All You Need to Know About Display & Video 360

The Display & Video 360 digital marketing tool and DSP platform is a part of the Google Marketing Platform ecosystem that allows you to manage all aspects of an advertising campaign from a single account. In this article, we’ll talk more about what DV360 is, the features and capabilities of this tool, the benefits of working with it, and provide an overview of expert opinions on working directly with this DSP platform.

What is DV360?

To better understand the nature of this product, let’s start with its definition. Display & Video 360 belongs to the class of platforms for digital marketing called DSP, or Demand-Side Platform. The DSP platform allows you to purchase inventory from various publishers that are connected to various SSPs (supply-side platforms). Such digital marketing platforms contain everything you might need to run a marketing campaign: both creative templates and tools for managing, planning marketing campaigns, or purchasing advertising.

DV360 makes it possible to run various advertising formats on different inventories from one interface, simplifying advertising campaigns’ management and analysis. This significantly saves time and generally improves team motivation and efficiency. Also, DSP platforms allow you to work with such advertising formats as Display, Video, and Audio.

Key features of Google Display & Video 360

So what exactly is Display & Video 360? It’s a tool for managing all aspects of an ad campaign: creating and managing creatives, curating and leveraging audience data, finding and buying inventory, and optimizing, planning, and evaluating campaign performance.

The main modules of this tool include the following:

Campaigns

One of the main features of Display & Video 360 is its advanced campaign management, with the ability to create and execute multichannel media plans. In addition, it is possible to plan campaigns based on forecasts of reach and frequency, depending on budget and audience. To achieve your goals without the need for manual optimization, DV360 also offers automated bidding strategies that are designed for maximum efficiency.

Audiences 

Another key feature of DV360 is advanced audience management. You can create an audience based on data collected from different campaigns: clicks, views, conversions, and combinations of lists for remarketing. You can also open the Audiences module to analyze them or generate reports, as well as create individual audience segments based on customer data.

Working with audiences in DV360 has the following advantages:

• Having access not only to Google audiences but also the ability to collect your own lists of audiences with the help of Floodlight codes that can be used for remarketing.
• Access to 3rd party audiences. These are audiences provided by third-party data providers, whose advantage is their niche nature.
• Access to the YouTube audience.
• Ability to combine audiences. Creation of lists of custom combinations of 1st party data (remarketing lists) based on Google audience data or lists of third-party data providers (3rd party data).

Creatives

In DV360, creatives are based on audience data and media placement. The platform provides powerful tools that allow you to make informed decisions about creatives, immediately adapting them to the target audience. DV360 has many possibilities for creating creatives in different formats: Display, Video, Audio, Native.

Also, the DV360 platform boasts an arsenal of auxiliary tools for creatives:

• Ad Canvas: Create graphic ads with real-time previews.
• Format Gallery: The ability to use innovative formats and templates from Google Web Designer in the development of solutions for the target audience.
• Data-driven creative: Create message options that can appeal to different audiences, with the ability to set your own rules to implement your creative strategy.

Inventory

The DV360 platform has high-quality inventory from trusted publishers and SSPs (supply-side publishers), as well as Google inventory. With the new capabilities of the Inventory module, media teams can view the diverse media market across formats, devices, and screens, and then easily negotiate and manage campaigns through a range of deal types.

At the same time, the following features and resources become available with the DV360 inventory:

• Fraud detection and prevention: Brand safety features are available in the DV360 tool.
• Advanced TV: Access to high-quality television resources in video streams and traditional networks (not available in Ukraine at this time)
• The ability to purchase display, video, and audio inventory from different partners (SSPs and AdExchanges) in one interface.
• YouTube inventory that includes all TrueView formats and the ability to customize YouTube Reserve deals
• Access to Gmail and Waze (both currently in beta) and other Google partner apps
• Guaranteed and programmed sales (Guaranteed deals): the ability to turn direct deal buying into an automated process and use real-time audience data to buy by reservation.

Insights module

Also, the DV360 platform provides opportunities for detailed analysis, where it is possible to access all the necessary indicators in one place. Active View, Google’s viewability measurement technology, determines in real-time whether an ad was visible to a user. This measurement protects your brand and ad budget with statistics that help you understand where your ads are appearing, as well as details like video player size and page position.

Advantages of working with Display & Video 360

Working with an ad campaign management tool that lets you almost forget about switching between different platforms is already an advantage. However, these advantages are actually much more:

• Full control over advertising campaigns. The DV360 platform lets you know in detail how the budget is spent and where exactly the ads are placed. All costs can be managed from a single dashboard for both open auctions and direct placements on various platforms (websites).
• Collaboration between different teams. In this tool for managing marketing campaigns, there is an opportunity for different teams to work in one tool. Planners — plan campaigns, designers — develop creatives, buyers — launch and optimize campaigns, analysts — analyze. There are different levels of access for each.
• Effective audience coverage. Gaining access to a large audience that can be reached on different platforms with different formats and messages. Also, the Audience Insights module offers the ability to create, manage, and analyze audiences for strategic ad design.
• Use of intelligent automation. Automate tasks like bidding and optimization. This allows you to respond more quickly to the needs of your audience using Google’s machine-learning capabilities. The use of automatic bidding also allows you to reach your goals without having to do it manually.

What do experts say?

The capabilities of the DV360 make a generally good impression on the professionals who work with it. Also, an expert from the MixDigital team gives the following assessment of this product:

“DV360 is one of the media split tools found to build interaction between the advertiser and their target audience at the top of the funnel. This programmatic platform remains the most popular in terms of cost per contact and, accordingly, the most popular advertising among consumers in the Internet segment. Its custom Brand Visibility settings and the ability to penetrate almost every popular website can build both a high level of quality coverage and the necessary media pressure, which positively affects the brand’s Ad Recall. In our opinion, the further development of the DV360 will be about the improvement of its technological capabilities. For example, the expansion of the use of AI in the creation and management of media flights or even greater integration of advertiser data into the platform, which will positively affect the effectiveness of targeting in advertising communications.”

Stanislav Skrypnyk, Media Director at MixDigital

“Display & Video 360 has really great functionality that can cover the goals of reaching your target audience and building brand awareness.

From our experience of running many advertising campaigns, we can say that DV360 can also be used to achieve performance goals, such as increasing the number of sales, conversions, or leads. DV360 also impresses with the possibilities of detailed targeting, purchasing inventory, creating your custom audiences, and endless possibilities for setting up advertising placement. Also, a great feature of this product is the possibility of building your own conversion algorithm (Custom Bidding Algorithm).

Setting up such placements is significantly different from regular (media) and much more complicated than in Google Ads due to numerous possible settings for targeting, quality control of inventory purchases, and work with campaign optimization and creatives.”

Vadym Slavinsky, Head of Digital Buying & Analytics at MixDigital