Category Archives: DoubleClick Search Blog

News, tips and information about coming changes to DoubleClick Search

Join DoubleClick Search at SMX West in San Jose

SMX West is coming up in just a week, and the DoubleClick Search team hopes to see you there! 

We’ll be participating this year as part of the Learn with Google Classroom on Wednesday, March 12th. In addition to a speaking session at 3:30PM, we will have demo stations attached to the classroom and available all day for questions and conversation. Please come see us!

Learn with Google Classroom Agenda for March 12:

The Profit Driven Marketer, 9:00AM - 10:15AM
Don’t Miss the Shift, 10:45AM - 12:00PM
Maximizing Sales, 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Attribution Strategies - DoubleClick Search Session -  3:30PM - 4:45PM
Learn with Google Cocktail Hour, 4:45PM - 5:45PM

The full SMX West agenda can be found here. Be sure to check out our other Google speakers at the following presentations and panels:

March 11: Amit Singhal, SVP Engineering - A Conversation with Google Search Chief Amit Singhal, 5:00PM - 6:00PM (Keynote session)
March 12: Maile Ohye, Sr Developer Programs Engineer - Best Practices for Mobile SEO, 9:00AM - 10:15AM
March 13: Santiago Andrigo, Google Shopping Product Manager - Power Boosting Sales with PLAs, 10:45AM - 12:00PM
March 13: Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer - Meet the Search Engines, 1:30PM - 2:45PM

Still haven’t registered? Enter discount code GOOGLESMXW14 (case sensitive) and save 10%. Expo+ passes are free and get you into the Learn with Google Classroom, which includes DoubleClick Search.

We hope to see you in San Jose!

Holiday results: VivaKi Search Hub increases conversions by 360 percent and decreases costs by 27 percent with real-time bid optimization


During the 2013 holidays, we shared some tips and tricks on how to adjust your bid strategies to take advantage of seasonal opportunities. Today, we wanted to take a look back and highlight one of our holiday success stories with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite for real-time bid optimization. The following story comes from the VivaKi Search Hub -- VivaKi’s marketing support service that uses a deep knowledge of DoubleClick Search to drive results for their advertisers’ search programs.  

One of the VivaKi Search Hub’s advertisers, a large retail brand, looked to the team to overhaul their current strategies for maximizing results over the 2013 Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days. To prepare for this peak time, the team turned to the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite to automate bids based on real-time conversion data, and respond immediately to market changes. 

Timothy Lackhouse, Team Lead for Bid Strategy at the VivaKi Search Hub, was in charge of managing the advertiser’s bid strategies. “The bid strategies in DoubleClick Search are incredibly clear to set up and modify,” said Lackhouse. “With near real-time and granular reporting, we don’t need to spend countless hours or days waiting for the data. We’re able to get a deep level of insight into our performance right away -- assessing what’s working, what’s not, and making tweaks as necessary.” 

Within days of launching the new bid strategies, the positive results were irrefutable. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the VivaKi Search Hub was able to increase its advertiser’s conversions by 360 percent while lowering CPO by 27 percent -- all while saving 90 minutes a day. 

To get the full scoop on the VivaKi Search Hub’s success with the Performance Bidding Suite, read the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog and Google+ page for even more customer success stories.

DoubleClick Search teams with Boost Media for ad optimization

Search marketers understand that the right optimization tools can make or break campaign performance. But for many, optimizing ad creative can be a challenge: beyond just relying on algorithms, marketers can spend hours repeatedly writing, testing, and refining ad copy across large-scale campaigns. To address this, today we’re excited to extend the suite of DoubleClick optimization solutions by partnering with Boost Media (formerly BoostCTR) -- bringing the company’s ad creative optimization solution to the DoubleClick Search platform.

With DoubleClick Search, customers are already taking advantage of performance-driving features to save time and improve results -- including inventory-aware campaigns for dynamic ad creation, A/B landing page testing to drive traffic to the highest ROI landing pages, and the Performance Bidding Suite for real time bid optimization. By coupling Boost Media’s ad optimization platform with core workflow and optimization tools from DoubleClick Search, advertisers can benefit in the following ways:

  • Increase ROI with proven optimization algorithms. On top of intra-day keyword bidding from DoubleClick Search, Boost Media tests ads side-by-side, and chooses ads based on Boost Media’s proprietary algorithms. According to Boost Media, their clients experience an average of 30 percent increase in sales volume.
  • Scale campaigns, save time with custom-tailored ad creation. Boost Media offers a network of professional copywriters to develop engaging and high-performing ads at scale. Advertisers can expect unique and creatively written ad text, distinguished from the standard Dynamic Keyword Insertion templates that are often used today. According to Boost Media, advertisers save an average of 60 hours per month on writing, testing, and reporting on creative.
  • Cut costs by focusing on the right ads. Boost Media decreases cost by identifying and eliminating underperforming ads, allowing clients to capture additional, unseen revenue from their ad groups. According to Boost Media, users see an average 5% decrease in CPAs.

DoubleClick Search customers interested in using Boost Media can contact their DoubleClick Search Sales representatives.
We’ll continue to develop more optimization features to drive ROI for our customers. Stay tuned to learn about our plans in to deliver deep performance-driving capabilities across audience, attribution, and more.

A better e-commerce experience: Channel Intelligence and DoubleClick Search team up for enhanced feed management, optimization


In an earlier blog post, we highlighted how shoppers exposed to a brand’s Product Listing Ads (PLA) and text ads are more likely to engage with that brand. To take full advantage of this opportunity across ad formats, it’s important that retailers have both a complete, accurate product feed and the tools to manage their campaigns at scale.

Today we’re excited to announce that DoubleClick Search will integrate feed management and optimization capabilities from Channel Intelligence. As an add-on solution to the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, the first step in this integration combines the data feed expertise from Channel Intelligence with the core workflow and optimization features from DoubleClick Search. Especially with the announcement of Shopping campaigns, having a detailed product feed is crucial for retailers to run high-impact search campaigns. This integration benefits retailers in the following ways:

  • Build optimized product feeds. Channel Intelligence works with retailers to refine product feeds -- ensuring that the feed is comprehensive, the data is organized, and product attributes are accurate.
  • Use improved feeds to dynamically create and update PLAs and text ads. Channel Intelligence feeds can power DoubleClick Search inventory-aware campaigns for automated campaign management. Using these optimized product feeds, DoubleClick Search can generate customized PLAs and text ads at scale, and keep them up-to-date based on changes to a retailer’s physical inventory.
  • Optimize in real time to maximize ROI. To further boost performance across these ads, DoubleClick Search bid strategies update bids up to 4 times a day, based on up-to-the-minute conversion information. This scale and speed allows retailers to respond to product inventory changes and market trends at the drop of a hat -- even during the busiest holiday shopping days.

Performics pilots solution for major retail client
Global leader Performics is one of the first agencies to take advantage of the integrated offering for one of their clients, a large department store retailer.

"We're really excited to team with Channel Intelligence and DoubleClick Search to optimize and fully integrate the search experience for our retail brands,” says Eric Papczun, President US of Performics. “The integration is greater than the sum of its parts, and we feel that these combined technologies will give our clients a clear competitive edge in the marketplace."

Even more to come
To learn more, join us for a webinar on March 10th where we’ll cover the integration, as well as discuss the power of moving toward real-time for retail campaigns. Sign up for the webinar here http://goo.gl/cBlAcx

Our teams will also be attending eTail West coming up March 3 - 6. Come meet us during the pre-day panels and roundtables, hear us present a keynote on Day 3, or find us on the conference floor.

ymarketing boosts performance for Clark Pest Control, while saving 20-30 hours per week with the DoubleClick Search Conversions API




Earlier last year, we announced improvements to our Conversions API -- a flexible offline conversion platform that lets you automatically upload, report, and optimize on offline data (like calls) in near real-time. Today, we wanted to highlight one of our success stories around this feature. The following story comes from ymarketing, a full-service digital agency who adopted the Conversions API to fuel their search campaigns with offline call data -- giving them access to more powerful insights than ever before.

Tired of importing and reconciling call data into their standard online reporting manually, ymarketing moved one of their clients, Clark Pest Control, to DoubleClick Search to take advantage of call tracking integrations from the Conversions API. Because Clark Pest Control’s prospective customers would often schedule their first appointments by phone, having the ability to optimize from offline call data was key. Today, DoubleClick Search integrates with ymarketing’s call tracking partner, Mongoose -- one of many call-tracking service providers working with DoubleClick -- ensuring that their client’s reporting reflects the most up-to-date call information for more insightful analysis and optimization. 

Steven Hellbusch, Performance Media Supervisor at ymarketing, says, “With the Conversions API, we have the ability to attribute calls to the specific keyword by search engine in almost real time. The ability to then optimize from both online and offline conversions has allowed us to better meet our clients’ goals. With all of our data in one place, we have a more accurate picture of what’s happening from a user experience, and more importantly, we have ability to unearth new opportunities for our client.” 

A month after implementing this solution for Clark Pest Control, ymarketing was impressed by the results: the team increased conversions by 173%, while cost per action decreased by 20%, and conversion rate doubled from 16% to 32%. On top of these significant performance gains, the team was able to save an estimated 20-30 hours of work a week.

To get the full scoop on ymarketing’s success with the DoubleClick Search Conversions API, read the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog and Google+ page for even more customer success stories.

Shopping campaigns support coming to the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite

Yesterday, the AdWords team announced the full launch of Shopping campaigns -- a streamlined way to organize, bid and report on your Product Listing Ads. The team also announced that they will be working closely with search management platforms to support these features.

We’re excited to fully support Shopping campaigns in DoubleClick Search in the coming weeks. Delivering smarter, faster tools for retailers is at the heart of our DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite investments, and with Shopping campaigns, we look forward to further helping marketers run effective search campaigns for their entire product catalogue.

For updates on our support of Shopping campaigns, stay tuned on the DoubleClick search blog, or follow us on Google+.


Making eyes at ROI: Love notes from DoubleClick customers




Each year, people are falling deeper in love with Valentine’s Day; in fact, this year’s numbers show consumers will spend $1.6 billion on candy to celebrate the day of love. And while Cupid’s been busy pairing up sweethearts, here at DoubleClick, we’ve been focused on connecting digital marketers with the right audiences to boost performance for their online marketing campaigns. To share that warm and fuzzy feeling, today we’re highlighting love notes from our top clients who are making eyes at ROI -- showcasing just a few ways they’re winning the hearts of consumers with faster, smarter tools from DoubleClick. 

Make sure your valentine knows you exist, with a creative message they can’t resist.
Every Romeo knows that snagging the prettiest Juliet starts with the perfect words and a timely delivery. That’s why Unfold Agency’s Brick Rucker and Daniel Weisinger have been using DoubleClick Rich Media for years to build beautiful creative messages that they can get in front of their target audience at the right time. Because they can review, approve and publish all their creatives themselves, they’re able to quickly turn their campaigns around and get them live on a deadline. 

“We believe in turning around creative quickly,” Weisinger says. “And most of the ad units we build are really complex.” By using DoubleClick, Unfold is able to push every banner as far as it can go, building innovative and engaging experiences within their rich media ad units. One recent creative even coordinated the ad unit with the surrounding skin of the website to provide a holistic brand experience for the user. “We’ve been using DoubleClick Studio for years...We’re as good as we are because DoubleClick created the platform for us.” 

Make it love at first ‘site’ with a sleek, new interface
Now that you have just the right message for your Valentine, you’ll also need to look sleek to really impress them. That’s why with DoubleClick Campaign Manager - the new version of DFA - we focused on building a beautiful, intuitive interface to help you work more efficiency and maximize your results across screens. 

For all those who have already upgraded to DoubleClick Campaign Manager, it’s been love at first ‘site’. Power users from Situation Interactive - Mara Winkler, Senior Media Planner, and Joyce Tse, Media Coordinator - told us about the benefits they’re seeing from using the new trafficking interface: “With the upgrade to DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we’ve been able to streamline the trafficking process. The new trafficking workflow makes it easy to edit everything without switching pages, and allows us to use our time more efficiently. For example, when we swap creative it’s an extremely easy and intuitive process, and changes are reflected almost immediately. This helps us to ensure that the correct creative is running at all times.”

Go ga-ga over programmatic buying
As Cupid would have it, no meaningful connections with your sweetheart should be overlooked, and neither should an opportunity to connect or reconnect with your customers. 

The agency Deutsch LA turned to programmatic to help a major real estate company reach customers at scale, at the lowest possible cost. To drive success, Deutsch brought the best of targeting, formats and inventory together on the DoubleClick Bid Manager platform.

To maximize share-of-voice, the team paired contextual and audience targeting using both display and video formats. Best-in-class semantic contextual targeting ensured they could engage users in the moment they read content related to their client’s products. While contextual comprised of 20% of campaign spend, it drove the highest clickthrough rate, at a CPA 50% lower than the rest of their buy. Stephanie Waddle, VP and Digital Associate Media Director at Deutsch LA tells us why she’s a fan: “Targeting endemic content is important for our client. It qualifies our audience and drives lower CPAs. In addition, it keeps them top of mind in a very competitive category.” 

The team also coupled their cross-exchange buy with a programmatic direct buy, to augment reach with increased focus on private marketplaces. Integrating their reserved and programmatic display buy within the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform gave the team added efficiencies and fresh, holistic reporting across their buy.

Get your heart racing with real-time insights
And when it comes to seeing the results of your efforts, any Valentine’s Day planner knows it’s never good to wait until the last minute -- not with dinner reservations, and certainly not with your digital campaigns. 

With instant conversions in DoubleClick Search, DigitasLBi was able to analyze their performance in a heartbeat, and use that up-to-the-minute information to influence bid decisions. “It’s been a great tool for DigitasLBi,” says Ashley Tsoumas, Search Marketing Analyst at DigitasLBi. “DoubleClick Search makes bid and budget adjustments automatically based on your goals, and then within the same day, you have an understanding of how those adjustments have impacted the overall business.” For one particular account across all Google and Bing keywords, these optimizations from instant conversion feedback contributed to 30% more orders at 68% lower CPO, month-over-month.

Customers are feeling the real-time romance across the DoubleClick platform, too. Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, tells us how unified reporting lets her team take advantage of every opportunity across their digital marketing with fresh, accurate data:  "Integration of search, display, RTB -- the ability to track all of that within one system, see how thats impacting media and actually start to act on that in real-time across all channels is an amazing new feature."

For more customer love stories, be sure to check out our list of case studies here. 

Happy Valentine’s Day from all of us at DoubleClick!

DS features in January

In January, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search:

  • Inventory Product Listing Ads campaigns
    This release introduces a new type of campaign: an inventory Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaign, which makes it easy to scale up your PLA advertising with detailed reports and bidding on each of your individual products. Inventory PLA campaigns automatically generate ad groups and granular product targets for Product Listing Ads from data in your Merchant Center account.     Learn more.

  • Reporting API
    You can now use the DoubleClick Search API to programmatically download reports. You can combine the API data with data you already have about your products, customers, and business goals (from a CRM system, for example) to complete the picture of your search advertising impact.     Learn more.

  • Assess your bid strategy’s health
    The new     Bid strategy health column displays messages about issues that prevent a bid strategy from performing optimally. If you click the message, DS navigates to the location in the UI in which you can address the issue. Learn more.

We also made the following feature updates:

  • Google Analytics metrics and goals in Executive Reporting
    If you use Google Analytics to track your conversions, you can now enhance your     executive reports with GA metrics and goals for multiple advertisers. For example, you can create a single chart that compares GA new visits with overall revenue for all of your advertisers.

  • More actions and notification options in automated rules and bulk edits
    We made the following improvements to     automated rules and bulk edits (including scheduled edits):
    • You can now perform bulk edits and automated rules on a list of product targets.
    • Change bid strategy and Change mobile bid adjustment % are new options when setting up a bulk edit or automated rule for campaigns or ad groups.
    • When setting up your actions and alerts for a rule, you have more options for when to receive an email. For example, you can choose to receive emails only when a problem occurs.

  • Improved support of targeting settings for Bing Ads ad groups
    When you     create or edit an ad group in a Bing Ads engine account, you'll notice that the Languages, Locations, and Devices settings have been changed to more accurately reflect the way Bing Ads organizes these settings.

Be sure to attend the New Feature Review monthly webinar to see these features in action. There are sessions on February 6, so register today!

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Introducing the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite: A smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management


Here at DoubleClick Search, we’ve been focused on developing tailored solutions for retail advertisers  -- delivering the scale, performance, and speed our customers need to maximize revenue for their businesses. Today, we’re excited to introduce the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, a robust toolset offering a smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management. The suite is comprised of solutions that help you automatically create and update text ad and PLA campaigns based on your product catalog, leverage real-time data to optimize against your product or category-level business goals, and measure it all with flexible, product-based reports.

Putting “product” at the core of commerce investments
We designed the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite with products at the core, letting you efficiently build, manage, and optimize campaigns by seamlessly integrating with your existing product investments. As the only platform directly integrated with Google Merchant Center, we make your product inventory visible and accessible within DoubleClick Search -- meaning there’s no need to navigate a separate interface, manage a manual upload, or wait for a separate team to deliver product feed data. Instead, anyone on your marketing team can act on live updates, as they happen.

For example, inventory-aware campaigns uses this live product information to automatically create and update text ads, keywords, and bids based on real-time changes to your Google Merchant Center feed -- inclusive of updates to pricing, availability, product descriptions, and more -- with no extra work, and at no extra cost to set up.

For ATG Stores, an ecommerce company for home goods, the ability to directly interact with Google Merchant Center data in DoubleClick Search was crucial in allowing the team to quickly iterate across their four million SKUs. “Inventory-aware campaigns have been a game changer,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG Stores. “It’s impressive to see that what would previously have taken a full week to do is now being updated in the system in less than an hour.” In addition to time savings, this smart automation also helped the team take advantage of broader long-tail keyword coverage to widen reach and uncover incremental revenue. As a result, ATG Stores tripled their return on ad spend (ROAS) for their inventory-managed campaigns.

Today, we’re extending the power of this product-centric automation with two new capabilities for Product Listing Ads (PLAs):

  • Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation, an extension of inventory-aware campaigns, lets you automatically generate and update PLA campaigns in real time, based on your Google Merchant Center feed.
  • Product Listing Ads optimization with intra-day bidding based on the freshest data lets you react quickly to changes in the market -- executing bids to meet your ROI goals on both high-volume products, as well as the long tail.

Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation
In addition to your text ads, you can now dynamically manage your PLA campaigns using the same, seamless workflow you use for the rest of your campaigns  -- ensuring you’re always up to date, maximizing coverage, and driving better ROAS and volume.

Already, advertisers are seeing the benefits. “The ability to auto-generate PLA campaigns from existing product inventory drastically simplifies our setup process,” said Carissa McStay, Associate Manager at global marketing firm The Search Agency. “I was able to generate new PLA campaigns with over 1000 ad groups by product type in a matter of minutes -- not only saving us hours of time, but ensuring that our new customers see the most compelling ads that are relevant to them.”

Product Listing Ads optimization (beta)
Our Performance Bidding Suite offers the flexibility to optimize from a variety of signals and conversion sources including formula columns, external data (like calls), and Google Analytics goals; now, these same powerful bidding algorithms extend to your PLA campaigns. With more product-level information available, DoubleClick Search bid strategies can fine-tune bids on high-volume products to drive the most revenue, as well as handle the long-tail products that may receive less traffic.

And like with the rest of DoubleClick Search bid strategies, PLA bid strategies benefit from access to the same real-time data, with bids based on up-to-the-minute conversions to capture every new opportunity. This allows advertisers to respond to market changes at the drop of a hat -- even during the busiest holiday shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Valentine’s Day.

As the global leader in performance marketing, iProspect understands that speed is often the difference between seized and missed opportunities for retail clients. "Real-time is the future of retail, and DoubleClick is leading the way with the ability to optimize from real-time conversion information,” says Jeremy Hull, Director of Bought Media at iProspect. “With fast, accurate data, DoubleClick Search offers clients the tools they need to optimize throughout the day as traffic shifts occur.”

Just the beginning
This product-centric focus will continue to guide our feature development, helping us quickly innovate additional tools that will drive revenue for the ecommerce business. To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and new technology integrations and partnerships, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, or follow us on Google+.

DS features in November/December


In November and December, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search:

  • Executive Reporting
    When it’s time to present performance data to your clients or executives, instead of manually downloading detailed data and distilling it into useful summaries, you can now create an executive report in DoubleClick Search (DS). DS executive reports     are a powerful new way to create custom visual reports to analyze data and share with your end clients, teammates, and managers. Learn more.

  • Analyze performance for all keywords or ads at the advertiser level
    You can now see the performance data for all of an advertiser’s keywords or ads across all engines. Most DS customers have multiple engine accounts, so this feature makes it easier to understand aggregate/overall performance. In the DS UI, simply navigate to an advertiser and click the Keywords tab or Ads tab.     Learn more.

We also made the following feature updates:

  • Better summary data for your bid strategies
    The bid strategy summary page now focuses on conversions, revenue, and bid strategy status by displaying the Bid strategy performance view by default. In addition to displaying goal type, target metric, and constraints, the Bid strategy performance view has been updated with new columns that show the conversion and revenue statistics relevant to that bid strategy.     Learn more.

  • Apply bid strategies to campaigns/ad groups via bulksheets: You can now use the Bid strategy column in a bulksheet to apply existing bid strategies to campaigns or ad groups. This makes it much easier to apply bid strategies to multiple campaigns and ad groups. Learn more.

  • Use bulksheets to create, change, and delete labels
    There’s a new bulksheet that makes it easier to create multiple labels at once, and it also allows you to change and delete labels.     Learn more.

  • Segment sitelink performance data by campaign
    You can now view sitelink performance by campaign in a single view. For example, if you applied a sitelink to 3 campaigns in a single AdWords engine account, you can see a list of the campaigns with the number of sitelink clicks in each campaign.     Learn more.


Posted by the DoubleClick Search team