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Google Feb. 22 refreshed its ad serving platform for large publishers, retiring the DART brand, renaming the platform DoubleClick for Publishers and offering a version for small businesses.
DoubleClick for Publishers, or DFP for short, combines Google’s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick’s display advertising and ad-serving skillset.
Essentially, DFP will be the display ad-serving engine Google has craved for years as it seeks to challenge Yahoo, Microsoft and others for a healthy share of the display ad market.
DFP, which serves graphical ads on Websites that catch people’s attention, is the realization of why Google paid $3.1 billion to buy DoubleClick in 2008, fighting off regulatory concerns from the Federal Trade Commission.
Joining Google’s existing AdSense and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, DFP will seek to make delivering ads easier for large publishers, such as social networks, entertainment sites, portals and news sites.
DFP boasts a redesigned interface to save time and reduce errors, as well as more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand what ads are driving sales. There is also a public API to let publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP or integrate third-party apps.
DoubleClick manager Jonathan Bellack explained:
“We created the first intelligent ad server to help publishers more effectively optimize campaign delivery to save time and strengthen advertiser relationships. Our ad server now receives hints directly from the forecasting engine to adjust delivery in anticipation of changes in site traffic, helping to improve on-time ad delivery with less manual intervention from ad operations teams. DFP’s optimization technology gives publishers the opportunity to utilize advanced Google machine learning algorithms to deliver even greater campaign performance lift for advertisers.”
In short, DFP will help publishers see more ad dollars. DFP comes in two flavors: the paid DFP and free DFP Small Business.
DFP is geared for larger online publishers and is designed to replace Google’s existing DoubleClick’s DART for Publishers ad server. Current DART for Publishers customers will be upgraded to DFP over the next year.
DFP Small Business is geared for growing online publishers, replacing Google Ad Manager. Google said it will be upgrading Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business this year, too.
DFP follows and complements the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which Google launched last September as a marketplace where prices are set in a real-time auction for display ads.
In fact, DFP works with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s dynamic allocation feature, which lets publishers open up their ad space to bids from other ad networks.