About us

It looks overwhelming at the beginning, but Display & Video 360 (DV360) brings together the features of Google’s advertising products into one unified platform, including Bid Manager, Studio and Audience Center, for end-to-end campaign management. We have listed our favourite features.

1.) Insights

DV360 provides users with fast access to their campaign health. The Intelligence Panel prevents users from having to dive individually into each insertion order (IO) and line item to diagnose problems with their campaigns. This feature reduces the amount of time users spend communicating with support.

A similar feature to the Intelligence Panel sits on the homepage of DV360. Here, users get a broader view of their entire DV360 activity across all advertisers, specifically highlighting underpacing IOs, underperforming IOs, and any rejected creatives.

2.) Audiences

DV360 provides a unified audience-building experience—all under one user interface. The tool allows us to find demographic, device, and interest (affinity and in-market) information on our first-party audiences. Then and there, custom audiences can be created off the back of this data to be deployed into targeting strategies.

3.) Reporting

The new Instant Reporting feature with open arms, acts as an interactive dashboard that updates in real-time as we input custom dimensions and metrics. While there is a slight limitation in the fact that Instant Reporting can only be used to look at data from the past 30 days, it does serve as a great tool for quick campaign performance checks and simple analysis. This data can be visualised—just like in Excel—by adding bar, line, pie, or scatter charts.

4.) Creative

For those who have a creative team in-house, the new unified creative workspace feature within DV360 is a welcomed addition to the platform. It brings a host of benefits, including the ability for creative teams to pull reports, make real-time updates to creatives for sturdy A/B testing, as well as hosting new formats which will be available to build within the DV360 platform.

5.) Inventory

DV360 is introducing some pretty cool features from an inventory perspective, including more audio partners such as Pandora and talkSPORT, among others. This provides marketers with a great way of reaching those tricky millennials outside the world of social media, and target audiences based on factors such as mood, personality, and more. Elsewhere, we’ll be able to purchase inventory in Waze (the GPS navigation software), which introduces us to the world of in-car activity, as well as the ability to buy Gmail ads programmatically.

As Google Marketing Platform experts we are always deep in the weeds of the platform and happily testing the newest features added, the above are a few favorites but the platform continues to be upgraded regularly. For any DV360 related needs, feel free to contact the team here at sales@bidmath.com

Originally known as DoubleClick Bid Manager, Display & Video 360 (DV360) has been upgraded and rebranded to form part of Google Marketing Platform as a Demand Side Platform that can be used to easily manage end-to-end programmatic campaigns across display, video, TV and audio.

What’s the difference between GDN and DV360?

For most marketers, the very first experience with media buying might take place on Google Display Network ( GDN), via the most used advertising service Google Ads (formerly known as Google Adwords). They may seem equally effective for marketers looking to buy digital advertising, however, the two platforms are entirely different from each other based on the available features and capabilities each uniquely offered to digital marketers.

Three key points to remember:

• Inventory: Both GDN and DV360 access Google Exchange Adex, where the vast majority of GDN’s inventory is only Adex. In contrast, DV360 can access AdX plus other non-Google exchanges such as AppNexus and OpenX (approx. 80 plus exchanges). By using DV360, you can access more inventory, of a higher quality = better performance.
• Deal Type: In GDN you buy ad space through the open auction. DV360 allows advertisers to leverage direct deals bought programmatically as preferred deals, private auctions, and guaranteed deals. Guaranteed deals are a good option, they give access to premium content and automate the process.
• Creative Formats: While GDN has the usual creative formats such as text, image, rich media, and video, DV360 is superior because it has many more formats including Native (both Display and Video), High Impact (e.g. interstitials, roadblocks), and Emerging Media such as audio ads. Think about banner blindness.
• Targeting: Both GDN and DV360 have Audience and Content targeting capabilities, however, DV360 has additional targeting capabilities such as Technology Targeting. With more targeting options, there are more chances for you to reach the exact target audience who will respond to your marketing efforts.
• First- and third-party data: Both platforms allow you to use first-party data to create audience lists. Furthermore, audience lists in DV360 are a perfect example of synergies across the Google stack: allowing you to share data across the platforms, Google Ads, Google Ad Manager, Campaign Manager, Display & Video 360, and Google Analytics 360.

However, the core difference isn’t the inventory or features, it’s the bidding algorithms and pricing model: DV360 charges on a CPM model and takes a transparent platform fee as a % of media spend on top of the CPM; While GDN through Adwords works on a CPC model like Search. There is a margin on top of GDN inventory, however, it isn't transparent and is wrapped up in the overall CPC fee advertisers pay. Because of this, many post-click performance advertisers perform better on the GDN because the risk of showing a lot of impressions but driving few clicks is mitigated on GDN.

In short, if you have the expertise – either in-house or an agency partner, then use DV360. It's a more powerful platform with access to premium inventory and equipped with more levers to truly push your programmatic goals.

If you are an advertiser looking to switch and upgrade from GDN to DV360 but don’t know where to start then contact us for more information on the available benefits at sales@bidmath.com

Pushing standard analytics platforms to new extremes is what we are good at and as our campaigns become even more complex, so do our measurement requirements. Today BigQuery has become an integral part of the ecosystem that can unlock data analysis and reporting like never before.

There are limitations within Google Analytics 360 and we believe the integration with BigQuery allows users to further enhance the standard GA360 capabilities and deliver a link between web analytics and various other third-party data sources. BigQuery is a powerful tool when operated correctly and if you are familiar with GA360 we believe the connection between the two deliver a few use cases and good reasons to try it out.

Firstly, what is BigQuery?

BigQuery is a data warehouse that can be found within the Google Cloud Platform or GCP console, it was specifically developed to analyze large data sets using super-fast SQL queries - we mentioned super-fast because it leverages the processing power of Google’s infrastructure. 

Benefit 1: Machine Learning Algorithms 

Leveraging programming languages and prepackaged functions within BigQuery we have the ability to take raw data and run predictive analytics, customer segmentation and customer lifetime value models. For example, we can create a predictive model based on past customer data to better optimize our performance campaigns. Finally, we remove the manual guesswork from serving impressions and start using 1st party data to assign values based on conversion probability.

Benefit 2: Old data, queried today

It's frustrating when you leverage new technology and the migration process glitches, losing all your insights, testing and data analytics. Fortunately, you have the option to import the previous 13 months of Google Analytics 360 into BigQuery, which means you can pull in more than 1 year of sales transactions into BigQuery instantly and start advanced queries without having to start again.

Benefit 3: Same data set but deeper

Google Analytics can easily measure and visualize the revenue driven through mobile devices, but what if you wanted to know the average revenue for a specific product at a user level for the past 6 months - this would no doubt be harder to answer and more of a job for BigQuery.

Benefit 4: Easier visualization of data

Due to the number of integrations available, including the advent and continuous improvement of Google Data Studio, building and visualizing all-round analytics data has never been easier. If you have followed Benefit 4, then you are already steps ahead of pulling all your data sources in one place. Google Data Studio is free and we would always recommend leveraging it with a different view for each type of user whether it is a member of the board who wants the topline view or the people in charge of campaign optimization.

Benefit 5: The single source of truth, improved.

Since BigQuery is a data warehouse it can store all of your data, however, you can bring in various other data sources such as CRM data with native integrations and develop a unique identifier for each customer. For the first time, you will be able to measure true lifetime value based on your known and previously unknown web visitors by combining your offline, online and marketing data.

At Bidmath, we are experts in BigQuery and strongly believe whatever data challenges you have, the means to get to that answer will be through leveraging BigQuery.  Whether it’s a CRM integration, a new way to identify unknown users or you're tempted to see your true customer lifetime value, we are here to help you on your data journey.

For more information, please contact sales@bidmath.com

Image credit