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Articles Digital Marketing

How to setup an ad-unit in DoubleClick for Publishers SB

DoubleClick for publishers adunit

One thing I would advise to you before you start creating any ad-unit, first do your planning. Creating ad-units are the easy part.

1. Planning your site inventory

Why do you need to do this, well, if you are planning to sell advertisement space on your website, you will need to know or at least tell your advertisers what inventory you have available to sell.

What is inventory? Inventory simply put, is any open space on a page you are prepared to make available for advertising. It doesn’t stop there, if your site consists of multiple sections or categories one will need to structure your ad-units in such a way to mirror your website structure.

In the end it will make it easier for you to sell ad space.

The best way to go about planning your site inventory, use Microsoft Excel. Start adding all your website sections and the size ads for each section you want to display.

Once you have a structure you can start with your ad-unit creation in DFP.

2. Creating an Ad-Unit

You can create ad-units in 2 different ways. Manually in DFP UI, or you can make use of the import feature. I will show you both ways, but if you have done your planning up-front, it would be easier for you to make use of you sheet you have already setup.

2.1 Creating an ad-unit in DFP UI

  1. Click the Inventory tab.
  2. Click New ad unit.
  3. Enter a Code, which is used to identify the ad unit in the associated ad tag. (I will explain to you in another article what an ad tag is).
  4. Enter a Name for the ad unit. You can change the name at any time. (Please take a look at the tips section below for some guidance on giving ad-unit names)
  5. Set the Sizes for the ad unit.
  6. Select Fixed size and then enter the size of the creatives the ad unit can host. You can enter multiple sizes if you want to use the same ad unit for multiple ad slots or across different platforms with different sizes, such as mobile and desktop.
  7. Define a target window, which identifies the browser window where an ad’s landing page will open. This value is set as the target attribute of the ad link.
  8. Click Add a labeling rule under Ad unit frequency caps to choose the number of impressions to be shown to each user per time period for the creatives that share the label.
  9. Set a refresh rate to determine how often a new ad impression is generated on a mobile app. If you select Refresh rate in seconds, DFP will auto-populate a value of 60, which you can change to 30 – 120 seconds.
  10. Click Save.

2.2 Creating an ad-unit/s with csv import feature

  1. Click the Inventory tab.
  2. Click Bulk upload new ad units.
  3. Click Download sample CSV file to download a file that you can use to define your ad units. Don’t change the column order or the column headings.
  4. Open the CSV file and make changes based on the examples and the descriptions in the tables below. When you’re done, save the CSV file.
  5. Click Choose File to find your CSV file.
  6. Click Upload and validate.
  7. Verify that the ad unit settings are correct.
  8. Click Confirm upload to upload the new ad units.
  9. The values for each column must follow the same formatting rules as those fields when you create an ad unit directly in DFP.

To read more about creating ad-units in DFP, please take a look at this article on DFP support.

Tips when creating ad-units

  • Often publishers choose to use codes that identify the ad unit’s location. For example, you might use the format SiteName_Section_SubSection_Location_PagePosition, and a specific ad unit code might be ABCPublisher_News_International_RightSidebarTop.
  • Only letters, numbers, underscores, hyphens, periods, asterisks, forward slashes, backslashes, exclamations, left angle brackets, right angle brackets, colons and parentheses are allowed.
  • Ad unit codes can be up to 100 characters in length.
  • Ad unit codes are not case-sensitive.
  • Associate the ad unit with one or more placements by clicking Add next to the appropriate placements.
  • If you’d like to maximize the revenue of unsold and non-guaranteed inventory with AdSense, select the Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense checkbox. (If all ad units in your network are enabled for AdSense by default, the AdSense inventory settings field will display Enabled.)
  • Ad units enabled for AdSense will only compete with AdSense if certain criteria are met; AdSense competition doesn’t work for ad units that are placed in mobile apps.
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Articles Digital Marketing

DoubleClick For Publishers Features Your Boss Wants To Know About

DoubleClick for Publishers Delivery page

You are suggesting to your boss that you switch over to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP ) as the companies new ad serving platform. Your boss wants to know about a few details of DoubleClick for Publishers before he decides to make the switch.

In this article I will take you through the key features why your boss will need to say yes to DoubleClick for Publishers small business.

1. Define your site’s ad inventory

DoubleClick for Publishers inventory managementWith DFP you can define inventory at granular levels to match how you sell your site’s , web, mobile or app ad inventory. This allows you to expand your array of sales opportunities.

DFP also made is very simple to generate tags which you can place on your website to create a link between your site and DFP.

2. Precisely target your ads

DoubleClick for Publishers Ad targetingWith DoubleClick for Publishers you can control when, where and to whom you want to serve a specific ad on your website. How do you do this you ask?

It’s very simple, DFP has a very advanced set of tools that enables to to schedule your direct sold ads, you can set a frequency cap on each ad so that you can limit the amount of times the ads displays to the same user.

With DFP you have the option of setting up campaigns with various pricing models for ex. cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM), cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-day (CPD).

DFP  has advanced targeting built in which will allow you to serve ads to a user’s geography, bandwidth, browser, browser language, operating system, domain and if that is not enough you can set your ads to run only during specific hours or days.

DFP supports multiple format creative and it has a few built-in creative types to choose from, which makes it very easy for a campaign manager to upload creatives into DFP.

3. Selling and maximize revenue

DoubleClick for Publishers adsenseThere are 2 ways within DFP you can look how much inventory you have available to sell to your advertisers to avoid overbooking and underselling. Both ways are in real time.

With DFP you have the option of maximizing your revenue once you enable real-time competing between Google AdSense, third-party ad networks, and other non-guaranteed advertisers for any inventory on your website.

DFP Small Business will optimize your revenue by automatically selecting the highest paying ad.

4. Measure performance

DoubleClick for Publishers reportingDFP’s reporting tool is fast and flexible. It allows you to optimize campaign delivery and uncover new opportunities.
You have the option of running reports ad-hoc or you can even schedule reports on a daily, weekly or even monthly. That is not all, you can also share reports with internal stakeholders and advertisers.

It’s very easy to customize reports or if you are not sure how to use the reporting tool at first, there are built-in reports which you can make use of.

Feel confident in DFP Small Business’ ad impression measurement process, accredited by the MRC to be fully compliant with Interactive Advertising Bureau standards.

5. Lots more…

If the above doesn’t sell it to your boss, you can keep these last few points for lasts:

  • You can serve video ads.
  • You can serve ads on mobile web and apps.
  • It’s free to use the system, yes that is correct, it’s free up to 90 million impressions monthly. If you think you will be serving more that 90 million impressions monthly you might need to upgrade to the premium version which opens up even more possibilities and opportunities.
  • It’s powered, updated and supported by Google.

I’m sure your boss will love it if you tell him or her about all the advantages and if you need someone to come into your office to tell you more about the features or even help you getting it setup on your websites, you can contact me via my website.

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Digital Marketing

Getting started with DoubleClick for Publishers SB

DoubleClick for Publishers

Getting started with DoubleClick for Publishers small business is not that difficult. In this article I will explain to you the steps you need to follow on how to create your own DFP small business account.

Introduction to DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

What is DFP and why should you use it? Are you a publisher or you own your own blog? Is your website busy growing in audience? Are you looking at increasing your revenue? DFP is your answer.

DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business is a free ad management tool that helps you as a publisher sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your digital ad inventory.

1. Step one – Create an Google Adsense account

adsenseYou need to signup for a Google AdSense account as a default advertising service first before you can make use of DFP.

To signup for Adsense you need to visit http://google.com/adsense.

Adsense sigup process

  1. First step, you need to click on the green “sign up now button” and follow each step.
  2. You need to either login with an existing Google account or you need to create one first.
  3. Once you are signed in you need to follow the rest of the steps.
  4. After you submitted your request to Google, Google will review your submission and they will be in contact with you once they approved your submission.

2. Step two – Create a DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business account

You can continue to browse to https://www.google.com/dfp/ once Google approved your Adsense account. You will need to log into your Google account first before you can continue to log into DFP. Once you are logged in you will see the DFP dashboard.

As you can see, a few easy steps to create your Adsesne and DFP accounts.

I will be writing more about DoubleClick so please visit again and you might see more articles on Doubleclick.

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About Me

Welcome to my website

welcome

Welcome, I’m Eric de Kock. I have been working in multiple industries since I started my career. I started in the video industry moved on to print then web and now digital marketing.

I have a passion for technology, I love to create and work with it and Google is my friend.

Take some time to go through my portfolio and if you have any questions for me or you would like to connect with me, feel free to send me a message, give me a call or link with me on any social platform you feel like.

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Portfolio Websites

Wheels24 Project

Wheels24 Project

The Wheels24 Project was my first big project at 24.com while I was Senior Website Designer. I had to build the html and css structure from the ground up.

That time there was no Bootstrap or Foundation to help me out. Everything was hand coded. We normally code the flat html, css and jquery first of the following pages:

  • homepage
  • category page
  • article page
  • gallery

I had to make sure that I code each component so that it can work on it’s own, no matter where it lived on the site and making sure that styles do not break.

Once I finish with one page I hand it over to the back end developer so that they can do their magic and plugin the cms controls.

Once they have done that I go back into the project and make sure that the styles are still working as expected.

You can have a look at the site here.

 

 

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Portfolio Websites

Competition pages rebuild

Competition pages rebuild

Our commercial team at 24.com approached me asking if we can rebuild our competition pages so that user can enter competitions on their mobiles too. My first thought was to make it responsive.

At that stage Twitter Bootstrap 3 was released and I saw this as the perfect opportunity to make use of Bootstrap. I looked at all the elements that was required and which devices we should be supporting.

Because we did so many competitions I had to come up with a plan how I can build the template so that it can be easily styled for other new competitions and again I thought of using SASS and building it in PHP.

It took me about a day to complete the project and also to test it. Luckily we had a mobile lab setup which made the testing much easier for me. We also used software called Ghostlab which helped speed up the process.

After completing this project I had to get it ready for a Nigeria competition. So I had to make sure that it worked on very low end devices. It was a big success as we had a lot more entries from this market than ever before.

Link: https://ericdekock.com/mywork/24com/competitions/index.php

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Portfolio Websites

Micro-Sites and Animations

Micro-Sites and Animations

We created Micro-Sites and Animations for UCT, a well know university in Cape Town. UCT wanted us to come up with a advertising strategy for their new courses they had to offer.

As digital swiss army knife I helped with the front-end coding of some of the micro-sites and created some of the animations. This was a very fun project as I enjoyed the animation very much. We created the animations in Adobe Flash and added the music in Adobe premier afterwards.

I added the Youtube channel so you can take a look at all the animations.

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbyXGl_wrhnxXUBA4AXBGIw

 

 

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Ads Coding Portfolio

Native Ad for DoubleClick for Publishers

DFP

One of our clients asked if we could create a Native Ad for DoubleClick for Publishers template for them.

Native Ads for Apps in DoubleClick
Picture from DFP

Now DFP (Double Click for Publishers) was working on a solution but the ETA was unknown. To give you and idea what it is, you can take a look at the DFP article.

We looked at our clients requirements and I started working on the creative. I had to create something that I could manipulate the dom once the ad tag has rendered on the page. I also had to make sure that this creative can be seen under user defined templates in the creative library and that the client will be able to make custom edits to each new ad.

I first had to detect a few things,  the width of the parent node in which this native ad will be rendering and while doing this I also needed to find the parent node class name so that I could apply additional styling to it, for example width and height which is being set in DFP. I pass all the DFP related values via DFP macros into my code.

You will also notice in my code that I am setting the height of the banner ad as the content resizes smaller, making sure that the content will still fit.

If you are not sure how DFP works and DFP tagging, please let me know, I will assist you with the setup.

You can download my code on github.

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Portfolio Websites

Micro-site Templates

Micro-Site Template

Micro-site templates was one of our responsive projects we were requested by product to create. Product wanted a template that can be duplicated and styled very quickly for a new micro-site.

We made use of twitter bootstrap as the frame and added our own custom styling. We made use of SASS which helped speed up the process. We created variables for certain css value that we needed to change all the time for new micro-sites.

The first master build took us about 2 weeks to complete, this includes front-end and back-end development. All future micro-sites onward took us no longer that 2 days which included QA.

This was a very exciting project as we could use new technology (SASS) which saved us a lot of time.

I was involved with the front-end coding of the master template, the development team consisted of 5 back end developers and one front-end developer and one designer.

Link: http://www.fin24.com/budget/.

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Portfolio Websites

Know your party

Know your Party

Know your party started out as a hackathon project which we designed and developed in 2 days.

The team consisted of an editor, UX/UI designer and a developer. Between the 3 of us we came up with the idea of know your party and started developing it.

Know your party wireframeI started with the wire-frame to get an idea of all the screens and the flow of this app while the editor researched the parties and worked on content and the developer started preparing the development environment and building the structure of the database.

Once we got all the content, wire-frames and database ready we continued looking at the design look and feel, the developer added all the content to the database and the editor cross checked everything.

Know your Party first DesignNow it was time to style the front-end, making sure it looks like the design and as I finished a screen the editor tested it to make sure if works as expected and the developer was working on all the logic at the same time.

Know your party turned out what you as a voter knew about each party and if you still want to vote for what your party stand for. It would be interesting to see if people changed their votes after going through the app.

We showed know your party to commercial, they love it so much, they felt we should make take it live before the election started in South Africa.

Link: http://www.news24.com/elections/knowyourparty