What is DV360?
Previously known as DoubleClick Bid Manager, Display and Video 360 (DV360) is a comprehensive programmatic media management solution for businesses. With DV360, you can plan campaigns, design creatives, organize audience data, purchase inventory, measure campaign performance, and optimize campaigns, all in one place.
DV360 serves as a versatile tool for marketers to manage reservation, programmatic, and programmatic guaranteed campaigns across various channels including display, video, TV, audio, and more.
What is DV360 Programmatic Platform?
DV360 is Google’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) for programmatic advertising. It enables you (advertisers) to bid on and purchase inventory from publishers or ad exchanges beyond Google’s network. It uses automated processes to acquire ad space in real-time, enhancing efficiency in your advertising efforts. With DV360, you can purchase ad impressions more accurately and quickly.
One of the key advantages of DV360 is its ability to help you appear on premium and well-known sites, expanding your reach and visibility. It seamlessly integrates various features such as Campaign Manager, Google’s ad-serving technology, and Studio, Google’s creative workflow tool. In simple terms, DV360 enables you to buy inventory and optimize media campaigns, ultimately driving better performance for your advertising endeavors.
Benefits of Using DV360
- Large Scale Reach: With DV360, you can broaden your reach and connect with a larger audience through its extensive publisher network and diverse channels. This helps maximize the impact of your campaign.
- Smarter Insights: It offers intelligent insights and analytics that go beyond surface-level metrics.
- Complete Control: You have complete control over your strategies, from campaign planning to execution and optimization.
- Premium Inventory: You get access to a wide range of premium inventory, including high-quality websites, apps, and media placements.
- Enhanced Features: DV360 has advanced features that enable you to create dynamic and impactful creatives.
- New Audience: By leveraging DV360’s targeting capabilities, you can reach specific demographics, interests, or behaviors. This allows you to extend your reach beyond your current clientele and explore untapped market niches.
- First-party Data Integration: It lets you seamlessly incorporate first-party data into your campaigns, including CRM and customer insight data.
- Data-flow Streamlining: DV360 facilitates a seamless flow of data between various platforms and tools. This streamlining saves time and effort in managing your campaigns.
- Connecting Reporting with Media: It offers integrated reporting capabilities, enabling you to monitor your campaign performance in real time.
How Does it Work?
DV360 empowers you to execute digital advertising campaigns with ease. Using this platform, you can design creatives, organize your user data, purchase inventory, and optimize your campaigns. You can also share campaign data with your teams and efficiently manage your budget by gaining insights into how it’s being spent. What’s more, it allows you to also automate bidding and optimization tasks, ensuring that you achieve the best possible results aligned with your campaign objectives.
DV360 has five integrated modules that work together to make the campaign management process easy for you:
- Campaigns – Here you can create, optimize and keep track of your campaigns, line items and insertion orders.
- Audience – Here you can find features like audience profile analysis, activity-based audience builder and audience-based frequency cap to effectively manage your audiences.
- Creatives – This is where you can unleash your creative strategies with the help of features like the ad canvas, format gallery and data-driven creatives catered for different audiences.
- Inventory – You get a high-quality inventory to get the best possible space for your campaigns. Here you can find new opportunities in the Marketplace.
- Insights – All of the campaign metrics that you require are accessible here. This can help you analyze your campaign’s performance across DV360.
What is the Difference Between Google Ads and DV360?
DV360 and Google Ads offer different benefits and functionalities. When compared to Google Display Ads, DV360 excels in terms of branding, lead generation, and e-commerce advertising. One of the key strengths of DV360 is its ability to provide a large-scale reach across over 80 exchanges, giving you extensive exposure.
There are notable differences between the two platforms. DV360 has a centralized management system that encompasses displays and various video activities. On the other hand, Google Ads operates on a different structure. Additionally, DV360 offers centralized data and reporting through Floodlight tracking, while Google Ads requires separate reporting and campaign tracking.
While Google Ads serves as a suitable choice for regular advertising, DV360 stands out with its robust audience buying capabilities, allowing you to appear on premium and well-known sites. DV360 offers access to a broader range of inventory, including YouTube, GDN apps, and partner sites, surpassing the inventory available through Google Ads alone. Moreover, DV360 integrates multiple features such as Campaign Manager (Google’s ad-serving technology) and Studio (Google’s creative workflow tool), enhancing your advertising capabilities.
It’s important to note that DV360 comes with platform fees, unlike Google Ads, which is free to use. Additionally, Google Ads often provides early access to new features compared to DV360, giving you an advantage in utilizing the latest advertising innovations.
Why is DV360, Google Programmatic Option Superior?
Google DV360 is the largest demand-side platform (DSP) in the world. With a wide range of inventory for marketers, DV360 has all the tools to maximize the efficiency of ad spend. Moreover, Google owns Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail, and all of which have a humongous amount of user data. This gives you access to an array of valuable data like audience behavior, content consumption, surfing habits, etc.
Data Superiority
With detailed insights, DV360 helps you target the most appropriate audience – thus reaching potential clients/consumers for your business/brand. No other programmatic Ad platform has access to this kind of data.
Large Inventory
DV360 has got 80+ ad exchanges in its offering further multiplying the reach. This makes it a far superior alternative to Google Display Ads. DV360 offers 50 times more availability of banner impressions than what Google Display can ever have.
Premium Inventory
Google Display already has access to banner inventory from Gulf News, Khaleej Times, The National – UAE’s top English News publications. DV360’s available inventory is 50 fold more.
Branding
Generally, the success of branding campaigns is measured with various metrics like reach & the frequency cap. With a large number of websites available through DV360, branding campaigns get great bandwidth.
What is Frequency Cap in DV360?
Frequency Cap is the number of times a banner ad is seen within a stipulated duration. With DV360, the Frequency Cap is controlled at the Account Level, Insertion Order Level & Line item level. The number of times the banner ad can be seen by a prospective consumer or lead can be limited in terms of the number of impressions within the number of minutes/hours/days/weeks/months/lifetime. In other words, depending on the specific line item of Insertion Order and the value of the lead for each product/service, the frequency can be specifically increased or decreased.
Keyword Targeting in DV360
DV360 offers multiple targeting options. Besides having access to Google’s own audience data, DV360 has access to third-party data providers, which will help to target more people at the right time.
You can target people based on demography, interests, geography and remarketing lists. Also, DV360 allows you to target custom audiences, who are looking to purchase a similar product.
Moreover, DV360 has an exclusive targeting option called contextual targeting where you can choose to target or exclude users by the online environment they are browsing on (app, mobile, laptop).
When is DV360 a Bad Idea?
First of all, DV360 is a bit more complicated than Google Ads. Sometimes, it can be confusing and complex to navigate. Another downside is that the advertiser needs to have a particular monthly media spend threshold. In Google Display, there is no such threshold. Also, DV360’s support is not up to the mark.
Conclusion
With Google Ads, you only pay when a user clicks on an ad – it’s that simple. It is the best option for small and medium-sized businesses. At the same time, go for DV360 if you need large-scale reach. With its extensive audience buying capabilities and consolidated features, DV360 can help your business reach newer heights.
