DoubleClick Search

We’re moving! A new address for the DoubleClick Search blog

2015-03-06T13:06:00.004-08:00

For the last few years, this blog has been the go-to source for all things DoubleClick Search. From monthly product releases, to events, bylines and case studies - you could find it all here.

Starting March 13, your source of DoubleClick Search news will be on our newly redesigned DoubleClick Advertiser blog. With this update, you will be able to access news on DoubleClick Search alongside broader digital marketing news from our team.

On Friday, February 13th, we’ll be retiring the old doubleclicksearch.blogpost.com and redirecting it to the search section of our newly redesigned DoubleClick Advertiser’s blog.

The new dedicated DoubleClick Search blog URL will be: http://doubleclickadvertisers.blogspot.com/search/label/Search

Please take this opportunity to subscribe to the new blog via Feedburner or the RSS reader of your choice. We look forward to seeing you soon at our new address.

Measure the true ROI of AdWords Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

2015-02-24T07:46:00.000-08:00

We are happy to announce support for AdWords Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) in DoubleClick Search. If you are a DoubleClick Search customer, you can now manage and report on your RLSA campaigns directly in our platform. Further, you can now report on the ROI performance of each individual remarketing list, regardless of how they spread across different campaigns and ad groups.

With this new capability, we’ve made it much easier for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of each remarketing list and their list strategies overall. Up to now, advertisers using RLSA through Adwords have had to duplicate and complicate their ad groups, in order to understand each remarketing list’s value. We are excited to see advertisers enhancing their search marketing campaigns by embracing audience signals, and below we’re shining a light on how customers are improving their results with RLSA:

"Within the remarketing campaigns, renewal customer target groups showed a 89% higher ROI than acquisition customers. Also, 90% of the target group customers turned out to be customers that renewed their contract"

- Irina Stutvoet, eCRM Marketing Manager, T-Mobile Netherlands

"When AdWords launched RLSA, it offered us a new opportunity to engage with our customers. Now with the addition of conversion reporting in DoubleClick Search, we can finally measure and realize the true ROI of RLSA. Across our agency portfolio we have seen RLSA campaigns improve conversion rates by 70% and CPA of 53% on average compared to non-RLSA campaigns”

- Matt Wright, Head of Paid Search, iProspect Manchester

As we continue our investments in our audience capabilities, we work closely with our partners to understand what they’re looking for.

With that in mind, over the next three weeks we’ll be hosting a series on the topic of the role of audience signals in search engine management. We’ll share perspectives from organizations like iProspect, Havas Media, and the Internet Advertising Bureau on what the opportunity is, how audience signals will impact search marketing and how marketers can get started.

We hope you enjoy the forthcoming series on audience signals in search engine management!

DS features in December and January

2015-02-17T06:58:00.000-08:00

In December and January, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

Forecast the performance of a bid strategy: Using historical data from an existing bid strategy, DS can estimate how the bid strategy may perform with a different target or spend amount.
You can use the forecast to gain such insights as:
- The CPA, ERS, or ROAS target you need to achieve a specific range of conversions. If you know how many conversions you want to achieve per week, you can see which target you're likely to need.
- How the bid strategy is likely to perform with a specific amount of weekly spend.
- The trade-offs between cost and conversion volume as you adjust your CPA, ERS, or ROAS targets.
Learn more.
Copy campaigns to AdWords, Bing Ads, and Yahoo! JAPAN engine accounts: If you need to manage the same campaigns on multiple engine accounts, instead of manually creating the campaigns in each account you can copy an existing AdWords account. If you make additions or changes to one of the campaigns, you can copy the additions and some of the changes into the other accounts. Learn more.

We also updated the following features:

Create and apply sitelinks by uploading a bulksheet: You can now use the same bulksheet to create and edit sitelinks and add them to campaigns and ad groups. Before this update, you needed to create sitelinks in one bulksheet and apply them to campaigns and ad groups in a second bulksheet. Learn more.
URL templates no longer encode URL parameters: If you use a redirect URL to pass tracking data to an additional tracking system, the additional system may require you to HTML-encode your landing page URLs. Instead of adding this redirect URL to each keyword's landing page, you can use a URL template to automatically apply the redirect URL and encode the landing page URLs. Previously, if you set up a URL template to encode landing page URLs, DS also encoded any URL parameters you specified in the template. DS has been updated so that it no longer encodes the URL parameters in a template. Learn more.
Bid strategy health column: The bid strategy health column now lets you know if any bid strategies are constrained because it's been too long since offline conversions have been uploaded into DS. Learn more.
Pause engine accounts: Agency managers can now change the status of an engine account from Active to Paused, temporarily stopping such activities as trafficking, bid optimization, and inventory management. Learn more.

See these updates in action in the new features training video.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

AdWords Upgraded URLs and DoubleClick Search

2015-02-09T15:45:00.002-08:00

This morning AdWords announced upgraded URLs, a fundamental change to the way they create and track URLs. The change is an easier and faster way to manage and track important information about each click on your AdWords ads.

As part of this upgrade, AdWords is moving from the concept of “destination URLs” to “final URLs and tracking templates”. In addition, AdWords will retire the existing {copy} valuetrack param available for sitelinks today. The upgrade will require that DoubleClick Search make some changes to landing page management for AdWords accounts.

No immediate change to DoubleClick Search workflows
While we work on supporting upgraded URLs, DoubleClick Search customers should continue to use the existing destination URL format to ensure tracking and campaign management capabilities. If you’re interested in saving time managing URLs, check out the DoubleClick Search URL builder to help simplify your workflows and save hours per week.

Stay tuned for upgrade details
AdWords will continue to support destination URLs until July 1st. We’ll share more details in the coming weeks about the recommended upgrade process for DoubleClick Search customers.

Join Forrester and Google for a conversation about the real-time opportunity in retail SEM

2015-02-09T09:43:00.000-08:00

There’s no doubt that technology continues to transform the pace of business. In the past, it wasn’t possible to track online conversions back to ads in real-time. You couldn’t always be sure you were advertising only in-stock items or immediately traffic out seasonal assortment changes.

But now advanced digital marketers are able to take advantage of real-time conversion and product data in their advertising campaigns to great effect.

Forrester recently completed a global study of 240 retailers’ search campaigns. What they found was… opportunity. Most retailers still don’t take advantage of existing real-time capabilities in digital marketing, and leave a significant opportunity for savvy marketers who do.

Come hear Forrester and Google talk about:

Results from Forrester’s retail search study
Insights about the retail search market, and where you can take advantage
How to become more “real-time” in your own digital advertising

Speakers:
Shar VanBoskirk, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Henry Tappen, Retail Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Time:
Wednesday, February 18th at 11AM PST/2PM EST

Register now on the event site.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Report on IBM Digital Analytics in DoubleClick Search

2015-02-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

When running an e-commerce site, you need an analytics solution to gain insight into visitors’ digital journeys and make swift & educated decisions. To help tie your eCommerce transactions with your search campaigns we’ve launched support for IBM Digital Analytics (prev. known as CoreMetrics) in DoubleClick Search.

IBM Digital Analytics is an enterprise class cloud based digital analytics platform and it collects and analyzes customer’s digital journey including data about conversion events on your site, such as cart additions, abandonments, bounces...etc. DoubleClick Search regularly pulls in the data and uses it to attribute visits & conversions to keywords and populate IBM Digital Analytics reporting columns. In DoubleClick Search you can access the columns via online reports, downloaded reports, and the reporting API. You can also take advantage of the ability to create formula columns and executive reporting charts that incorporate IBM Digital Analytics data.

If you’re interested in getting started, please share your IBM Digital Analytics client ID, DDX API auth token, username, timezone & currency with your DoubleClick Search support contact or ds-support@google.com. They’ll give you a heads up when your DoubleClick Search advertiser and IBM Digital Analytics account have been successfully linked.

DS features in November

2014-12-16T22:04:00.000-08:00

In November, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

Report purchase details in DS: Learn which products in your inventory make up your sales with purchase detail reports. Enable this feature by configuring your Floodlight transaction tags to report on revenue, cost, and profit for individual products sold in each conversion. DS reports can also show which campaigns (including keyword and Shopping campaigns), ad groups, and keywords contributed to the sales of those products. Finally, you can segment your reports using any attributes from your inventory feed.

We also updated the following features:

Executive Reports:

Share reports: Share a link to your executive reports with clients, executives, non-DS users, or anyone that you want to see how you’re performing toward your advertising goals.
Resize charts: DS has added chart resizing to the list of formatting options available in executive reports. With a single click, you can expand or contract a chart horizontally or vertically.

Bid strategies: Set a minimum ROAS constraint: In addition to bid limit and position constraints, you can now set a minimum ROAS constraint. For bid strategies that are focused on maximizing revenue, set the minimum ROAS constraint to optimize bids and keep the marginal ROAS above a target threshold.

Apply, remove, or change sitelinks for AdWords campaigns in the DS UI: If you need to apply sitelinks to several campaigns in your AdWords account, you can now use the DS UI in addition to bulksheets.

Use the DS API to report on AdWords location extensions : If you've set up upgraded location extensions in DS, you can use the DoubleClick Search API’s Reporting Service to download adGroup, campaign, or feeditem performance metrics for location extensions.

Note that reports downloaded from the DS API include only location extensions that have recorded at least one impression during the report's time range.

See these updates in action in the November New Features training video:

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

DoubleClick at CES

2014-12-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

With 2014 drawing to a close, we’re getting excited about what’s ahead in the new year. We’ll be ringing in 2015 at the International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) the first week of January. If you’re planning to go too, we’d like to invite you to come by C Space, the new destination at CES for advertisers, publishers, agencies, and content creators.

On the first day of the event (Tuesday, January 6th), Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Display and Video Advertising Products, will be headlining C Space. In his keynote he’ll talk about how brands can make the most of video in a climate where consumers are easier to reach but harder to influence. He’ll discuss not only how to drive engagement but also how to measure the impact that it has on brand metrics.
Following his keynote, Neal will join Meredith Levien, EVP Advertising at The New York Times, in a fireside chat.
Learn more about C Space and check out the full agenda here.
Hope to see you there!
Tuesday, January 6th 2015
1 - 2 PM PT

Digital advertising in 2014: An industry in motion

2014-12-11T09:52:00.003-08:00

2014: IAB’s “Open Letter to Marketers” advocated for the universal adoption of HTML5. “Programmatic” became the ANA’s marketing word of the year. The MRC lifted its advisory on transacting on viewability.

These are just some of the moments that moved our industry forward in 2014. “Digital Advertising in 2014: An Industry in Motion” recaps the ideas we congregated around as an industry, the technology we evolved to realize them, and the impact we saw from executing on them. Together with you, we:

Told stories through big, beautiful canvases everywhere
Evolved media buying
Measured what matters with new metrics
Made digital easier for all of us

As we raise a toast to the year that was and look forward to 2015, we thank you for partnering with us and ensuring that we never stay still, that as an industry, we’re always in motion.

Get DoubleClick’s full 2014 recap here.

Real-time helps you win on big launch days

2014-11-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

This is our third post in a blog series on using real-time data to win in SEM. Today, we’re writing about the importance of real-time for product launches.

If you’re a marketer, a product launch can translate into a long list of to-dos - from updating your website with product, pricing, and promotional information, to setting up your campaigns for maximum exposure.

Then, you have to carefully monitor sales and respond to real-time changes in consumer demand. While some retailers receive and act on performance data after 24 hours, this lag can result in a significant lost opportunity for others. Real-time data helps you act in the first crucial minutes and hours of a launch.

Real-time data and the tools to act on it in DoubleClick Search can help make your launches a success. Automated bid strategies update bids multiple times per day to meet business goals. Up-to-the-minute conversion reporting means you can see sales as they come in, make adjustments, and ensure your changes are live across all engines as fast as you react.

Real-time becomes even more crucial in competitive markets when, for example, a single product is launching in numerous retail outlets at once. To illustrate this, we’ll use some examples from the mobile industry. With the release of the iPhone 6 and Moto 360 in September, and with pre-sales having opened for the Nexus 6 on October 29, autumn is a big launch season for mobile retailers.

How important was real-time on these days? An example from the days following the iPhone 6 launch shows that DoubleClick Search responded to breaking trends throughout the day, and updated relevant advertisers’ bids an average of eight times, sometimes topping out at 13 bid changes per day during the highest-peak days. These frequent changes were made to drive incremental revenue or to push ads to the top of the page. Without DoubleClick Search’s real-time data and real-time bid strategies, these advertisers would have been left with their original bids for the whole day—missing out on opportunities for more sales.

But real-time is about more than just changing bids frequently. It is about knowing what is happening, like understanding what is and isn’t converting. During big events, the propensity for your keywords to convert can change dramatically. A big launch like one for the iPhone or Android generates many curiosity-seekers who - while not in-market - will be looking for information. Do these clicks matter for your business? Real-time conversion data shows you the answer, separating out keywords that drive revenue from those that just capture browsers, and distinguishing, in real-time, how they in relation to a big market event. With all of this real-time visibility available directly in your reporting, you can make quick decisions on whether you want to be in-market for non-converting keywords that may yet be important for your brand to stay out there. Automated bidding rules can make this even more responsive.

Jeffrey Mysel with Digitas LBi explains how real-time data was key for a successful launch and promotion of the Moto360 smart watch:

“Capturing demand for the Moto360 product launch was a crucial piece to our marketing program, and even more so for paid search. Having the benefit of real-time data gave us the flexibility to pulse our budget during important sales windows, as the team was able to monitor data and make adjustments on peak days. With DoubleClick Search, we were able to maximize our budget and make quick decisions to manage public demand, meet client needs, and keep our program in line with product inventory.”

Real-time data can also be extremely useful for big seasonal events. As the holidays approach, our next post will highlight how DoubleClick Search clients used real-time data to take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year.

DS features in October

2014-11-11T07:23:00.000-08:00

In October, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

Include data from IBM Digital Analytics in DS reports: You can now report on IBM Digital Analytics data directly in DoubleClick Search (DS). After your DS advertiser and Digital Analytics accounts are linked, you’ll be able to see conversion events—including revenue and item counts—from Digital Analytics in the DoubleClick Search UI. You can also download and schedule reports with this data, retrieve the data from the DoubleClick Search API’s Reporting Service, as well as use the data in formula columns. To get started, email your DS support contact and let them know that you want to link DS with Digital Analytics. See Link a DS advertiser with Digital Analytics for the information to include in your email.
Manage AdWords location extensions in DS: Location extensions show your local business address, phone number, and a map marker in text ads served by AdWords. Now you can use DS to manage the location extensions that you've set up in AdWords.
Report on the quantity of items in transactions: Now you can use DS to report the number of items in transactions recorded by Google Analytics and Floodlight activities. Just add the GA quantity, Action quantity, and Transaction quantity columns to a report, or to a formula column.

We also updated the following features:

Bid strategies:
- Choose an attribution model for distributing credit: By default, bid strategies attribute full credit for a conversion to the last paid click. In effect, bid strategies optimize bids to maximize the number of last click conversions in the funnel. If instead you prefer to optimize for paid search clicks throughout the funnel, you can select an alternate attribution model such as time-decay.
- Set a maximum CPA: Bid strategies optimize bids across the whole portfolio to increase efficiency by bidding more for some keywords and less for others. This can mean that the average bid for some individual keywords drives a CPA that's over the target CPA, even though the overall strategy is profitable. To attempt to keep the average bid of each keyword in the profitable CPA range, you can now set a max CPA constraint.
Executive Reporting: Customize the axes for bar and line charts
- Start axis at zero: Now, if you want to show the scale of change between data points in your bar and line charts, you have the option to start the axis at zero. For close data ranges, starting at zero expands the scale of the range.
- Combine the range for measurement on one axis: When comparing different metrics in bar and line charts, you can also combine metrics that use the same unit of measurement on one axis. For example, you can combine clicks and impressions on the same axis because they are measured the same way.
Updated editor for text ads: To make it easier to create text ads, the ad editor now provides separate fields for each line along with a preview of the ad. As you enter text, you'll see the number of characters that you can type in each line. And for a shortcut, you can paste an entire ad into the Headline field. DS will automatically fill in the fields with text you pasted.
DS API's Reporting Service:
- Download sitelink reports: You can use the reporting API to download reports with metrics for AdWords sitelink extensions.
- Report on custom Floodlight variables: In DS, you can use custom Floodlight variables to report conversion data that is unique to your business needs, such as the genre of a movie that a user purchases, the name of the store from which an item is purchased, shipping costs, and so on. The data can be uploaded by a Floodlight tag on the advertiser's site or by the DS conversions API, and now you can use the DS reporting API to download reports that contain the data.

See these updates in action in the training video for October features:

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Using real-time data to optimize your search ads and Shopping Campaigns

2014-10-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

This is the second in a series of posts on real-time advertising. Last week, we wrote about the real-time gap and how access to real-time data can positively affect online sales and results. This week, we’re writing about how real-time data can help you optimize text ads and Shopping campaigns.

Don’t underestimate the long tail
Retailers today often have hundreds or thousands of products, but a recent study shows they only advertise an average of 49% of their inventory with search ads. There are two main reasons for this. One is that advertisers just can’t manage millions of keywords and bids on their own. The other is that they often don’t see the value of their long-tail inventory items.

However, forgetting the long tail can mean missed opportunities. While each additional item advertised may not contribute a lot of sales on its own, aggregated sales for long-tail items can have a significant bottom-line impact.

Create and optimize Shopping Campaigns with inventory-aware campaigns
Our customers have told us Shopping campaigns are a critical tool to automate ad creation, management, and bid optimization. Integrating with Google Merchant Center - from feed to ad creation - helps retailers be “real-time” in responding to the many seasonal assortment changes, new product launches and inventory status changes. They can afford to traffic and manage the full product catalog, without risking losing track of a promotion or out-of-stock and paying for that “ad to nowhere”. Last year Piston saw big success with inventory management, with over 50% gains in both ROAS and conversions.

Umut Dincer, The Home Depot’s Director of Online Marketing shares: “Our strong partnership with DoubleClick Search has been a great source of revenue for The Home Depot using the Google Merchant Center and Shopping campaigns to merchandize inventory.”

Organize products intelligently with Adaptive Shopping Campaigns
Beyond expanding product coverage, advertisers can also improve performance with sound product group structure. Adaptive Shopping campaigns leverage real-time conversion data to automatically change Shopping Campaign structure to optimize performance gains. When items in product groups have similar conversion rates, DoubleClick Search can assign better bids and reduce inefficiencies in spend.

By looking at advertiser data, we found, for example, that 90% of the median advertiser’s Shopping campaign cost came from only 9.5% of its products.* Often, it turned out, advertisers were lumping high-performance products into product groups with other, lower-converting products. The end result: bids that were too low for their top-selling products and bids that were too high for their lower-revenue items.

Andrea Bywater, Marketing Coordinator of Paid Search at BuildDirect says, “Adaptive shopping campaigns will be incredibly helpful in grouping ‘winning’ SKUs together—especially when things get busier with the holidays, and with Black Friday around the corner. Not only will this save time; it’ll help us save money on products with lower conversion rates.”

Link purchases to ads with Purchase detail reports
A third way for retailers to increase their advertising efficiencies with real-time data is to allow them to connect their ads with product sales. Linking ads and sales used to be a complex task requiring deep analysis and a lot of data. As a result, advertisers often skipped over this analysis, missing out on key insights like which keywords sold which products. We designed Purchase detail reports to meet this customer need.

Purchase detail reports help advertisers:

Identify the impact of advertising on business goals like maximizing profitability or selling off inventory
Improve ad targeting by matching ads to products that consumers are most interested in
Understand the value of brand and general terms in selling your highest margin or most important products

Justin Johnson, Paid Search Manager at Cabela’s explains, “Having insights into where we spend our money, in addition to what people are looking for, has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions. We have a better look into where we may not have adequate coverage, and are able to quickly make changes to address that. Being able to pull in margin data to see if certain keywords are better or worse at driving profitable traffic than we anticipated helps us be more thoughtful with our spend.”

Real-time in real life
In the next edition we’ll shift our focus to a real-time use case: smartphone launches. We’ll have a look at how real-time capabilities make a difference on big sales days, where competition and volatility are high.

*DoubleClick Search internal data, 2014

DoubleClick Search URL Change

2014-10-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

To better align with other solutions in the DoubleClick Digital Marketing (DDM) platform, we’re moving DoubleClick Search (DS) from https://www.google.com/doubleclick/search to https://ddm.google.com/search.

Over the coming weeks you may notice that you’re automatically redirected to the new URL when hopping into DS. When this happens you may receive a message that informs you about the redirect and encourages you to update your bookmarks. It’s important to note that DS user credentials will continue to work as expected and existing bookmarks/saved links will redirect to the new URL.

Reach out to your DoubleClick Search representative or our support team at ds-support@google.com with any questions.

DS Features in September

2014-10-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

In September, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

Adaptive Shopping campaigns: DS can monitor the performance of products in your Shopping campaigns and automatically subdivide existing product groups to give individual bids to the SKUs that drive most of your traffic. Product groups give a single bid to ads for all the products covered by the group, even if those products have varying performance. This feature helps you achieve better performance by automatically refining your product groups to focus on products with similar performance. You can then set manual bids or use a bid strategy to provide a bid on these groups. Learn more.

Create and apply URL templates: If you use a common set of query strings or a common redirection URL for the keyword landing pages in an engine account, you can now create a URL template and apply it to your keywords. In addition to saving time and ensuring accuracy, using a URL template simplifies landing page URLs so you can quickly scan your keywords and see where they’re supposed to land. Learn more.

Upload availability timestamps using bulksheets: To optimize bid strategies that target offline conversions, you can indicate which Floodlight activities track offline conversions. If no conversions have occurred for a period of time, you can use bulksheets to indicate whether the lack of data means that no conversions have occurred or that you haven’t uploaded the data yet. Learn more.

We also updated the following feature:

Executive Reports now include a Total row in tables that display segmented data: DS will add a Total row to the bottom of the table when you create or edit a table in an executive report. The Total row is displayed if the table includes at least one segment.

Watch the recorded webinar for September features to see these updates in action.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

The real-time gap and what it means for retail search marketers

2014-10-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

Understanding retailers and their relationship to real-time
In a recent post, we announced a study we ran with Forrester to understand how retailers were leveraging real-time data in their online advertising efforts. What we learned was that they believe real-time data presents both opportunities and challenges. Retailers see the potential for including this type of data in their campaigns, but they also think it can be too much work to respond to changes that can come and go in an instant.

DoubleClick Search makes real-time easy
At DoubleClick Search, we want to make it easy to integrate real-time data into your campaigns. We’ve worked hard to build tools that give you the data you need to make quick decisions for your business. We also want to make your campaign optimization easy and automated, so you don’t need hours of planning to respond to sudden changes in demand.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll share stories of how advertisers are using real-time data to reach customers in their time of need, faster. This first post in our series is on the real-time gap and how DoubleClick Search helps you to bridge it. The “real-time gap” is the difference between retailers’ current SEM practices and their best possible performance.

Fact: Real-time data is important
Any number of factors can affect consumer demand for your products and services—many of which are unpredictable. Heat waves and cold snaps appear unannounced, fashion trends crop up, and wild card sports teams make it into the playoffs. From weather concerns to new shoes to baseball playoffs, search queries give marketers insight into what matters most to people in a specific moment. And with today’s proliferation of smartphones and tablets, consumers search all day, every day, providing real-time data on what’s happening right now.

Barriers to adoption for real-time data
If real-time data is so important, you would think that all retailers would integrate it into their campaigns, but it turns out there are a few common barriers to adoption.

First, many retailers believe it takes too much time and energy to respond to unplanned events. One respondent in our Forrester study explained: “I’m sure there are quick wins to be had. But we don’t have the experience or manpower needed to chase everything.” Another said, “I have so many demands on my time, managing for something unexpected isn’t convenient for me.”

Retailers also need to re-think what’s “good enough” when it comes to speed and real time feedback. Our Forrester research shows that only 20% of retailers have access to real-time click and conversion data, and that over half do not see data updated for a week. Despite this reality, 84% of these retailers who consider driving sales as a goal feel their marketing programs are either “effective” or “very effective” at achieving their goals. But, data received once a day (or even less frequently) means there are unlimited missed opportunities to capture revenue, brand awareness, or reduce cost.

DoubleClick Search makes real-time easy
We want to make it easy to collect and act on real-time data. Our smart bid optimization understands your goals, gets conversion information in real-time, and adjusts bids multiple times per day to meet those goals. And with conversion data from all channels, delivered in real-time, DoubleClick Search can react quickly to changing market conditions by optimizing based on real-time attributed conversion data.

Real-time data in action
Here’s just one example of how real-time data can positively affect sales. This is an excerpt from a recent iProspect report.

The chart below shows how one of iProspect’s clients, a top luxury apparel brand (let’s call it Brand X), looked to real-time data and execution to maximize its marketing during a busy shopping season. Brand X holds a highly anticipated three-day sale twice per year. In 2012, it used an SEM platform that did not offer real-time conversion insights or intra-day bidding. A year later, when it switched to DoubleClick Search, a tool that reacted more quickly, the difference was immense. The overall result: the company more than tripled revenue on the first day of the promotion year over year while decreasing cost per clicks (CPCs) by over 60%.

Three-day Promotion: Better Results With Real Time

Source: iProspect proprietary data

Your partner for real-time data
At DoubleClick search, we want to be your partner in delivering real-time data to improve your advertising performance. In our next post in the series, we’ll talk about how retailers are taking advantage of real-time data to optimize text ads and Shopping Campaigns for their products.

Whip your seasonal campaigns into shape: Four “knead to know” tips for search marketers

2014-10-06T10:41:00.001-07:00

A pinch of salt, a dash of sugar...and a handful of data analysis?

We all know baking is a huge part of the holidays. But amidst the hustle and bustle of planning scrumptious menus for friends and family, as a marketer you’re also juggling fleeting promotions, revising stale ads and trying to balance your budget — all in hopes of reaching holiday shoppers at the moment they’re looking to buy. So how do you avoid those half-baked campaigns during one of the busiest times of the year?

This season, we wanted to share a few of our favorite tools to whip your digital strategy into shape and help you make your holiday promotions a piece of cake. With the right ingredients to scale and streamline your seasonal campaigns, you can find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your perfectly baked holiday pastries — while we take care of the rest.

	1. Whip up new opportunities in an instant with real-time reporting and optimization We get it. The holidays are busy, and you often find yourself running out of time — both in the kitchen and with your digital marketing. Forget the manual, hand-churned methods of the past that can leave your campaign results as stale as last year’s fruitcake. This year, turbocharge your campaigns with up-to-the-minute reporting and optimization in DoubleClick™ Search. We’ll whip up performance and conversion metrics as they happen, so you get a real-time view into how your campaigns are performing. Then we’ll use that near-instant conversion data to update bids throughout the day, —helping you get an ROI the size of a holiday feast.
	2. Handle on-the-go customers with mobile bid modifiers As a master cook, you’re moving around non-stop during the holidays — and so are your customers. But as they’re searching for deals and checking them twice across screens, how do you set the right bids to showcase your hottest products to your most eager prospects — wherever they are? Mobile bid modifiers in DoubleClick Search help you adjust campaign bids to maximize performance for mobile searches. Ready to make your holidays a multiscreen event this year? We’ll raise a glass of eggnog to that!
	3. Find the right recipe with adaptive Shopping campaigns Your digital marketing, much like your cooking, might need some extra help during the busy holidays. Take your go-to recipe from good to great by spicing it up with something special. This year, that secret ingredient can be adaptive Shopping campaigns, which ensures that your Shopping campaign structure is optimized to perform its very best. Adaptive Shopping campaigns dynamically optimize your Shopping campaign structure, based on product performance. That means you’ll set the right bids for your high-performing products, as well as save money on bids for low-performing products. And the best part? It’s all automatic, so you won’t have to make it from scratch.
	4. Measure your product sales with purchase detail reports Proper measurement is one of the most important parts of cooking up an impactful campaign. Especially during the busy holiday season, trying to mix and match different reports can have you feeling like Scrooge. We’ll help your campaigns rise to the occasion this year with purchase detail reports for smarter product-centric measurement. Get clear visibility into the products consumers purchase, as well as the ads that drive those sales. Customize and report on your individual product sales by any product attribute—such as color, size and style—and do it for any type of campaign, including text, Shopping, and on AdWords™ or Bing.

Ready for more holiday treats? Tune in to the DoubleClick Advertisers blog tomorrow for even more tips for media agencies, or sign up for our newsletter for regular updates: http://goo.gl/p03ZMS

Forrester Report: A Faster Pace for Retail Paid Search

2014-09-17T04:00:00.000-07:00

The real-time imperative
Real-time matters in retail search because external events continuously affect demand. Whether planned events like Black Friday, or unplanned ones like the next big snow day, campaigns that were optimized for demand are suddenly altered by new market realities. The speed at which a retailer’s search management tool can “see” the new behavior and adapt to it will help to determine how successful campaigns are over time, and because events can shift quickly, speed is ever-more important for success.

We know how important it is for our retailers to be running profitable campaigns with a minimum of ongoing manual effort. It’s why we’ve consistently invested in tools to be faster. From instant conversion data and intra-day bidding to integration with Google Merchant Center for ad creation and management, we’re committed to developing tools to support speed in search.

Understanding how retailers use real-time
Today, in partnership with Forrester, we’re launching a study that shows how retailers access and use real-time tools to stay ahead in the digital game.

What we found was… opportunity
According to Forrester’s survey, only 20% of retail search marketers have access to real-time conversion data, and less than half can see conversions before the next business day.

In addition to response times, we found that, on average, marketers are only able to merchandize about half their inventory in search ads, even though long-tail products can represent a significant revenue opportunity.

Get the full report
For all the results, along with Forrester’s recommendations for retail search success, check out the full report at Think with Google. To get the latest research, communications and case studies from DoubleClick, sign up for one of our newsletters.

DS features in August

2014-09-15T11:43:00.000-07:00

In August, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

Add and manage users in DS: DS agency managers can now add users, remove users, and change user permissions right in DoubleClick Search. Learn more.
Optimize bid strategies that target offline conversions: If you include offline conversions in your bid strategies, you can now improve performance by indicating which Floodlight activities primarily track offline conversions. If no conversions have occurred for a period of time, you can send an availability timestamp to clarify whether the lack of data means that no conversions have occurred or that you haven’t uploaded the data yet. Learn more.
Use the DS reporting API to download sitelink reports: You can use the reporting API to download reports containing metrics for AdWords sitelinks. For example, you can download a report that shows the number of clicks, impressions, and other data for each sitelink in an ad group or campaign. Learn more.
Quantity columns from Google Analytics and Floodlight activities: To report on the number of items in transactions recorded by Google Analytics and Floodlight activities, you can now add the GA quantity, Action quantity, and Transaction quantity columns to DS reporting tables. You can also use these columns in formula columns.

Watch the recorded webinar for August features to see these updates in action.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

DoubleClick Search Academy: Make the grade with customized, self-paced training

2014-09-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

Last week, we shared some digital marketing flashcards to help you go back to school, DoubleClick style (Take a look at our day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, and day 5 flashcards).

Today, we're helping you further your DoubleClick Search education by introducing DoubleClick Search Academy, an easy-to-use, self-paced learning path designed to guide you through core DoubleClick Search online help and training courses -- based on your role and how you use the tool.

We’ve heard from users that they need more customized learning based on how they use DoubleClick products. If you’re a trafficker, you might need a broad understanding ranging from the basics all the way to advanced features to maximize search campaign performance. If you’re an analyst, you might not need to know all the details a planner might be responsible for, but you might still like to know how conversion data is tracked and how to monitor day-to-day performance for reporting insights.

DoubleClick Search Academy includes these checklists:

Basics for new users: Understand the benefits of a search engine management tool using our core curriculum, including DoubleClick Search Fundamentals eLearning and certification.
Implementation guide: Learn how to implement a new DS account and launch a basic campaign.
QA and troubleshooting: It’s not shop class, but you’ll learn all about QA’ing tags, troubleshooting common Floodlight tag issues, and more.
Advanced topics: Become an expert by learning about advanced DS integrations and topics. Learn about formula columns, shopping campaigns, bid strategies, inventory-aware campaigns, and executive reporting.

Since DoubleClick Search Academy covers a lot of material, we’ve set it up in checklist format so you can track progress by checking the boxes at the end of each step. Your progress will be saved so if you have to take a break, you can come back anytime and pick up where you left off.

Whether you’re a freshman trafficker adjusting your search marketing beanie, an analyst on the Dean’s list, or a planner feeling like a 5th year student, you can find customized training based on your role to help you ace DoubleClick Search.

Go for extra credit and sign up to receive DoubleClick training updates in your inbox.

Posted by Justine Thomas, DoubleClick Search Product Trainer

Advertisers see Shopping campaign success with new optimization, reporting tools from the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite

2014-08-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

In March, we introduced Shopping campaigns support in DoubleClick Search, offering a simpler, more flexible way for retailers to manage their Product Listing Ads (PLAs). Thanks to these tools, advertisers have already seen success with Shopping campaigns. As Casandra Jones, Associate Director at iProspect, says: “It’s been incredibly helpful having DoubleClick Search be first to market with a solution for Shopping campaigns. We were able to transition to Shopping campaigns more quickly and determine best practices that work for our brands -- giving us a competitive edge, long before the majority of retailers hit the market.”

Since then, we’ve been focused on building solutions with the scale and speed you need to capture every retail opportunity. Now, we’re excited to announce three new tools from the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite to help make your reporting and optimization even easier. Below, we’ll unpack these features by highlighting the what, the why, and how customers are using our solutions today.

Automated campaign optimization with adaptive Shopping campaigns

	*What*: Adaptive Shopping campaigns is a new way to dynamically create and optimize your Shopping campaign structure, based on product performance. Native integration with Google Merchant Center means we’ll monitor your feed and automatically subdivide existing product groups by product ID, based on the conversion rates of the products in each group.
	*Why*: We’ve found that 90% of the median advertiser’s cost comes from only 9.5% of its products(1). However, advertisers often lump these high-spend products into bid groups with other, lower-converting products -- leading to bid values that are not optimized, based on relative performance. Adaptive Shopping campaigns ensure your most popular SKUs get the right bid by creating product groups for each item earning high traffic.
	*What do customers think?* Andrea Bywater, Marketing Coordinator of Paid Search at BuildDirect, says: “Using adaptive shopping campaigns will be incredibly helpful in helping us group ‘winning’ SKUs together -- especially when things get even busier with the holidays and Black Friday just around the corner. Not only will this be more effective in saving time; it’ll also help us save money on products with lower conversion rates.”

Smarter, faster bid optimization for Shopping campaigns

	*What*: Earlier this month, we rolled out bid optimization for Shopping campaigns -- giving you the ability to extend the same powerful bidding algorithms from our Performance Bidding Suite to your Shopping campaigns, with smarter bidding based on near real-time data.
	*Why*: We know bid optimization can make or break campaign results. Bidding strategies need to be flexible enough to meet your business objectives, while algorithms need to be fast enough to act quickly in a competitive landscape. With bid optimization for Shopping campaigns, you can: Easily define your goals -- setting individual bid strategies, or combining different strategies, just as you do with your DoubleClick Search text ads. Target precisely and efficiently by setting Shopping campaign bid strategies on campaigns, ad groups, or even product groups. Reach shoppers on the go by automatically setting a mobile bid modifier. And as with the rest of your bids, bid optimization for Shopping campaigns benefit from up-to-the-minute conversion data. This means you can use fresher data to more closely track to your promotion goals -- even during the busiest marketing days.
	*What do customers think?* Ashlee Wiltshire, Analytics & Technology Account Manager at Performics, recently helped her team implement Shopping campaign bid strategies for several of their key retail clients. Wiltshire says: “Within two weeks, we've seen CPCs come down 11.2% and ROAS improve by 3.4%. It's also freed up a lot of the teams’ time, and as a result we’re able to build out more granular campaigns without worrying about manually updating bids."

Better transaction insights with purchase detail reports (beta)

	*What*: Purchase detail reports (currently in beta) let you better understand the products consumers purchased, and the ads that drove those sales. Once you specify the products sold in a transaction using the DoubleClick floodlight tag, you can customize and report on specific product sales by any attribute, including color, size, product line, and style. Best of all, these reports are available for any type of campaign -- whether that’s text, Shopping, on AdWords or on Bing.
	*Why*: With ever-changing shifts in seasons and trends, retailers often focus on selling a certain products at a given time. Fashion advertisers, for example, need to sell the latest styles before they fall out of favor. In the past, figuring out if your search advertising actually lead to these product sales has been complex -- requiring lots of time and effort in reporting analysis. Purchase detail reports give granular transaction details for better insights into your campaign performance: Identify the impact of your advertising on achieving core business goals like maximizing profitability or selling off inventory. Improve ad targeting by matching ads to the products that consumers are most interested in purchasing. Understand the real value of brand and general terms in selling your highest margin or most important products.
	*What do customers think?* Justin Johnson, Paid Search Manager at Cabela’s, says: “Having insights into where we spend our money, in addition to what people are looking for, has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions. With this data, we have a better look into where we may not have adequate coverage, and are able to quickly make changes to address that. Being able to pull in margin data to see if certain keywords are actually better or worse at driving profitable traffic than we anticipated helps us be more thoughtful with our spending.”

Reach out to your DoubleClick Search representative or our support team at ds-support@google.com.

To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and smarter optimization, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Google+.

1. DoubleClick Search internal data, 2014

DS features in July

2014-08-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

In July, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

Attribution models: You can now choose from one of several multi-channel, pre-defined attribution models or models authored in DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM). An attribution model determines the method of distributing credit for a conversion among all of the activity in a conversion funnel. The information is reported in DoubleClick Search Floodlight columns. Learn more about selecting an attribution model.

Executive Reports: Combined mixed bar and line charts: You can now compare metrics and trends in a single chart in Executive Reports. One metric will display as bars and another metric as a line. Learn more.

Optimize Shopping campaigns using bid strategies: You can now apply ROI bid strategies to Shopping campaigns as well as individual product groups. You can even use the same bid strategy to manage bidding for both keywords and product groups and let DS determine the best bid for reaching your ROI goals. Learn more.

Sign in to multiple Google accounts: If you use different Google accounts to access different agencies or advertisers within DoubleClick Search (DS), you can sign in to multiple accounts in the same browser window. This allows you to quickly switch between accounts or use different accounts at the same time. Learn more.

We also updated the following features:

Enhanced Bing Ads support
- Exclude locations: To give you more control over where your Bing Ads display, you can now exclude locations from a Bing Ads campaign or ad group in the DoubleClick Search user interface or by bulksheet.
- Radius targets: You can use DoubleClick Search to remove radius targets that were added in Bing Ads. DS will remove the radius targets when it traffics the change to Bing Ads. Learn more.

Richer data analysis using the DoubleClick Search API
- Report on product groups: You can view performance metrics and settings for your Shopping campaign product groups by using the DS Reporting API.
- Attribute offline conversions to Shopping campaigns: You can use the DS API to attribute offline conversions to the right Shopping campaign ad and corresponding keyword, product target, or product group. Learn more about uploading offline conversions.

Use reserved URL parameters: You are now free to use any formerly reserved parameter name such as ds_s_aid and lid for tracking purposes. Just change your engine account's parameter-handling option to Include full URL (unencoded) and DoubleClick Search wraps your landing page URLs.

Yahoo! Japan device targeting removed: DoubleClick Search has removed device-targeting settings from Yahoo! JAPAN campaigns, both in the user interface and in bulksheets, because Yahoo! Japan no longer supports the ability to specifically target tablets and other mobile devices. You can still use mobile bid adjustments to adjust bids for ads on mobile devices such as laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Watch the recorded webinar for July features to see these updates in action.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Valuing Website Metrics: Introducing Bid Optimization Support for Google Analytics Goals in DoubleClick Search

2014-08-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

As part of our mission to offer the most actionable data and reporting, from all sources, DoubleClick Search lets you report on Google Analytics goals. You may not know that we also have the capability to use Google Analytics Goals as targets for DoubleClick Search bid-strategies. When you create a bid strategy in the Doubleclick Search Performance Bidding Suite, you can optimize to conversions and revenue based on Google Analytics goals and transactions. This feature extends the flexibility of DS bid strategies, which already support optimization to Floodlight activities and formula columns. This release also extends bid optimization support to goals based on site analytics metrics such as pages per visit and visit duration.

Make better decisions based on user behavior insights
Google Analytics goals make it possible to have user behavior prior to purchase drive your bidding decisions. Conversion windows vary by vertical. Some customers finalize their purchases/actions within minutes or hours, while other customers may take days, weeks or even months to research before converting. If you understand the propensity of a user to convert based on their session behavior, you can bid more for keywords that drive higher quality customers. This is where site analytics data comes in as it provides useful post click data such as "users from ad group X spend an average of 5 minutes on the site after clicking".

Our Google Analytics integration gives you access to powerful new metrics to enhance bid optimization and create custom models that not only include the final conversion but also values keywords that lead to pre-conversion user behaviors including time on site, pages viewed, etc.

Getting started with Google Analytics goals
Getting started with Google Analytics goals & DoubleClick Search bid-strategies is simple. They work in the same way as the DoubleClick Floodlight-targeted bid strategies you are already familiar with. Just create a new bid strategy using the wizard and select Conversions, Revenue, or Advanced targeting as the goal. Then Google Analytics can be selected as a conversion source (shown below).

If you want to mix Floodlight Tags and Google Analytics Goals in the same bid-strategy, first define the relative value of the Tags and Goal inside the formula column. For example, suppose you wanted a ROAS strategy for your travel agency. Your main objective is to drive revenue from ticket and package sales, but you value a user spending 10 minutes reading about vacation packages at $1.50 since you expect they will return later to buy. The following formula column would capture this valuation:

FL_ticket_revenue + FL_package_revenue + to_money(1.50 * GA_10_minute_session)

In the above formula: FL=Floodlight, GA=Google Analytics

Once you've created this formula columns, create a new bid strategy, in step 2 select the conversion source to be "formula column". If you haven’t linked your Google analytics account with DS, you can find a step by step guide here. If you are interested in using the site analytics level goals, please follow the guide here (note: you only need to complete Step 1: Transferring Property). To learn more about DS bid-strategies and Google Analytics integration, please check out our help center article.

Success with DS: Custom Floodlight Variables and Reporting

2014-08-05T10:31:00.003-07:00

Back in May we launched custom Floodlight variables (CFVs) in DoubleClick Search. CFVs allow you to track and report on non-PII user activity associated with conversions. If you use Floodlight tags to track conversions, you can now leverage CFV data in your DoubleClick Search reports.

CFVs can be either metrics or dimensions. Metrics reflect numeric data and dimensions reflect alphanumeric or numeric strings. Let’s say that I represent a bank and created a metric to capture the number of credit card sign ups and a dimension to track different credit card types, such as cc gold, cc silver...etc. With both metric and dimension data in DoubleClick Search I’m able to analyze the number of sign ups for each credit card type and make decisions about how to allocate the bank’s advertising budget.

Once CFVs are available in DoubleClick Search you can include CFV metrics in Floodlight columns and/or filter results by CFV dimensions. For example, I may want to see the number of credit card sign ups for a specific Floodlight tag and credit card type, such as “CC Gold”. For more info, please refer to this article.

For views containing Floodlight data, such as Actions, Transactions, or Floodlight columns, you can report on CFV dimensions using segmentation or dimension grouping. For example, I may want to understand how the different credit card types are performing across ad groups within a campaign. Segmenting a report by a CFV dimension will return a row with each ad group and CFV dimension value combination (e.g. one row for ad group #1 and cc gold & one row for ad group #1 and cc silver). If instead I want an aggregated view of CFV dimension data, I can select the CFV dimension from the Dimensions tab. This will return a row with data for each CFV dimension value (e.g. one row for cc gold & one row for cc silver).

To take advantage of this feature you’ll need to take the following steps:

Create CFVs in DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM). More info.
Add the CFVS to the Floodlight tags on your website. More info.
Set up CFVs within the Advertiser Settings section in DS. More info.

We encourage you to give CFVs a whirl and share your feedback and findings with your DS account management team.

Real-time in retail: Why acting quickly matters in search

2014-07-21T13:22:00.000-07:00

When consumers act, they act fast. Retailers can get a leg up in the marketplace by responding to consumers’ needs as they surface. While some events, such as holidays and championship games, can be anticipated, others, such as weather-related issues, cannot. Using real-time technologies in search, brands can dynamically adjust their reach, competitiveness and relevancy with their target audiences at the most critical times.

In a new Think Insights article, Casandra Jones, Account Director at iProspect, tells us the benefits of adopting SEM tools that act in real time to achieve search success as these important events and conversations occur.

Check out Casandra’s article on the Think Insights page here, and let us know what you think on Twitter or our Google+ page.

DS features in June

2014-07-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

In June, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

Public launch of Yahoo! JAPAN accounts in DS
We’re excited to announce the full launch of support for Yahoo! JAPAN campaigns in DS. You can create, manage, report on, and optimize Yahoo! JAPAN search campaigns in DS. To get started, you’ll first need to create a DS engine account for a Yahoo! JAPAN Listing Ads account. Once that’s set up, you can create and manage your campaigns under the account.
Report on AdWords estimated conversions
Estimated conversions is an AdWords feature that provides a holistic view of all conversions driven by your Google search advertising. This includes conversions starting on one device or browser and completing on another, or that start online and finish with a phone call. (The feature requires you to enable AdWords conversion tracking in your AdWords account.) You can now include the number of estimated total conversions and cross-device conversions in your DS reports. Learn more.
Executive Reporting: new web-view mode
You can now view executive reports online via a web-view mode without needing to download them. Learn more.

We also made the following feature updates:

New options for segmenting reports
DS now supports several new report segmentation options, such as segmenting reports on labels and applying date segments to the reports that you view in DS and that you download. In addition, in most reports you can now specify multiple segments, such as Floodlight activity and device. Learn more.
Updated time-range options for reporting tables
DS now supports new time-range options in reports, such as including data from the current day, selecting the start day for weekly ranges, and selecting your own custom range, such as the last 15 days or the 37 days. Learn more.
Shopping campaigns: Use the Dimensions tab instead of the Products tab
To analyze Shopping campaign performance based on product attributes, such as Category and Brand, you now use the Dimensions tab instead of the Products tab. Learn more.
New authorization process for Bing Ads accounts
Bing Ads is changing its sign-in process from username-password authentication to Microsoft Account authentication and authorization. If you’re changing the settings of an existing Bing Ads engine account in DS, you'll need to follow the new authorization process before you can save your changes. You do not need to update engine accounts yet if you aren’t making other changes. Learn more.
"Campaign target network" is now required when creating AdWords campaigns via bulksheet The "Campaign target network" column in a bulksheet specifies the advertising network (search, display, partner, and so on) that an AdWords campaign targets. Previously this column was optional, but as part of supporting the new AdWords “Search Network with Display Select” campaigns, DS now requires you to specify a value for AdWords campaigns. For details, download the "Campaign" or "All" upload template (XLSX format) and rest the mouse pointer on the "Campaign target network" column heading.

Watch the recorded webinar for June features to see these updates in action.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team