One of the conference speakers was Maxim Shaparev, Google Marketing Platform Coordinator at newage. agency. The expert explained how to optimize media campaigns more effectively and detailed the differences between Display & Video 360 (DV360) and Google Ads.

Previously, to place an advertisement, one had to go through a long process: contact the publisher, negotiate the price, prepare necessary materials, etc. Now all of this is automated thanks to programmatic platforms that bring advertisers and publishers together through DSP (Demand-Side Platforms) and SSP (Supply-Side Platforms).

DV360, as a DSP platform for digital marketing, provides a wide range of tools for optimizing and analyzing advertising campaigns, allowing for more precise audience targeting and improving return on advertising investments. Let’s look at the advantages of this GMP tool.

One of the key advantages of DV360 is access to a vast inventory of advertising platforms. Unlike Google Ads, which is limited to YouTube and the Display Network, DV360 provides access to over 100 additional advertising exchanges. This means you can achieve broader reach and find users who more precisely match your target segments.

Besides traditional channels, DV360 offers access to many other advertising inventories. In particular, the platform supports Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) format, allowing advertisement placement on outdoor media such as billboards.

Finally, the private deals function allows direct contact with website owners to arrange special advertising placement agreements. A specific example: Netflix. Soon the platform will become available to Ukrainian users and opens new perspectives for advertisers. Through DV360, you’ll be able to directly approach Netflix publishers and place your advertisements. To launch a campaign, you’ll only need to specify the desired cost per thousand impressions (CPM), number of impressions, select the target audience, and dates.

Furthermore, DV360 offers audience targeting tools that allow precise advertising campaign settings according to your business needs. While targeting capabilities in DV360 largely overlap with Google Ads (Custom Intent, Custom Affinity, Remarketing), there is one significant difference: the use of third-party audiences. This means we can access audiences collected by Big Data providers that aren’t available in Google Ads. Such audiences can be more niche and relevant for business campaigns, although they usually involve additional costs. One could say that DV360 offers sophisticated tools for precise targeting, especially if you work in the B2B segment.

However, advertising campaign effectiveness depends not only on who we show the ad to but also on whether users see it. That’s why DV360 allows setting up viewability targeting. Viewability settings ensure that an advertising banner will be shown at least 50% in the visible screen area. This is important because there are cases when an impression is counted and we have to pay for it, but the banner appeared in the lower zone of the landing page where the user doesn’t scroll to and, consequently, doesn’t see the banner.

The Key to Successful Campaigns — Formats

DV360 provides greater flexibility in format selection. Besides standard banner ads and YouTube video advertising, the platform allows launching ads in integrated video players on various websites. This significantly expands opportunities for experimentation and allows finding the optimal format for each specific campaign, providing businesses with numerous possibilities for effective advertising.

DV360 also enables the use of interactive Reach Media Ads formats. These dynamic banners have many different use cases, one such example being the ability to create a banner where the product will be in 3D and can be viewed from different angles. This is especially useful for e-commerce as it allows users to “rotate” the product and make an informed purchase decision.

Thus, DV360 allows standing out among thousands of standard banners, and interactive formats, such as carousels, increase clickthrough rates (CTR) and generally engage more users in viewing advertisements.

In addition to standard strategies like Maximize Clicks, Target Impression Share, and Maximize Conversion, which you know from Google Ads, DV360 offers two additional options for video advertising on third-party sites. This allows not just increasing the number of clicks but also optimizing campaigns for important metrics such as video view duration. Therefore, you can be confident that your advertisement is not just being shown but is achieving its goal.

If your promotional video contains a key message during the first 10 seconds, you can optimize your campaign in DV360 considering this specific indicator. This ensures that your target audience immediately understands the essence of your message. Additionally, the custom bidding function allows creating personalized conversion funnels, providing you with additional opportunities for user interaction.

For example, for an online store, we can set different values for actions such as website visits, adding items to cart, and making purchases. This means the system will choose a user who is more likely to perform the action that has the highest value (purchase). When such users are unavailable, the system starts looking for users who will convert from the upper level of the marketing funnel, in our case adding to cart, and so on by analogy until it reaches the “least important” conversion. Thus, we get all types of conversions that interest us while maintaining focus on the most important one. Therefore, we can optimize advertising campaigns for specific business goals.

Campaign Structure in DV360

While in Google Ads a campaign can cover different advertising formats (YouTube, banners, etc.) but doesn’t allow setting a unified frequency for all formats, DV360 provides this capability.

Thanks to the excellent structure of advertising campaigns, which include insertion order and line item, we can combine different advertising formats under one campaign and set a single limit on impression frequency. This means that users won’t see our advertisement too frequently, which could negatively impact the campaign’s overall effectiveness.

DV360 offers more detailed conversion analysis. Besides standard metrics (impressions, clicks, post-click conversions), DV360 allows tracking additional post-view conversions. This means we can measure the impact of advertising materials even on users who didn’t directly click on the advertisement but remembered it and converted later from another source. Besides detailed conversion tracking, DV360 provides more accurate audience reach measurement. This functionality is particularly useful for clients aiming to reach a certain market share.

And the final point concerns Active View, which is a whole scope of metrics. With it, you can gain a deep understanding of how users interact with your video advertising. By analyzing metrics such as view time, sound interaction, and full-screen mode, you can determine which video moments engage the audience most and which, conversely, trigger negative reactions.