Mountain View, California — Google just yesterday released a revamped version of its ad-serving platform DoubleClick for Publishers, with a revived interface, more statistics, improved ad-delivery algorithms and a new API for developers, which the company claims should demonstrate its commitment to ad management products and to display advertising in general, the company said Monday.
“For the past few years, we have been investing greatly in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving platform and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange – aimed at helping online publishers generate the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both,” says Vice President of Product Management Neal Mohan.
For major online publishers, the redesigned platform improves upon the existing DART for Publishers, which is for big online publishers and is now called DoubleClick for Publishers, and upon Google Ad Manager, designed for small publishers and renewed DFP Small Business — including for social networks and online communities, and is aimed to facilitate Web publishers automate, optimize, monitor and manage the process of serving up display ads on their Web sites. It also incorporates a public API that lets site owners integrate their first- and third-party apps with the DFP system.
“We will be upgrading current DART for Publishers publishers to DoubleClick for Publishers over the next year as we continue to incorporate features and modules, and we will be moving Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business in the coming weeks,” wrote Mohan, in an official blog.
“There is nothing new and the basics are unchanged,” he said. “It is just that we have now significantly upgraded the two key elements…that speak to each other to make dynamic allocation possible.”
Finally, in addition to the feature alterations, Google has also fine-tuned the product’s name and logo — doing away with the “DART” brand and incorporating a “by Google” tagline.
In a statement, Google said the fine-tunings reflect “the central role of DoubleClick’s technology products within Google’s display advertising business.”
Perhaps more importantly — from Google’s viewpoint anyway — the DFP upgrades mean it will perform better with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which launched officially last year. Publishers can use a “dynamic allocation” feature that exposes their inventory to numerous ad networks on the exchange. The latest release contains a new interface, revived to save users time and reduce errors, and more detailed reporting/forecasting data. Google says it has “sophisticated algorithms” that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
“We see great opportunity to ameliorate ad serving even further by combining Google’s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick’s display advertising and ad serving experience,” Mohan, wrote in a blog post. “Since we acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, our engineering and product teams have been working with online publishers to tackle the obstacles that prevent them from maximizing revenues from their websites.”
While Google commands major part of the search advertising market and has built its empire on its success in that arena of the online ad market, the company is attempting to widen its revenue stream into other ad formats and other markets altogether like enterprise software.
A Google spokesperson noted the dynamic allocation feature existed previously, but with the revamp of both DFP and the ad exchange, Google hopes it will be adopted more widely.
All Google Ad Manager publisher accounts will soon be automatically upgraded to DFP Small Business.