Category Archives: DoubleClick Search Blog

News, tips and information about coming changes to DoubleClick Search

Piston boosts ROAS by 51%, conversions by 50% for retail client using inventory-aware campaigns


A few months ago, we announced improvements to our inventory-aware campaigns feature, which automatically creates and optimizes a retailer’s search campaigns, based on updates made to their Google Merchant Center product feed. Since then, we’ve seen some impressive results across the board, showing that inventory-managed keywords more than doubled return on ad spend for heavy users(1).

Today, we wanted to highlight one of our success stories around this feature. The following story comes from Piston -- a bicoastal digital agency in the US, who helped their retail client maintain a “stylish profile” by keeping their campaigns relevant using inventory-aware campaigns.

After working around the clock to keep up with ever-changing product descriptions, prices, and landing pages during a busy holiday season, Piston turned to inventory-aware campaigns to scale their campaign management across their retail client’s 8,000+ products.

“When we’re looking for a solution, the key questions we ask are: can this save us time, can this save us money, and does it have features that can really help us impact our bottom line? And with DoubleClick inventory-aware campaigns, the answer was always ‘Yes’.” says Jennifer Johnstone, Senior Performance Marketing Strategist at Piston. “Inventory-aware campaigns allow us to save time from manually managing product inventory, enable us to spend our dollars on more efficient product level keywords, and help us drive more revenue than manual campaign builds.”

One quarter after adopting inventory-aware campaigns, Piston saw a 51% rise in ROAS, a 26% jump in CTR, and a 50% boost in conversion rate, compared to manually-managed campaigns. Additionally, inventory-aware campaigns allowed them to expand keyword coverage on both products and SKUs by 49% -- all while saving an estimated 38 hours over one quarter since implementation.

To get the full scoop on Piston’s success with inventory-aware campaigns, download the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog and Google+ page for even more customer success stories.

1. Google internal data, 2013

Get ready to rock the holidays with instant conversion data in DoubleClick Search

Keeping up with your retail search campaigns is no easy task. On top of monitoring sales, profits, inventory levels, and the competition, you also want to seize every opportunity during short-lived periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

At DoubleClick Search, we've been focused on delivering the speed you need to maximize performance during the holiday season. So, today we wanted to shine a light on our investments in instant conversion data and the benefits it delivers.

Meredith Spitz, Sr. Analyst with Starcom, tells us why fresh and accurate campaign metrics are important:

“Knowing how we’re performing throughout the day has allowed us to take advantage of more opportunities, instead of relying on stale data. We’ve been able to hit our goals more accurately because of instant conversion data.”

Immediate insights, 32% conversion lift in volatile search landscapes with near real-time data
Real-time data can power performance in two key ways. First, as real-time data flows into DoubleClick Search reports, your talented search team has the information they need to make campaign optimizations on the fly, and drive performance.  Up-to-the-minute insights make the difference between success and failure, while also saving time.




And when it comes to automated bid optimization, DoubleClick Search uses the same real-time data to update bids frequently - up to four times per day - using fresher data to more closely track to your goals.  

At iProspect, they’re already seeing the benefits of faster bid optimization, as shared by Account Supervisor Jessica Dearien,

“We’ve been able to test DoubleClick Search bid optimization with real-time data and we’ve already seen fantastic results. That’s even more critical moving into the high-volume shopping days of the holiday season.”

The below graphic illustrates how updating bids four times a day helps track closer to a $5 CPA goal than updating bids only once per day. Please note the $5 CPA is for example purposes only - your goal CPA will vary based on the characteristics of your business.



Our team conducted an internal study to understand just how helpful, in aggregate, changing bids more often could be.  We found that in volatile search landscapes, 4x daily bid changes improved conversion volume an average of 32% over 1x daily bid changes, while also keeping CPA slightly lower for a given CPA goal.*
*(Google internal study data)

In addition to bidding more frequently, DoubleClick Search’s bid optimization technology keeps your campaigns in top shape with capabilities like:
  • Near-real-time trend detection: We use both past and current data to predict future trends.  Our bid optimization takes into account seasonality, holiday periods, and sudden spikes in demand due to offline events like weather, accounting for fluctuations in traffic around external events.
  • Performance-based spend allocation: DoubleClick Search intelligently allocates budgets dynamically to various keywords, based on their performance.  It considers the opportunity cost of each keyword and allocates spend accordingly.
  • Portfolio bidding for low-volume keywords: These keywords are often overlooked by manual or simple bid optimization methods, as they provide little or no data to use. However, ignoring long-tail terms can add up across the board—leaving opportunity on the table. DoubleClick Search groups similar keywords together and bids on them as a whole.

To get the most out of your search campaigns this holiday season, rely on instant conversions from DoubleClick Search for the real-time insights and optimizations that will help your team succeed.  For more information, check out our instant conversions video and bid optimization white paper.

Dialing up better measurement: Announcing integration with top call tracking services

Today, we’re happy to announce new integrations that make it even easier for DoubleClick Search customers to track and report on conversions that happen via phone after interactions with search ads. Recent research shows that over half of smartphone users are taking advantage of click-to-call ad features from Google and others. In addition, around 7% of all mobile searches result in a phone call to a business, so understanding the impact of call data is important to analyzing and optimizing campaign ROI.


Ever since DoubleClick Search introduced the Conversions API, advertisers have been able to upload and report on the offline activities and conversions that make sense for their business, and take advantage of those insights in near real-time. Now we’re happy to announce official integrations with many of the major call tracking service providers in the US, EMEA and Australian/SEA markets.






Australia/SEA: AVANSER


We’re continuing to evaluate other providers for integration on an ongoing basis.


How advertisers and agencies benefit
Cramer Krasselt, an ad agency based out of Chicago, had historically used a number of tactics to measure offline conversions that resulted from their online campaigns. “We knew a lot of conversions were happening where the primary conversion occurs offline,” mentions Rocky Yost, Senior Analyst at Cramer Krasselt, “but we didn’t have an easy way of connecting it to our online campaigns.”


Yost continues, “Because of call tracking integration into DoubleClick Search technology, we now have one place to get reporting. And because it’s automatically uploaded into DoubleClick Search, conversions from customer calls are now also a part of DoubleClick Search bidding models. This integration has improved ROI by decreasing cost per click, giving us better positioning in search results, and in general, the bid management system is able to make a better choice because it has a more complete picture of completed transactions.”


Moreover, advertisers are able to see these conversions in near real-time, and can use the insights gained in both reporting and automated bid optimization immediately, instead of waiting 24 hours or more. As always, all reporting is aggregated and anonymous, and these conversions are not used to target advertising.


Continuing to invest for the future
We’re currently planning the next extensions of the Conversions API and offline conversion tracking. Stay tuned to the blog and our Google+ page for more.

DS features in September

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

  • Manage AdWords upgraded sitelinks: DS now supports AdWords upgraded sitelinks, which make it easy for you to reach customers with deeper information about your site or product. Upgraded sitelinks appear in your ads just like non-upgraded sitelinks, but they’re easier to manage and provide more detailed reporting. You can create and edit upgraded sitelinks in the DS UI or by upload, choose whether a sitelink is mobile preferred, specify start and end dates, and more.

  • Optimize bids to custom metrics using formula columns: The DS Performance Bidding Suite now supports the optimization of bids based on formula columns. Use the flexibility of formula columns to first define your own performance metrics, and then easily set up bid strategies that optimize to those metrics.

  • Manage Product Listing Ads in DS: Retail advertisers can now create and manage AdWords Product Listing Ads campaigns directly in DS and take advantage of the powerful features for managing search campaigns efficiently and delivering maximum ROI. You can easily view Merchant Center feeds and define product targets based on those feeds, preview the products that match your criteria in campaigns and product targets, and use DS bulksheets to upload large amounts of product targets at once.

  • Create match type-specific ad groups in inventory campaigns: These ad groups give you the power to more easily manage negative keywords, report by match type, enforce the bid you set, and more.

We also made the following feature updates:

  • Use special characters in template functions:  When using a template function for ads or keywords in inventory campaigns, you can now include “, [, and ] as special characters in your static text, as long as you escape them. Special characters make it easier for you to clean up data from the Merchant Center feed to prepare it for inventory-aware campaigns. To use these characters in a text string, they must be preceded by a backslash (\”, \[, \]).

  • New ROUND() template function for inventory-aware campaign templates. When you add ad templates in an inventory campaign, you can now use ROUND() as a function to round number values from the Merchant Center feed to a given decimal point. This allows you to shorten or round numeric values like price in ad copy, making it easier to fit ad copy character limits. For example, if the price listed for a given item is 25.79, ROUND(PRICE,0) outputs 26, while ROUND(PRICE,3) outputs 25.790.

Be sure to attend the New Feature Review monthly webinar to see these features in action. There are sessions on October 3, so register today!

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team