TBM BLOG
DV360: Your Questions Answered
Google has combined the DoubleClick advertiser products and the Google Analytics Manager 360 Suite under a single brand: Google Marketing Platform, which now includes DV360. This post will give you an overview of DV360, highlight some features that make it stand out in a crowded Demand Side Platform (DSP) marketplace and answer any questions you may have.
What is DV360 Google?
The Google Marketing Platform and DoubleClick Bid Campaign Manager have been unified to become DV360.
DV360 is structured around five integrated modules that simplify the campaign management process: Campaigns, Audiences, Creatives, Inventory, and Insights. This format helps deliver a faster, more innovative digital marketing solution. It does this by providing media buyers with the tools and reporting needed for successful campaign optimisation.
What does DV360 stand for?
Display & Video 360 (DV360). This single, integrated tool helps creative, data, and media teams work together to execute end-to-end digital media campaigns.
DV360 vs Google Ads: What’s the difference?
The Google Display Ads (GDA) is Google’s ad network accessed via Google Ads. Google Ads only allows purchased display campaigns to run in their Google Display Network (GDN). However, the Google Display Network comprises of more than 2 million websites, videos, and apps where your Google Ads can appear. Therefore, Google Ads is better suited for smaller advertisers who do not have a big budget for programmatic display advertising.
DV360 is Google’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) which provides the tools that allow media buying and bidding from advertisers directly from publishers or ad exchanges outside of Google’s network.
Why DV360 over Google Ads?
There are serval differences between the DV360 and Google Ads. Let’s compare the two.
Third-party data
Google Ads only offers Google’s own targeting data. In comparison, DV360 gives access to many different third-party providers, enabling audience targeting at a deeper level.
Targeting
You can target campaigns more extensively with DV360 than Google Ads. For example, DV360 allows you to determine what percentage of the ad impressions should display to page visitors.
Bidding
DV360 provides more algorithmic automated machine buying capabilities than Google Ads. In addition, DV360 allows for independent optimisation of your manual purchases. The automatic bidding of DV360 automatically adjusts your bid based on your set performance goals.
Deals
Unfortunately, Google Ads doesn’t offer the opportunity to take advantage of any publisher deals, even with publishers using the Google Display Network. DV360, however, provides the ability to create deals with publishers. For example, you can strike a deal to access lower or fixed ad display prices, pre-purchase before the general auction, or access ad inventory that is not sold in the open auction.
Reach
Google Ads’ reach is limited to just the Google Display Network. However, as DV360 has access to several exchanges, it reaches more users across a wider range of sites. As a result, using DV360 ensures that your ads appear on the most relevant content, reaching more of your targeted audience.
Creatives
Creative options vary across the two platforms. For example, Google Ads allows both text, image, and video ads. Whereas DV360 creative allows for dynamic remarketing and prospecting using customisable XML or Google Doc feeds. This means you can tailor your messaging, image, and ensure you are showing the most up-to-date product information from your website.
Video
You can purchase video ads on YouTube on both Google Ads and DV360. The video formats accepted by both are in-stream, in-search, and in-display. In addition to YouTube, DV360 allows you to purchase video inventory from over 35 ad auctions at affordable CPM prices and a more extensive selection of premium sites.
What are the benefits of DV360?
The most significant benefit of DV360 as a digital marketing tool is its efficiency, as it offers access to a myriad of different publishers all within one platform. This eliminates the need to work directly with publishers on a one-to-one basis as you can access, manage, and report on all inventory within one place.
Other benefits of DV360 include:
- Allows more transparency and gives you more control: Know precisely where your Google ads are running and how your budget is spent across campaigns.
- Gives access to insights faster: The built-in intelligence of DV360 allows for automated bidding and optimisation. In addition, it is data-driven and quickly filters out any insights or recommendations addressing any issues stopping campaigns from reaching targets.
- Smoother collaboration across teams: It’s easier to share campaign audience data and insights, creatives, and analytics to teams across different disciplines.
How does DV360 work?
DV306 is used to buy and run programmatic guaranteed advertising. Advertisers set preferences to target specific audiences, determine how much to spend and what time of day to display ads. It offers a single tool for planning campaigns, designing, managing creativity, organising and applying audience data, finding, buying inventory, and measuring and optimising campaigns. Let’s take a closer look.
campaigns
This is where you create, optimise, and monitor campaigns, line items, and insertion orders. You will also see new views that help you organise every campaign component. This includes views that combine insertion orders, line items, and creatives for easier QA checks.
Audience
You can manage your audience alongside your DV360 campaign. It has three new features:
- Audience profile: Analyse your audiences based on all available first-party, third-party, and Google data, and create new combined audiences across data sets.
- Activity-based audience builder: This allows you to build audiences based on your campaign activity in DV360.
- Audience-based frequency capping: Set frequency caps across audiences based on all impression exposures.
Creatives
The Creatives module allows you to tie your creative strategy to your data and media plan. In addition, it offers a workspace for your entire creative team within DV360. Creative features that help you build and manage creatives include:
- Ad Canvas. Design ads and see real-time previews.
- Format Gallery. Discover and test new innovative formats on Ad Canvas and browse Google Web Designer customisable templates.
- Data-driven creatives. Create and deliver different variations of your ad to specific audience groups.
DV360 allows you to create Creative user roles, so your entire creative team can collaborate within the DV360 platform. Learn more here.
The below table shows what creatives can and can’t do.
Inventory
Here, you can discover and manage high-quality inventory and explore new opportunities in the marketplace and negotiate deals.
Insights
Here you will see all the campaign metrics you need. DV360 uses these insights to get instant reporting that allows you to quickly access data within DV360 without waiting for reports to export.
DV360 Account-wide features
You’ll see additional account-wide features throughout your account, including:
- Google Marketing Platform: You’ll see the new Google Marketing Platform features linked from the new standard product switcher.
- Overview page: Quickly navigate to the things that matter the most to you, see essential alerts, and recently viewed items specific to your DV360 user account.
- The Intelligence Panel. See performance health alerts and optimisation suggestions for campaigns and insertion orders.
How to create a DV360 account
Bid Manager accounts automatically became a Display & Video 360 account as of July 24, 2018. See how to create an advertiser here.
What are the DV360 creative ad specs?
Supported file types for DV360 include:
Image creatives, JPEG, GIF, and PNG.
HTML5 creatives: HTML5 creatives must be compressed in a ZIP file. However, you can include the following file types inside an HTML5 ZIP file:
- HTML/Text: HTML, HTM, CSS, JS
- Images: JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, SVG
- Fonts: DFONT, EOT, OTF, TTE, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2
See full guidelines for display creatives here.
What creative types can you use on DV360?
DV360 allows for high-quality creatives, for example, rich media, interactive ads, and high impact formats. It also allows for greater use of dynamic ads for 1-to-1 remarketing.
DV360 creative types you can use include:
- Image
- HTML5
- Third-Party Tag
- Native
- YouTube
- Video
- Audio
What is a DV360 campaign?
A DV360 campaign groups related insertion orders with a common business goal. Within the campaign, you can:
- Track campaign goals.
- Put a Frequency cap in place across multiple insertion orders.
- Set default targeting for multiple insertion orders and line items.
- Report across all the insertion orders in the campaign.
DV360 campaigns have one of the following statuses:
- Active campaigns that are eligible for serving. The campaign’s insertion orders can spend and serve creatives via any active line items associated with the insertion order.
- Paused campaigns aren’t eligible for serving, even if any insertion orders and line items associated with the campaign are active.
- Archived campaigns are automatically paused and filtered from view.
- Completed campaigns have reached their end date. As the campaign flight dates don’t affect serving, completed campaigns may still serve if their line items and insertion orders are active.
Want to know more about starting a DV360 campaign? See how to create a campaign here.
How much does DV360 cost?
As DV360 is part of the Google Marketing Platform, it costs businesses to run. However, advertisers get complete transparency of how costs are split as fees for the platform and tracking are included in the media spend budgets.
Should you be using DV360?
DV60 brings together ad content, data, and media for powerful, closed-loop campaigns. However, as it is relatively new, you will need extra expertise and knowledge due to the complexity and more intricate processes and systems.
If you want to build brand awareness, DV360 may be the option for you. The platform enables better control over audiences and placements and has strong brand safety settings and more advanced creative possibilities. As a result, it is a great choice to build brand awareness.
So, should you be using DV360? Of course, it all depends on your advertising strategy but how you use DV360 is up to you. You could even adopt a dual-platform approach using DV360 alongside GDA, giving you the best of both worlds in one display strategy. DV360 is also more suited for larger executive businesses with a bigger advertising budget.
In the coming weeks, we will be taking a closer look at what DV360 means for creatives. Keep an eye on our blog for more details.
If you want to know more about using DV360 contact Google here. However, if you want to talk about creating outstanding digital display campaigns, contact TBM today!