1 - CM360 Tutorial - Introduction to CM360 and Uses (DoubleClick Campaign Manager)

Hello everyone, welcome to the campaign manager 360 course. In this course, we will take you from beginners level to expert level so that you are able to create campaigns in campaign manager 360, report on campaigns as well as plan your campaigns. This is the first video of the course and I will keep the link to the whole playlist in the description below where all the videos will be arranged in order so that you are able to understand everything we discuss in this course. Before we jump into the platform and we show you on live demo that how to create, optimize and report on campaigns. In this video, we will first take you through the basics so that you have a solid understanding of what campaign manager is and what can it do so that it's easier for you to understand later how to do it. In this video, we will discuss about what campaign manager 360 is if you're not aware and then we'll discuss about what is it used for and possible use cases. Basically, campaign manager 360 is a part of Google marketing platform, which consists of six different products. Some of you might have already heard about the first one I would start with is display and video 360, which is DV 360, which is a DSP. It was called DBM before I already have a playlist for the course for DV 360. I will also link in the description below. Then we have the campaign manager for which we have created this course. And then we have optimized 360, which is a usability testing tool. And then we have search ads 360, which is like Google ads for search. But here you can traffic ads on some other search engines as well as you can leverage audiences and it has some advanced capabilities. Then we have analytics 360, which is just like Google analytics with some differences. And then we have data studio, which is a virtualization tool where you can create dashboards. You can natively connect Google data studio for free with any of these products and you can create dashboards from your reports or whatever you want to export there. Now before anything else, I want you to know that campaign manager 360 or CM 360 was called DCM before, which was short for double click campaign manager. And before that few years ago, it was called DFA, which is double click for advertisers. Basically Google keeps changing these names after every few years, mostly when it comes to double click products, because double click was acquired by Google, I think in 2008. And they have constantly keep kept changing the names of these products to bring it closer to the Google naming syntax. If I say DCM in between, so you should understand that I'm referring to campaign manager 360 because I'm more used to calling it DCM or campaign manager. Now campaign manager is an ad server used on advertiser side, when I say ad server, it's just like any other server we host websites and our online assets on. So the basic use of campaign manager as an ad server is advertisers store their creators and ads on this ad server. Now why we will discuss later in this video, but this is the first thing you have to understand. Campaign manager is an ad server. Advertisers and agencies, they store their ads and creators on this ad server. Just like if you are running a campaign on Facebook ads, you upload a creative, you upload an image, a caption, so you are storing your creatives on Facebook, but you run the campaigns on Facebook as well. But in this case, campaign manager is only used to store the creatives, the actual media buying and the campaign execution happens on other platform. Bear with me for a while, it will be all clear in the next few slides. Why do advertisers use a set dedicated ad server to store creatives? Now we come to the topic, why do advertisers even use campaign manager 360 for just storing their creatives? Okay. Now, first thing you have to understand is campaign manager 360 or CM 360 is used by big agencies and advertisers. Actually, the problems it solves are more useful for big advertisers. We are talking about, let's say Apple has a launch campaign in 10 countries. They have seven different languages, creatives in seven different languages. They have 20 direct buys with websites where they want to go live with this launch campaign. And they have also this campaign running on five different ad networks. It doesn't have to be Apple, but I'm just giving you an idea for such large campaigns. Campaign manager solves a lot of problems, but it's not mandatory that it has to be as this huge, but I have seen small advertisers using campaign manager 360 as well, and it really helps them, which we will discuss in the next few slides. Now, the main uses of campaign manager can be divided into five different categories, which we will discuss one by one. That's all a campaign manager does. So please pay attention and understand all the five uses that what kind of problems it can solve. And I have also created a quiz, which you should attempt after this video, just to understand how much you have learned in this video. And even if you are not able to answer any of the questions, once you submit your quiz, you will see the right answers of all the questions. Now the first use is centrally controlled trafficking. Now what I mean by centrally controlled trafficking is, for example, I have a campaign running with BBC.com. For example, I am eToro, it's a trading platform where you can buy and sell stocks, commodities. Now when I have this campaign with BBC.com, what I can do is I can control on my ad server that if somebody goes to eToro.com on a mobile device, they should see a different ad. If somebody goes on a desktop device, they should see a different ad. If let's say a high net worth individual goes to BBC.com, they should see an ad from me, but a different ad, which is engaging to them. But if a new trader who just wants to invest a small amount of money goes to BBC.com, they should see a different message and a different creative. Or if somebody goes to BBC.com in US, they should see a different ad. And if somebody goes to BBC.com in India, they should see a different ad. Now to have this setup done with BBC.com, it will be really complicated. What I can do is I can create one campaign in campaign manager. I upload all the creatives I want to use for different geographies, different devices, and I will just create one particular tag and I will give it to BBC.com. They will traffic it on their end. What I can do from my side is I will set up all these rules and campaigns, which we will discuss later in this course, how to do that. And just with one tag or two tags with BBC.com, I can control on my end that which user should see what kind of ad. If you are running a campaign on DV360 and that too on real time bidding. So you can do all of that using campaign manager. It's an amazing thing if you think about it. Now then we have creative rotation. So for example, if I have three creatives I want to do testing with that, which one is doing better. Now what I can do is the same scenario. Let's say I have one tag of 300 crores 250. I give it to BBC.com or I'm trafficking it in DV360. Now with one tag, I will have one particular campaign target to this tag in my campaign manager 360 and I can upload three creatives and assign a way to get these creatives should be rotated in a particular sequence, which will help me to understand the performance of each creative and it can all be done from my side where I'm an advertiser. I do not have to tell this to the publisher to rotate the creatives in certain way and rely on their reports. The third one is data driven creatives. So what you can do is you can connect studio, which is one of the entities in Google marketing platform and you can upload a lot of headlines and assets and based on the AI and the data Google has, it will create data driven creatives in terms of what headline and particular image is working for females and males and different audiences. So that's called data driven creatives where studio and campaign manager will create different combinations suitable for a particular audience who is exposed to this particular ad. Now then we have control on trafficking. Now this is very important to understand. For example, Apple has a launch campaign and the campaign is set up in a way that seven days before everybody will see a creative seven days to go. Next day everybody will see a campaign six days to go. Now Apple cannot send, for example, they have campaign running on 20 different publishers, their DSP, DV360 or any other ad networks as well. Now every day they have to rotate, they have to send new creatives to these publishers and imagine if there are multiple languages involved. So what they do is they create one campaign, they generate tag, one tag or multiple tags for each publisher and every day in their campaign manager they upload a new creative targeted to these tags or one tag. So they can control this centrally. This is one of the examples, but you can think of it like any other advertiser who changes monthly or who wants to change a creative or something is wrong with the creative. For example, an advertiser is working with 10 different companies, publishers. Now they realize later that there is a typo or there's a problem with the creative. They will have to again send the new creative to everyone. Probably some might be working on different time zone, it might delay. But in this case, in their campaign manager, they change it on their campaign manager and all the tags they have shared, they will receive the new creative they have updated in their campaign manager. It's a very important thing. Guys, I'm just giving you one example for each of these, but you will have to use your common sense and come up with different solutions it can provide and how it can help advertisers. So that was about centrally controlled trafficking. Now the second one is consolidated tracking and reporting. There are two things you have to understand about how campaign manager can help in this way. The first one is, let's say consolidated reporting. For example, I'm an advertiser. I have a particular campaign which is running on DV360, which is running on LinkedIn, which is running on a Gmail campaign. And I also have a tie up, a direct buy, let's say a programmatic deal with bbc.com or any publisher for that matter. So this campaign is running on multiple platforms. One way for me is to after the campaign ends or every week or month, I will have to get reports from the publisher. I'll have to generate reports from Gmail, Google ads. I'll have to generate reports from DV360 and then combine them together. Now in case of DCM or campaign manager 360, what I can do is I can post the campaign here, all the creatives I'm using with DV360, your ad networks, and also use tracking ads for my Gmail and LinkedIn, where I can generate reports in one view. And the old reports will look the same in terms of metrics, where impressions, clicks and conversions. The good thing here is you can also generate reports with impression level events. For example, if somebody saw your DV360 ad and then they clicked on a LinkedIn ad, they just saw it on the DV360 campaign, then they click later, saw the LinkedIn ad, they clicked on it, went to the website and they filled the form. If you are not using campaign manager, you have no way to know that how the journey of the customer looked like. They were exposed to DV360 ad before, then they saw LinkedIn ad, that's when they converted. So in this way, you will have this unified report with impression level events and you will be able to understand the impact of each channel on this particular campaign. That's what cross channel reporting is as well. The third use of campaign manager 360 is to control ad fraud and verification. If you are not aware about this, trust me, this is a very big deal when it comes to medium and large businesses and advertisers. Now how it helps is as per stats, click fraud will cost advertisers more than 50 billion by 2025. If you are running campaigns on other platforms, you might be aware that sometimes you see a lot of clicks generated by the campaign, but in Google Analytics, you see a lot less traffic. Now, one of the biggest reason is click fraud, because on most of the platforms, a lot of click fraud happens. There are even companies, small companies and people who have set up something called click farms. What they do is they have multiple devices connected, they refresh their websites, it has a software which automatically clicks. So when these ad networks see that this particular website is generating a lot of clicks, they traffic even more to optimize the campaign, but they are actually fake inventory and it's called click fraud. Now what campaign manager 360 helps is one is it helps in ad blocking, so you can set up different kinds of rules when to block ads, so your campaign should not serve on those environments. The second one is viewability. What you can do is you can target and you can generate reports in campaign manager on viewability as well in terms of how many people actually have seen my ad. Sometimes you get a lot of impressions, but actually all those most of those impressions are always serving below the fold. Nobody actually saw those ads. So it impacts the performance of the campaign, but campaign manager, you can even target and you can also generate reports on viewability of your campaign to see how many, how much of your impressions were actually seen by the people. Then you can also set rules for content labeling where you can stop your campaigns running on different kind of context or websites or apps. Then you can also do geo targeting verification where you can. So one of the things you have to remember is with campaign manager, you can integrate third party vendors. There are dedicated companies like IAS, their job is just verification, verification vendors. You can integrate even those in campaign manager as well. And you can actually see with campaign manager reports that if your campaign was supposed to only run in, let's say, the United States, you can see how much of your campaign impressions actually served outside the United States and you can even block that your ad campaign should not serve there. Then we have domain level verification where you can actually generate reports exactly on which URLs did your ad display campaign or video campaign serve on. So that's about control ad fraud and verification. These are very important for some advertisers. So then we have data driven attribution, BigQuery, which is again a Google tool. It's used to manipulate data. And with BigQuery integration in campaign manager, you can actually transfer event level log files in terms of impression, exact timestamps, and a lot of details. So it's important for some companies, they do data warehousing about all their campaigns. Then they have the data scientists who create different kind of data analysis models to understand impact of campaigns or where they should target its data science stuff. And then you have scalable floodlight setup. Now what you can do is you can set up a floodlight tracking setup in your campaign manager. The first thing is it's scalable. Let's say this particular advertiser is using with five different affiliates. They can create a floodlight setup for all these five, one particular setup where they pass the variables, which is meaningful to measure for each of these five affiliates later. And even if they decide to work with more affiliates later, they can easily scale this floodlight setup and use the same on other inventories as well and report on each affiliate network separately with each of the events they have decided. For example, if it's an e-commerce company working with different affiliates, they can see how many people clicked on it, what was the, how many purchases were made, whatever they want to track, any events, add to cart, they can generate all these reports for any number of affiliates they work with. They just have to replicate the same floodlight setup. And again, if you are using it natively, guys, this is a very important thing to understand. Campaign manager can be connected to, for example, DV360. If both are owned by you or an advertiser and they can connect it directly, it's called a native integration. However, in certain cases, for example, we have a lot of, I have a lot of clients, they have their own DCM, but the campaigns are run on our DV360. So what we do is they generate tags. We use it in our DV360, but it's not a native integration. Native integration would be whenever you own campaign manager, DV360 or data studio, any of the six products in a marketing platform, and you connect them like you connect Google ads and Google analytics, you just give the code, accept, give the permission. So that's called a native integration. So that is about data driven attribution. And the fifth one would be media planning. Campaign manager helps a lot in media planning as well. A lot of people do not use it, but if you have a big campaign, you can set up a plan based on which publishers you want to work with, their rates, what kind of deals you want to set up, whether programmatic, guaranteed, non-guaranteed, you can calculate the costs and all of the planning can be done in campaign manager. These are the only five uses of campaign manager. There might be small here and there, but these are the major ones which everybody uses campaign manager for. Now we go to how does campaign manager integrate in the advertiser setup. So now that we know what campaign manager can do, what do people use it for? We will have a detailed next videos, we'll have detailed how do people integrate, how to set up campaigns, tags, all of this step by step so that you can understand it. But for now, I just want to give you a quick sneak peek in an advertiser ecosystem. How does it look like? If you see agency or an advertiser, what they have done is they have hosted all their creatives in campaign manager. Now this particular advertiser, they have a campaign running on Dynomi, for example, which is an ad network. Then they have a campaign running on DV360. Then they have a direct deal with bbc.com. In the next video, we'll discuss about what are ad tags and all these for just to give you an idea. In campaign manager, you upload your five creatives, let's say five different images. Then you generate ad tags for each of this creative and this ad tags you pass to Dynomi, you pass to DV360. Similarly, Dynomi, you will traffic it at this ad tag and BBC, you will give them this ad tag and they'll traffic it in their Google Ad Manager. So what happens is whenever there is a campaign running on these three platforms, the actual creative is hosting campaign manager. So it is always aware that how many impressions, how many clicks, so you can even control. So for example, you generated three different ad tags for these three platforms. Now you decide to change the creative. You just have to change the creative in your own campaign manager as an advertiser or an agency and the respective ads in these platforms will be or they will reflect the new creative. Now also, it's not just ad tags. In certain cases, for example, Gmail ads and LinkedIn, you cannot traffic ad tags as creatives. So in those cases, what you do is you upload a creative in LinkedIn, but you can create something called tracking ads. You implement them as impression and click trackers. So the ads are hosted here, but whenever there is an impression or click on these platforms, it will be all recorded in campaign manager as well through tracking ads. And that's when the campaign manager will even count the conversions and all those things which came through LinkedIn and Gmail. Gmail and LinkedIn will count the conversions, clicks, impressions on their own as well, but you will not have to rely on their reports. You can see a unified report in the campaign manager. Stay tuned for the next videos on campaign manager, and I assure you that you will be completely able to work on your own on campaign manager on any of the aspects, whether it's reporting, trafficking, or even planning. Guys, let me know in the comments if this video was helpful. It helps the algorithm to push our video more, which helps us as well. And I'm really curious to know if this kind of trainings are helpful for people so that we can always modify our trainings. Thank you so much. I will see you in the next one.