Category Archives: DoubleClick Search Blog

News, tips and information about coming changes to DoubleClick Search

New agency view and navigation bar offers more efficiency in DoubleClick Search

Today we’d like to let you know about two upcoming changes to the DoubleClick Search interface that we’ve designed to enhance usability and workflow efficiency: the new agency view that enables viewing and reporting across multiple advertisers, and the new navigation bar that provides a more useable way to quickly find and access information across your advertisers.

Agency view
Agencies using DoubleClick Search often spend time toggling between the many clients they manage. The new agency view in DoubleClick Search shows key data from multiple advertisers into one integrated, consistent view to help advertisers more easily act on the biggest opportunities. This new view allows agencies to:

  • Quickly compare client accounts at a glance, and prioritize their day’s activities
  • Use familiar reporting tools in DoubleClick Search, including date comparison, downloading reports, and customizing views, for better organization across accounts.



Navigation bar
The new navigation bar allows customers to seamlessly move across their accounts in the following ways:

  • A new horizontal layout minimizes scrolling and provides a full view of account components.
  • A “search-as-you-type” function lets you quickly find the objects you’re looking for.
  • “Favorites” labels for your advertisers or agencies ensure your most important ones stay at the top of your list.
  • Keyboard shortcuts let you easily select or deselect specific accounts



The new agency view and navigation bar are in early preview for DoubleClick Search customers. If you’re interested in learning more, contact your DoubleClick Search representative.

Success with DS series: Advanced features in executive reporting

This is the third post in our "Success with DS" series, highlighting tips and tricks around key DoubleClick Search features. Today’s submission is from Stephanie Bean -- DoubleClick Search Technical Product Specialist, and highlights some of the advanced capabilities of our newest launch -- executive reporting. 

We recently launched executive reporting -- a powerful new way to create custom visual reports to analyze data and share with your end clients, teammates and managers. As you sit down for a slice of pumpkin pie for the holidays, consider whipping together some useful pie, line and bar charts!

Executive reporting offers a number of advanced features that make holistic campaign reporting and analysis even more powerful. Today we’ll talk about two of them: downloading data and merging objects.

Download and share reports easily: 
Let’s say your management team is requesting a monthly report to understand how campaigns are performing, but they want something they can decipher at a glance, not a spreadsheet full of numbers. What should you do? This is a great use case for executive reporting. You can segment and visualize the data as needed in the DoubleClick Search UI, download the report, and quickly share it with management.

Tip: Reports can be downloaded as Microsoft Excel, but don’t forget about the option of saving or printing as PDF!



Merge objects to see trends across campaigns: 
While executive reporting includes all your search-based metrics, including engine stats, Google Analytics metrics, Floodlight columns, formula columns, and labels, we understand that you may want to analyze them across different lines of business within a single chart. Perhaps management wants to see how brand vs. non-brand terms are performing across your retail business. When multiple advertisers are included in one report, executive reporting identifies objects with the exact same name, such as Floodlight columns and labels, and merges them.

Tip: To take advantage of opportunities with merging, consider implementing a consistent naming convention for your labels across advertiser accounts.

Happy reporting!

What industry leaders value in a digital marketing platform

-- The following is cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog --

A few months ago, we launched the new version of DFA - DoubleClick Campaign Manager - globally.

The launch coincided with DFA’s 15th anniversary, so we wanted to use this opportunity to hear from some of our longtime partners. Surely, the world has changed since the early days of DFA, 15 years ago. With new opportunities to reach consumers in more ways than ever, come many new challenges for digital marketers. And marketing platforms must continuously evolve to meet the demands of a shifting and ever-growing industry. 

We asked industry leaders Kurt Unkel, President of Product & Solutions at VivaKi, Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, and Angelina Eng, VP of Digital Media Ops at Carat what they value in a platform in this day and age, and how DoubleClick has evolved to address those needs. Here’s what they told us:
  1. Efficiency, reliability, and simplicity are crucial to helping marketers streamline the campaign management process. Kurt Unkel said, ”What we get with DoubleClick that we struggle to see anywhere else is simplicity - the ability to integrate a lot of disparate technologies into a common stack. That’s something that really makes a difference in our business, because it allows us to focus on the bigger, strategic things.”
  2. Marketers need integration across channels and screens, and to be able to track and execute across their efforts within one system. Angelina Eng notes, “When we talk about all of these different things that are coming out - verification, video, mobile - how do make that work all together? A company that’s embracing that is one that we want to work with.” 
  3. Platforms must help marketers gain more actionable insights and act on them in real-time. “We have almost too much data at our disposal,” Megan Moldovan tells us, “and it can sometimes be hard to sift through all of that information and understand what it really means, and particularly understand what everything means when you look at it together.”


      With DoubleClick, we are investing in tools to help your digital teams work more efficiently to maximize your results across channels and screens. 

      In the coming weeks and months we will deep dive into many of the new product features available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Stay tuned to the blog to learn about the new tools that will simplify digital, help you engage across channels, and enable better decisions.

      If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

      Search marketing “stocking stuffers”: 5 festive strategies to lighten your workload this holiday season

      Running top-notch digital campaigns for the holidays can be a lot of work, and your to-do list can seem never-ending. On top of the festivities of the season, you’re 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 succeed online during one of the busiest times of the year, and reach the right people with the right message, at the drop of a (Santa) hat?

      Over the past few weeks, we’ve shared some best practices to whip your campaigns into shape, just in time for the holidays. Today, we wanted to recap a few of our favorite search marketing “stocking stuffers” to put the cheer back in your holiday and help you go faster, smarter, and better than ever before. With tools to scale and streamline your seasonal campaigns, find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your toasty apple cider -- while we take care of the rest.

      Deliver just the right gift with inventory-aware campaigns.
      Admit it: Manually managing your product inventory to stay on top of changing products, new promotions and seasonal search trends can leave you feeling like a Grinch. To lighten your load this holiday season, inventory-aware campaigns let you use your existing Google Merchant Center Feeds to automatically update your search campaigns -- showing the right product to the right customer, when they’re looking to buy. To get started with inventory-aware campaigns, check out some tips and tricks here.

      On our “nice” list: ATG Stores. Search advertising is the primary driver of traffic to ATG’s website and is key to helping ATG scale their online marketing across a breadth of products -- spanning four million SKUs from 3,500 different manufacturers. Using inventory-aware campaigns, ATG Stores expanded their reach with 160 new campaigns containing over 6 million new long-tail keywords -- resulting in 3x higher ROAS for their business. “Inventory-aware campaigns help our customers by showing them how many units we have in stock, and at what price. It’s going to be a much more compelling experience for our shoppers,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG.

      Do the work of a team of elves with automated rules.
      Stay up 'til midnight waiting for Santa -- not your campaign updates -- with a little help from automated rules. Schedule changes to specific ads and keywords, based on criteria you specify, to ensure that your holiday campaigns are in tip-top shape (which means you can spend less time on repetitive tasks, and more time setting up those reindeer traps!). To get started with automated rules, check out some tips and tricks here.

      On our “nice” list: Media Experts. As Chris Sylvestre, Manager of Search Marketing at Media Experts puts it, “Using automated rules this season, I’ll be more focused on what ingredients to put in my eggnog than I’ll be about our campaigns launching on time!” Maurice Revah, Senior Search Marketing Analyst, continues: “Automated rules allow us to activate and pause time sensitive promotions for our clients, regardless of the time of day. This enables us to operate outside of regular business hours, increasing productivity beyond measurement.”

      Solve the cross-channel puzzle with display remarketing from search ads.
      It’s not a miracle on 34th Street: you can get your search and display campaigns connected and performing this holiday season, and beyond. Display remarketing from search ads will help you close the loop on those last-minute shoppers who searched for your product or service but didn't convert. With this feature, re-engage your audience with display ads across exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across Google Display Network -- and do it all with an easy, tagless workflow. To get started with display remarketing from search ads, check out some tips and tricks here.

      Race to the top of the search page with real-time bid optimization.
      Looking for a solution that’ll help you go as fast as Rudolph? Put your best bid forward with our Performance Bidding Suite, designed to drive campaign performance through speedy, data-driven bid optimization. DoubleClick Search uses instant conversion data to update bids in near real-time, to more closely track to your seasonal goals, and help you get the ROI the size of a holiday feast. To get started with display remarketing from search ads, check out some tips and tricks here,

      Get a full view of your online advertising with more data integrations.
      To capture sales that occur after the inevitable rush to the malls, our Conversions API allows you to upload and edit conversions automatically so you can factor in purchases that started with your search ads, but resulted in transactions outside of your website. With this feature, you can upload new conversions to account for in-store transactions, or edit existing conversions to account for discounts and exchanges (...let’s face it -- we knew you didn’t need another pair of snowman pajamas).

      On our “nice” list: ymarketing. With the DoubleClick Search Conversions API, ymarketing easily and automatically integrated their call tracking information (as well as data from other outside data sources) into DoubleClick Search. Steven Hellbusch, Performance Media Supervisor at ymarketing, says: “With the Conversions API, we can attribute calls to the specific keyword by search engine in almost real time. The ability to then optimize off of 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.”

      Do you have a DoubleClick tip or trick that gets you through the busy holiday season?
      Email it to us at [email protected] with your name and title. We’ll feature the best tips here on the blog!

      Insights on the fly: Introducing executive reporting from DoubleClick Search

      Search marketers managing multiple campaigns across multiple accounts have to visualize their data in many different ways and tailor reporting for each group of stakeholders. Often, this means spending time pulling and aggregating reports, building macro-enabled spreadsheets, and wrangling your data into a specific format for a specific presentation -- only to do it all over again in a slightly different way the next time around.

      DoubleClick Search believes in making search marketing faster, and over the past year we’ve invested in time-saving features like bulk editing enhancements, new scheduling options, and automated rules. Today, we’re excited to announce executive reporting, a fundamentally new way to report on and share your search campaign data.

      With executive reporting, quickly get to the insights you need. Take the data from all your search campaigns, segment as needed, present it in an easily consumable visual format, and share with team members and stakeholders -- all within the UI, without spending hours downloading, reconciling, and updating spreadsheets.



      As we designed executive reporting, we worked closely with our clients to ensure our solution was built to address the unique needs of search marketers, agency account managers, and executives. Matt Grebow, Sr. Manager, Search Marketing at TSA, who participated heavily in our feedback sessions, shared his needs for richer export fidelity with the engineering team.

      “Most reporting platforms let you export data in a raw format, but this means extensive formatting in Excel and a lot of coding. DoubleClick Search Executive Reporting is flexible enough to use across clients with different goals. We can create templates on the fly and export reports in a client-ready format.” 

      Three ways to get started with executive reporting
      1. Daily account management and stakeholder communication: As an account manager, you can easily pick the subset of data and the visualizations you need for each set of stakeholders. The reports will stay up to date, and you can have them ready for meetings, or download and share through email at a moment’s notice -- saving you time for strategy.
      2. High-level team management and oversight: As a business leader, you can see an overview of your entire business in one place. If you’re needed for an escalation, you can quickly pull reports to understand account health and spot issues -- so you’re never unprepared.
      3. Market insights for competitive advantage: Another advantage of seeing your entire business at a glance: if you manage a large volume of accounts, you can quickly analyze market-level data and see which account or campaigns are underperforming. Then, dig in to understand why and get them back on track. 

      Keep an eye on the blog next week for a follow up “Success with DS” post on how the get the most out of executive reporting. In the meantime, give the new reports a try and let your account team know what you think. If you don't see the 'Executive Reports' tab in the DoubleClick Search interface, ask your account team to enable it for you.

      Over the coming months, we’ll continue to invest in easy, flexible reporting options for DoubleClick Search. If you have a data warehouse, business intelligence tool, or visualization software and you’re interested in seeing your search data alongside other metrics for reporting purposes, check out our reporting API, currently in open whitelist.

      Holiday Best Practices: Adjust your bid strategy settings for optimal performance

      This holiday season, we’re offering quick tips (30 minutes or less to implement!) to whip your campaigns into shape, just in time for the holidays. Reach out to your DoubleClick Search solutions consultant or the DoubleClick Search Support team for more advice on how to implement today’s tip.

      This week’s tips go out to anyone who is currently running bid strategies in their accounts. This holiday season, let Santa do all the heavy lifting while DoubleClick Search bid optimization updates your keywords automatically.

      DoubleClick Search uses near-instant conversion data to account for current trends like seasonality, holiday periods, or sudden spikes in demand due to offline events like weather. With this data-driven optimization, you can be sure that a burst of sale activity won't send a bid strategy haywire, but will help our algorithms quickly learn and deliver results, so you make the most bang for your buck during the holiday season. 

      If you have any kind of bid strategy implemented in your accounts, set up a saved view to make reporting and adjusting easier. Some useful columns to include are:
      • % at min bid -- this column shows you the amount of time each keyword has spent at their min bids, in the date range you’ve selected
      • % at max bid -- this column shows you the amount of time each keyword has spent at their max bids, in the date range you’ve selected
      • Primary constraint or bid strategy health -- these columns will be populated with reasons why the keyword might not have reached a target bid (for example, it was constrained by minimum or maximum bid limits)

      Now, let’s put these columns into practice. You can filter down this saved view to only show keywords that are hitting their min or max bids at over 50% of the time -- then think about adjusting the bid ranges for any keywords that show up in the filtered list. DoubleClick Search bid strategies do their best work with more relaxed bid constraints, so you want to minimize the number of keywords in this view.

      To further minimize the time you’ll spend monitoring your bid strategies, you can set up automated rules and alerts to notify you if keywords are hitting their min or max bids, not receiving clicks and/or conversions, or falling out of a certain position range goal you’ve set. Set up a recurring rule to email you a notification every day or week, and that will serve as the reminder for you to log in and check your saved view!

      In under 30 minutes, you can make sure your bid strategies are working to meet your goals over the holidays. Set aside your worries, knowing that you’ll get notifications in your inbox if anything needs adjusting. Reach out to the support team at [email protected] or your account reps for more bid strategy workflow and optimization tips or to get assistance with setting up the saved views or automated rules & alerts.

      DS features in October


      In October, we added the following feature to DoubleClick Search:

      • Optimize to Google Analytics conversions: When you create a conversion-based bid strategy in DoubleClick Search (DS), you can now optimize to conversions based on Google Analytics goals. This feature extends the conversion options for DS bid strategies, which already support optimization to Floodlight activities and formula columns. We’re adding another layer of flexibility by allowing you to use the conversions you track on Google Analytics to get the most out of your keyword bidding in DS.

      We also made the following feature updates:

      • New Google Analytics columns: By linking your DS and Google Analytics accounts, you can add columns to your DS reports that display data from Google Analytics. With this update, DS added the following columns: GA bounce rate, GA pages / visit, GA avg visit duration, and GA new visits %. DS also renamed some of its existing columns to align with the column names in Google Analytics. Learn more.

      • Updates to formula-column operators: The Days() and Months() operators in a formula column can now count backwards in addition to counting forwards. For example, if today is October 15, clicks.for_date_range(today(), days(-14)) returns the number of clicks from October 1 to October 14. Also, you no longer need to nest IF operators to evaluate multiple conditions and outcomes. For example, now you can write an IF operator like this: If(Impr / Num_days() < 10, "Very low run rate", Impr / Num_days() > 500, "Very high run rate", "").  Learn more.

      • New macros: DS has added new macros that you can use to pass additional information to your landing pages. Specifically, you can now pass the name and ID of the ad group, campaign, and engine account containing the keyword that was responsible for a click. See the available DoubleClick Search macros.

      • Download negative keywords and edit for upload: You can now download negative keywords and edit them for upload in DS. To help with creating negative keywords, we added templates specifically for negative keywords in the Help Center.

      • Easier to upload offline conversions: When you upload offline conversions using bulksheets, you can attribute those conversions to visits by just specifying the click ID. To attribute the conversion to a keyword, you can specify just the keyword ID. Learn more.

      • DoubleClick Natural Search now reports on HTTPS-encrypted searches: DoubleClick Natural Search now reports on encrypted natural searches in DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM), with the value Not provided. In addition, conversions can be attributed to encrypted natural searches, so you may see fewer paid search or display conversions. Learn more and see an example.

      Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

      Holiday Best Practices: Setting up labels for quick reporting and remarketing

      This holiday season, we’re offering quick tips (30 minutes or less to implement!) to whip your campaigns into shape, just in time for the holidays. Reach out to your DoubleClick Search solutions consultant or the DoubleClick Search Support team for more advice on how to implement today’s tip.

      Today’s tips are all about labels: use them for reporting or use them for remarketing, but make sure you use them!

      Are you looking to optimize your reporting for the holiday season? DoubleClick Search labels make it simple to keep track of your holiday promotions. For instance, assign one or more labels to your seasonal campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords to group them by initiative. For easy comparison, report on multiple labels to break down your holiday promotions into narrower silos (eg “Black Friday Branded Terms” vs “Black Friday Unbranded Terms”). When you’re ready, report on your labels to see statistics across your holiday promotion labels from a top level perspective.



      Want to spend even less time on reporting? Set up a scheduled report to have your data delivered to you, when you want it.

      Are you looking to take advantage of more cross-channel opportunities between search and display? You already have labels in place -- now make them actionable by putting them into a remarketing list, allowing you to target your search users with display ads. With display remarketing from search ads, re-engage your audience who clicked on your search ad, by showing them display ads across exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across Google Display Network. We recommend filtering to keywords with a high CTR and low conversion volume: convince your browsers to be buyers, and improve your overall conversion volume!

      You can simplify your reporting and give your holiday campaigns extra love with remarketing in less than 30 minutes. Reach out to the support team for more workflow and remarketing tips, to get assistance with structuring your labels, or for advice on setting up additional audience segments.

      Success with DS series: Shortcuts to time savings with automated rules

      This is the second post in our "Success with DS" series, highlighting tips and tricks around key DoubleClick Search features. Today’s post comes from Vijay Reddy, DoubleClick Platform Solutions Consultant.


      Last time, we heard Technical Specialist Emily Brodman talk about how you can enjoy the rest of your summer vacation with inventory-aware campaigns that automatically create and update your search campaigns, based on your Google Merchant Center feed. But now summer's gone, and Halloween's just around the corner. We figured you could use some of the time you save after implementing the automated rules below to put the finishing touches on your costume.



      You may already know the basics of automated rules. You may know that it’s an easy, reliable way to save time by automating the tasks you do everyday. But did you know you could use rules to detect a downward trend in your campaign volume, increase your budget to reverse the trend, and to label keywords for easy reporting. Too good to be true? It’s not. We’ll start small and work our way up to doing exactly that. Navigate to the campaigns tab of a particular engine account, select a couple of campaigns you want the rule to apply to, then configure as follows: 1) Set your condition


      2) Set your action to “Notify only”


      3) Schedule the rule to run and click “Save rule”

      Easy as 1,2,3 (literally)!


      Tip: The date range your condition is evaluated over is the date range of the view you created the rule from. You may be thinking, “This is great and all...but in the real world, different campaigns have different volumes. Does this mean I have to create a new rule of every campaign?”
      Formula columns to the rescue!  
      Instead of triggering off a static click threshold, let’s create a formula column that detects a trend in click volume: Create a formula column called “% Change Clicks.” You can copy the below formula: to_percent((Clicks.for_Date_Range(Yesterday()) -Clicks/num_days())/(Clicks/num_days())) Now recreate the previous rule, but this time trigger off the formula column you just created:

      You now have rule that detects if yesterday’s clicks have dropped more than 30% below the trailing 7 day average! Tip: If you liked that formula column, you can see several more creative examples of formula columns in action here.Now, as Emeril  would say, “Let’s kick it up a notch!” Our rule currently just notifies us that volume is trending down, but it doesn’t actually do anything about it. Enter Actions!
      Different object types have different actions available. For example, a rule on keywords would have the option to change its landing page or max CPC. Rules on campaigns have their own menu of actions. Since the rule in question is detecting a drop in click-volume, it may make sense to bump up the campaign’s budget in an attempt to get volume back up. Just model your action like below:

      Mission accomplished! What’s that you say? You want MORE automation? I thought you’d never ask. Extra Credit:
      If you thought Rules +formula columns was a powerful combo, wait till you throw labels into the mix. Try creating a parallel rule  that runs with the same condition as the previous rule, but instead of increasing budget it adds a label (e.g. “Budget Auto-Increased”). Now go back to the first rule and add NOT having that label as a condition for the first rule. This effectively means the each campaign can only be auto-increased once. What other creative ways can you think of to combine rules, formula columns, and labels?

      Holiday Best Practices: Automatically capturing longtail keywords with inventory aware campaigns


      This holiday season, we’re offering quick tips (30 minutes or less to implement!) to whip your campaigns into shape, just in time for the holidays. Reach out to your DS solutions consultant or the DoubleClick Search Support team for more advice on how to implement today’s tip.

      This tip goes out to retail advertisers who have linked their Merchant Center accounts to DoubleClick Search. Inventory campaigns, when carefully crafted with Brand + Category keywords and custom templates, can drive thousands of revenue dollars and save whole days of optimizing ad copy and keyword creation, but what if it’s mid-November and you’re underwater with thousands of new and updating products? Use inventory campaigns piecemeal to just create those pesky long-tail product-specific keywords, right when you need them.

      Try creating an inventory campaign that’s scoped to every product for a single, long-tail campaign that covers the full product inventory. Name of the game here is:
      • For your ad groups, split them out by AdWords_Grouping or Brand, whichever makes sense for the sorts of products you sell, or whatever might map to your PLA campaigns.
      • For your first ad template, make a static ad template, modeled from your best performing ad copy. Advertise your shipping deals, if possible!
      • For keyword templates, pick the quick wins for complete product coverage, like:
        • Title, phrase or exact match
        • Brand Title, broad match

      The inventory-aware campaign will handle all the rest -- pausing keywords if the products go out of stock/are removed from the feed, and adding new keywords as new products come into stock. DoubleClick Search integrates seamlessly with the Google Merchant Center feed for intraday updates (almost as good as elves helping you work).

      In less than 30 minutes, you can set your long-tail keywords up for success. Reach out to our support team for more inventory-aware implementation tips -- helping you answer your “what-if” scenarios, or structuring your campaign. Get your long-tail, full-coverage campaign implemented for all the holiday shoppers making their lists (and checking them twice).