Google Display & Video 360 (AKA DV360, formerly known as DoubleClick Bid Manager or DBM for short) is Google’s own enterprise DSP, offering access to premium high traffic inventory pulled from over 100 ad exchanges, advanced targeting capabilities through 3rd party data providers, and a diverse selection of ad formats. Think Google Ads on steroids.

DV360 provides marketers unparalleled capabilities to serve the right ads, to the right people, at the right moment in their buying journey, for the right price.  

However, just like with AdWords and Facebook, there is one major limitation; you can’t target audiences based on their weather, or indeed set any type of weather based automation for your programmatic campaigns, natively from within DV360.

With 60% of consumer choices being determined by the weather, the inevitable result for many advertisers is under-performing ads, wasted ad spend, and missed sales opportunities.

For all of you long-suffering DV360 account managers and programmatic marketing geeks out there, the wait is finally over. WeatherAds - the world’s number 1 weather targeting software - is now available for Display & Video 360.

WeatherAds for DV360 lets marketers add powerful pre-bid weather targeting to their programmatic display and video campaigns.

With WeatherAds for Display & Video, Performance marketers can set automated rules to bid or not bid on an impression depending on their audience’s weather, or dynamically switch between creative executions under different weather scenarios.

Why add weather targeting to your programmatic display and video campaigns?

Businesses have known for decades that weather drives sales for vast swathes of their products or services, and marketers understand that commonplace changes in the weather can have a big impact on their campaign’s KPIs. A favorable spell of weather can precipitate a huge uptick in clicks, ad engagement and conversions.  All of a sudden, the weather changes, and your performance metrics could flatline. So what can marketers do about this?

Whilst you can’t control the weather (unless you're the Chinese government, apparently) you can use real-time weather data to inform your programmatic media buys. With weather targeting, you can serve ads to specific geos where the weather resonates with your product or service, and pause ads where the weather is not conducive to clicks and sales. Of course, managing this manually wouldn’t be feasible (or at the very least would be a 24 hour job), which is why we built WeatherAds - software that automates bidding and ad delivery for your paid search, display, social and programmatic campaigns based on live weather data.

Case in point; let’s says you sell rainproof jackets, a product that sells significantly better when there’s, well... a lot of rain. You don’t want to be serving display ads to people experiencing hot, sunny weather. As good as your jackets are, they’re just not relevant to this audience. You’ll get much better results by targeting zip codes that have just had - or are forecast to have - an ungodly amount of rainfall.

Likewise, if you’re a HVAC brand advertising air conditioners, you wouldn’t want to be targeting folks who are freezing cold. This is not a high-value audience segment for your product, and you won’t get a good return on your ad spend. That audience sweating in 90F heat is your 24 carat segment. They’re ready to buy your air conditioners, if only they saw your ad.  

If you’re selling bikinis or sunglasses, then your ads literally need to follow the sun across the country, around the clock, throughout the course of your campaign. If you’re a snow clearing service, they need to trigger immediately after it’s snowed… you get the gist.

It’s not all about direct response either. Weather based relevancy is great for brand awareness campaigns. Using weather targeting for CMP display or programmatic video campaigns will create associations between your brand and a specific type of weather. Gas and Energy companies do this particularly well. E.g. ‘cold and miserable outside? We’ll keep you warm and safe ’. These types of campaigns use weather as an emotional hook to create brand affinity and win mindshare.

More often than not, weather-adaptive advertising will produce deeper creative cut-through, generate higher engagement rates and yield more conversions. Simply put, weather targeting can make the difference between an outstanding programmatic campaign, and a mediocre one. That’s the difference between a bumper payday and losing out to your competition.

How do I set up weather targeting for DV360?

WeatherAds for Display & Video lets marketers layer in weather targeting into their DV360 programmatic display and video campaigns.

Weather based rules (or ‘triggers’) are created straight from within WeatherAds using the intuitive point-and-click dashboard. The triggers are then applied to selected line items within your campaign’s insertion orders (IOs). All this, without having to write a single line of code, mess around with tags, or follow a series of cryptic steps like you’re trying to solve the Da Vinci Code.

For those advertisers who like to test different types of targeting against each other across multiple line items, we have you covered. You only have to create one set of weather targeting rules – and these can be bulk copied across all relevant line items (you have complete control over this.)

The sync-up process between your DV360 account and WeatherAds is seamless, with plug-and-play authorization between the two platforms enabled with a couple of clicks.

So now that you can affect 60% more buying decisions than you could before, the sky is the limit to what you can achieve with WeatherAds for DV360.

For the thousands of product categories that are weather sensitive, along with countless others that are more subtly impacted by weather; adding weather targeting will improve ad relevancy, increase Click-through-rates, and drive higher ROI for advertiser.

If you are interested in learning more about weather targeting your programmatic campaigns, get in touch with us and we’ll set you up with a WeatherAds for DV360 account.

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