's end. New metrics suggest global publisher sell-through rates on average rose from 36% to 42% in the fourth quarter, compared with the year. Overall, according to Google's report, publishers sold more unreserved than reserved impressions last year, and all regions exhibited similar compositions in channel mix.
Although reserved ad inventory sold by the publisher's sales team and unreserved impressions rose incrementally each quarter, reserved impressions grew at a faster rate in the fourth quarter of the year: 64% in Q1 2011, 62% in Q2, 62% in Q3, and 58% in Q4 for unreserved. Compare that with 36% in Q1 2011, 38% in Q2, 38% in Q3, and 42% in Q4 for reserved.
Really interesting article and but no comments above.
One additional thing that definitely worth considering is the issue with tracking time on pages and the option Google offers in the way of their Event Tracking API to correct this by capturing an event every 10 seconds that someone spends on a page. By implementing this (there are numerous articles and blogs on how to do this) there are two major advantages:-
* It actually limits bounce rates to anyone who truly bounces from the site (i.e. arrives and leaves straight away as they are no longer a bounce if they are there for greater than 10 seconds) - A separate goal can always be created to show anyone who only views a single page if you want to be able to see both metrics
* The time on page is much more accurate irrespective of whether it is the first or last page they view on the website. This means you can start to look at people who will have read the entire article versus those skim reading or simply bypassing the page all together
The only issue that is occasionally hit is that customers who leave their browsers option can seem to spend hours upon hours on a given page. This can be resolved with the help of a clever developer to either set it to only continue to fire when the tab / window is being viewed or to stop capturing the event data after x. iterations...
Also we have another problems. For example:
I searched in Google Scholar for a couple articles published in my company’s journals, and I found more than one instance where our article was conflated either with the prepress version in arXiv, or with another article by the same author, with a similar title, published in a different journal. It makes me wonder if every time one of those articles is cited, Scholar Metrics counts it as a citation of the version in arXiv, rather than counting it towards our journal’s h-index.
Similarly, Scholar Metrics only ranks journals that have published 100 or more articles in a five-year period. One of our journals is nowhere to be found in Scholar Metrics, even though it has published 110 articles in that time period. A search in Google Scholar for the journal’s title turns up 70-odd articles. But when I did a search for the abbreviated title of the journal in Google Scholar, I found the missing 30-something articles. So is Google Scholar Metrics smart enough to combine the citations attributed to the journal’s full title and it’s abbreviated title? I’m not sure.
Hi Laurie!
Great post and some good pointers for people getting to grips with using data to help them focus their efforts on what adds most value to the business.
Another thing to look at would be visitor flow from page to page - Analytics has a very good visual representation of this. If you find out where most of your visitors are dropping off it can tell you which pages need to be improved OR if visitors on those pages have trouble finding their way to the next step which ultimately leads to the conversion page.
To my mind Google has one big edge, though: Nearly all of the major Web publishers already use DoubleClick’s services. Ad agencies hope those publishers, whose large audiences they find attractive, will make more of their premium ad space on frequently visited pages available on DoubleClick’s exchange. To prime the exchange pump, Google is making ad space on hundreds of thousands of other sites on its Content Network, where it already places search ads, available through the exchange. “They have an enormous advertising base that will make the marketplace liquid,” says Marc Goldberg, vice-president for business development at About.com, a site that offers experts on a wide range of topics, owned by the New York Times Co. (NYT).