DoubleClick vs Google Ads: Which To Choose for the Promotion of Ecommerce?

Remarketing is one of the most efficient forms of display advertising. It enables you to target personalized ads to users who have already browsed through certain products on your website.

Google groups such users into remarketing audiences in order to serve relevant ads to those who visit websites in the Google Display Network (GDN). By clicking the ad, the user will return back to your website and complete their purchase. That said, separate audiences can be created for each group of ads.

Remarketing enables you to re-engage with people who have already shown interest in your products and services, through meaningful messages that will encourage them to complete a purchase. The primary visual component of remarketing ads is the so-called creatives. You don’t have to edit creatives manually since Google AdWords (already renamed to Google Ads) provides ready-to-use ad templates along with an ad editor.

Dynamic remarketing with Google Ads and the (former) DoubleClick tools features a number of significant benefits over typical remarketing. It offers much more flexibility when it comes to serving ads to target users. For more information about dynamic remarketing and how it helps businesses with their marketing tasks, please read our Comfy case study.

Starting July 24, the DoubleClick and Google Analytics 360 Suite have been unified and rebranded into the Google Marketing Platform. All the former DoubleClick’s advertising tools are now available within the platform, with parts of DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Studio rolled into the new Display and Video 360 tool.

Why this benefits ecommerce projects?

DoubleClick products were primarily associated with display advertising, and the Google Marketing Platform is yet to be explored. Search advertising professionals might find the tools somewhat more “closed-off” than the familiar Google AdWords. The Internet doesn’t have a lot of tutorials or other educational resources. Case studies are scarce and hard to find.

Let’s take a closer look at the marketing tools which Google Marketing Platform has to offer so far.

Campaign Manager (former DoubleClick Campaign Manager) is a single platform where you can set up your ads to show them in different display networks, primarily in the Google Display Network. Its advantage is that all advertising resources are collected in one place, which makes it much easier to edit a certain display creative.

Display & Video 360 (former DoubleClick Bid Manager, reinforced with other DoubleClick features) embodies today’s groundbreaking programmatic advertising technologies in display ads. You can select the websites to display your ads on, all in a single interface.

Studio (former DoubleClick Studio) is a tool for creating and managing rich media creatives and banners.

Search Ads 360 (former DoubleClick Search) is a platform that helps manage search marketing campaigns across multiple search engines. This service enables users to edit, manage, and track digital campaigns from multiple advertising accounts in a single platform.

Thanks to its ample opportunities for campaign management, DoubleClick products were known to help solve a wide range of key digital marketing challenges, such as:

1. Reaching out directly to your target audience. In addition to delivering ads to your existing audiences, you can engage new potential customers across the most relevant websites.

2. Maximising your reach. You get access to a lot more websites than GDN has to offer.

3. Personalising your offers. In addition to reminding users of the products they were looking for on your website, you can also offer related products.

4. Analysing all at once. You can monitor the performance of all your ads from all websites in a single account.

5. Optimising your time. Former DoubleClick services such as Search 360 and Display&Video 360 offer a wide range of automation options for your manual tasks.

Differences

There’s a significant overlap between DoubleClick-based solutions in Google Marketing Platform and the more conventional Google Ads. The image below provides a visual comparison of these two tools.

Now, let’s explore when it is worth taking advantage of each of these tools.

Relevant targeting. Google Ads offers a massive number of targeting options. You can even specify the websites manually. However, even in this way, your competitors’ ads can still beat yours in your display game. Which means your ad might appear less often, or not on the site sections you want it to be displayed.

Increased reach. Google Marketing Platform provides access to a large number of networks, including Google Display Network.

Ad formats. Both platforms support the same formats for display ads. Google Ads also supports text display advertising.

Audiences. DoubleClick products were famous for their partner audiences. Since the update, this should also be true for Google Marketing Platform. The list of audiences includes paid audiences which are collected from other websites. This is an analogue of remarketing audiences, only with users who haven’t visited your website but were interested in similar websites.

Pricing. DoubleClick products only charge per 1,000 impressions (CPM). The advantage of Google Ads is that you can pay per click.

Remarketing. DoubleClick allows linking multiple feeds to data and displaying ads with pre-configured rules. There is also an opportunity to show complementary and similar products in the ad.

Banners. Google Ads features a banner editor with a large number of templates you can use for both dynamic retargeting and other image ads. In the Google Marketing Platform, you need to prepare all the necessary materials separately.

Search. Search 360 helps you enhance your existing Google Ads campaigns. Thanks to its flexible rules, your campaign performance would be comparable to constant high-quality manual optimisation. Google Ads alone doesn’t allow for such efficiency at the moment.

Despite the fact that it takes quite a lot of time to set up campaigns with the Google Marketing Platform, it’s very convenient for achieving large-scale goals. Accordingly, campaigns with a small budget won’t perform as well as campaigns in Google Ads.

Downsides

For online stores and other large ecommerce projects, remarketing tools bring more benefits than traditional advertising campaigns. They help businesses reduce the bounce rate by reducing the number of steps it takes for a user to make a purchase decision. However, with all the available benefits, Google Marketing Platform still has minimal use in countries like Ukraine. Here are some reasons for this:

1. Fees. The use of each of the DoubleClick tools in Google Marketing Platform imposes additional fees. Given the method of payment (CPM), advertising can turn out to be quite costly as compared to Google Ads.

2. Limited knowledge base. there’s not much publicly available information about the tool, as well as guides for marketing specialists. Google does not yet provide training on the Marketing Platform. Business owners and advertisers don’t quite understand why they might need this tool.

3. Complexity. Creating ads with Google Marketing Platform takes much longer than with Google Ads. This imposes many limitations. Setting up dynamic remarketing campaigns requires much more effort from both the agency and the business owner, with the additional help from the IT department.

4. Limited applicability. Unfortunately, many countries don’t have an audience provider at the moment. Besides, there are not so many networks where ads can be placed, and a part of the campaign planning functions are not available yet.

Afterword

Just like its predecessor DoubleClick, Google Marketing Platform is an effective, multi-purpose tool. Its main advantage is that it gives you access to all campaigns, metrics and analytics tools in one advertising account. This makes it much easier to plan marketing activities and advertising budget allocation. The tool is also perfect for driving the most relevant traffic to the online store while reducing online marketing costs. To learn more about how DoubleClick products can help save advertising budget, check out the MOYO case study.

Online advertising is gradually replacing the conventional offline methods. Therefore, the use of the Marketing Platform will only grow. Agencies and marketing professionals need to get ready and stay ready by studying Google Marketing Platform now.

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