Tag Archives: Advertisers

DoubleClick Search Holiday Series: Automate your holiday campaigns

This is the second in post our DoubleClick Search Holiday Series. In our first post, we talked about preparation. Today, we cover automation.

The holidays always roll around too quickly. But this year, with DoubleClick Search, you can “set it, not sweat it.” Set rules for sales, schedule edits, and determine your parameters, then let DoubleClick Search handle the automated, 24/7 campaign management. We’ve created the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays to help you succeed.

Bulksheets

DoubleClick Search scheduled uploads let you prepare and validate bulksheets for bulk campaign actions in advance, then have them uploaded at a scheduled time and date, giving you peace of mind during this busy time.

Automated rules

Automated rules and alerts let you schedule changes to specific campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords, based on your criteria. Use formula columns in rules to deliver everything on your wish list. You can even specify advanced logic for your changes using DoubleClick Search formula columns. Learn more.

For example:
  • Daily at 2 P.M., raise budget by 20% for campaigns that have more than 5 conversions and have exhausted more than 80% of your daily budget.
  • Every Friday, pause all keywords that have had more than 1,000 clicks but zero conversions during the previous week.
  • Every Monday, raise max CPC by 15% for keywords that met all of the following criteria from the previous week:
    • More than 50 conversions
    • Cost per conversion under $10
    • Trigger ads in positions worse than three

Inventory-aware campaigns

Inventory-aware campaigns automatically convert your product catalog to highly relevant, up-to-date search ads. Reach your customers with the right message, every time, with inventory-aware campaigns that automatically update your ads whenever your products change, such as when a product goes out of stock or the price changes.

To give you even greater control over your inventory-aware campaigns this holiday season, we’ve added new functionality. Inventory-aware campaigns now allow you to highlight the number of varieties of an item you have available, such as “Over 90 styles of men’s ski jackets”, so your customers will know you offer a wide selection to choose from. We also added new functions to make setting up inventory-aware campaigns easy, even if your feed isn't perfect, such as the ability to trim, clean or reduce words, automatically.

In our next post, we’ll talk about measurement. Learn more about all five steps to turn searchers into customers this holiday season with the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Register now for a webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

DoubleClick Search Holiday Series: Prepare to make your holidays merry

This is our first post in the DoubleClick Search Holiday Series to help you get ready for the 2015 holiday shopping season—a critical time for online marketers and retailers. Last year, consumers spent $616.1 billion on retail purchases during November and December1. As you might know from Google’s 5 Holiday Shopping Trends to Watch in 2015, 40 percent of that spend was made online.

In fact, 2014 was the most-connected holiday shopping season we’ve ever seen. Shoppers spent an unprecedented amount of time researching and buying online:

  • 78% used the internet for holiday research vs. 29% relied on friends, relatives, or colleagues (down from 2013)2.
  • 40% of holiday shopping was online2.
  • 53% of those who shopped online used smartphones or tablets, up from 41% the previous year3.

For you, this represents a huge opportunity to reach shoppers, either while they're still researching or when they're actually ready to buy. To help you capture this opportunity, we’ve created the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays that walks through five key steps for holiday success. Today, we’ll address the first step: Preparation.

  • First, unify your data for insights and action. Effective tagging will help track your success during the holidays.
  • Your labels are important, too. Track your holiday promotions, and make them easy to identify in reports by assigning labels to your seasonal campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords.
  • Finally, don’t neglect offline data integration. Often, conversions start online and finish offline. Use the DoubleClick Search conversions API to report on and optimize conversions from external data, including call-tracking and in-store transactions.

In our next post, we’ll talk about automation. Learn more about all five steps in the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Register now for a webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search
1 National Retail Federation, “Retail Holiday Sales Increase 4 Percent,” January 14, 2015.
2 Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,500.
3 Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,167, January 2014, n = 1,077.

New DoubleClick Search features to help you turn searchers into customers this holiday season

For search marketers, the holiday season starts well before the holidays. You’re busy making preparations to help holiday shoppers check items off their list with you. To make your job easier, we’ve been working hard all summer to bring new campaign management, measurement, and workflow features to DoubleClick Search.

Manage mobile campaigns on Bing and Yahoo! Japan more easily

Mobile search will influence the 2015 holiday shopping season more than any other shopping season before it. The Inside AdWords blog shared in May that more Google searches now take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan. Google's Micro-Moments Guide indicates that mobile conversion rates have shot up by 29% in the last year alone. DoubleClick Search has two new features that will help you capture the mobile search opportunity.

First, we've added mobile and tablet bid adjustments for Bing Ads campaigns. This makes it easy for you to adjust to Unified Device Targeting (UDT) in DoubleClick Search with mobile and tablet bid adjustments for Bing Ads that work just like mobile bid adjustments for AdWords.

Second, we've made it easier to optimize mobile bid adjustments on Yahoo! Japan. You can now set adjustments at the ad group level that will trump adjustments at the campaign level.

Improve the relevance of inventory keyword campaigns

On mobile and desktop, relevance is a key component of search marketing success. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in higher positions, and bring you the most success.

DoubleClick Search retail advertisers use inventory-aware campaigns to build highly relevant campaigns at scale by creating templates that automatically build keywords and ads based on their product feeds. We've made these templates even more powerful with new functions to let you fine-tune and customize your keywords and ad content.

Stay abreast of campaign performance

New DoubleClick Search features for measuring results will help you stay on top of campaign performance throughout the season and beyond.

You can now use bulksheets or the DoubleClick Search API to attribute a conversion in a shopping campaign to a specific product in your inventory feed. To help you analyze and optimize at scale, we've added three reports to the DoubleClick Search reporting API.

We've also made it a cinch to analyze what's happening in the Black Friday to Cyber Monday stretch, or any other period of time, with more flexible date functions for formula columns. For example, you can use Date subtraction to calculate the number of days between two dates, or use weeknum to return the week number for a specified date.

Enjoy improvements to usability and visibility

In order to help you get campaign work done fast, we've enhanced the usability and visibility of some DoubleClick Search features based on your feedback. You can now apply labels when you create new keywords or customize and rename report views.

If you're looking to use DoubleClick attribution models to better understand what's driving conversions, we now automatically pre-populate the time decay model so you can start using it immediately.

Let the holiday season begin

Today's announcement is the culmination of many months of work to help make your holiday campaigns as streamlined and rewarding as possible.

Visit the DoubleClick Search Help Center for a complete overview of what's new and view trainings to help you get started.

Posted by Anthony Chavez
Product Management Director, DoubleClick Search

Webinar: Reach the right audience, faster with comScore vCE in DoubleClick

Just a few weeks ago we announced the release of comScore vCE in DoubleClick, the first completely tagless GRP measurement solution integrated directly into an ad server. With comScore vCE in DoubleClick, Brand Marketers in the US get the trusted comScore audience measurement solution for both video and display ads that delivers 100% coverage.

Register now for a webinar on October 21st at 11am PST / 2pm EST, where you’ll be joined by Anne Hunter, SVP Global Marketing Strategy at comScore, Inc. and Paul Trieu, Product Manager at Google, to learn about:

  • How reach, demographics and GRPs can help enhance campaign success
  • Share practical tips for enabling comScore vCE in DoubleClick in DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Campaign Manager
  • Unveil best practices on using comScore vCE in DoubleClick to measure campaigns
  • Perform a demo of the new simple and easy to read reports
  • Host Q&A
Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing, Video Platforms & Brand Measurement, Google

Programmatic momentum across our platforms

Mobile has forever changed the way we live, and it’s forever changed the way we engage with brands. It has fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments -- the moments in time when consumers' preferences are shaped and decisions are made. Each one is a critical opportunity for brands, and increasingly we are seeing advertisers turn to programmatic to reach and engage audiences everywhere and win these moments.

As the industry gears up for Advertising Week next week, I want to reflect on the momentum we’re seeing in programmatic buying across our platforms, especially in mobile. At DoubleClick, the number of advertisers using our programmatic solutions has grown nearly 2x in the last 18 months, and now includes over 80% of the AdAge top 100 advertisers. More broadly, IDC estimates that programmatic spending on mobile display and video advertising in the U.S. will grow from $4.7 billion in 2015 to $22.8 billion in 2019 (a CAGR of 65%.)1

With people switching between multiple devices throughout their day and increasing their consumption of mobile video, advertisers have changed how and where they buy programmatically in order to connect with people in micro-moments. Both mobile and video impressions served on DoubleClick Bid Manager have grown more than 3.5x since last year, and impressions served via direct deals that are transacted programmatically have nearly tripled. To provide you with the largest pool of inventory, DoubleClick Bid Manager has access to 70 exchanges and API partners, and we prioritize mobile and video inventory sources when identifying new integrations to pursue.

Ultimately, our engineers spend each day thinking about how to build innovative products that help you win these micro-moments by connecting with the people you want to reach, across screens and at scale. The growth in usage of our platforms shows that we are making progress, but we are even more excited for what's to come. Google has a great line-up of talks set for next week in New York - we hope to see you there.

Posted by Neal Mohan
VP, Display & Video Advertising, Google
1. IDC Report #256782, June 2015 “WW and US Programmatic growth forecasts, 2015-2019”

Programmatic helps brands make the most of micro-moments

Every day, your audience is filling their days with hundreds if not thousands of micro-moments—intent-rich moments when preferences are shaped and decisions are made. As consumers spread their attention across more and more screens and channels, those moments can happen almost anywhere, anytime. People search on their smartphones while in front of the TV. They watch YouTube videos on their tablets while texting their friends. They open a mobile app to shop for the perfect gift, then head to the store to buy it. With mobile devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find and buy anything, anytime.

For marketers, this means the purchase funnel is wildly more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

“Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent.”

It’s hard to plan for nonlinear purchase paths, but programmatic advertising can help, enabling brands to reach the right person with the right message in the moment of opportunity. Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent. That’s a powerful proposition, and it’s why programmatic advertising spend is projected to grow by more than 77% this year.1

In this article, we share four tips for using programmatic to win these micro-moments and examples of brands that are doing it right.

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.

Cutting unwanted ad injectors out of advertising

For the last few months, we’ve been raising awareness of the ad injection economy, showing how unwanted ad injectors can hurt user experience, jeopardize user security, and generate significant volumes of unwanted ads. We’ve used learnings from our research to prevent and remove unwanted ad injectors from Google services and improve our policies and technologies to make it more difficult to spread this unwanted software.

Today, we’re announcing a new measure to remove injected ads from the advertising ecosystem, including an automated filter in DoubleClick Bid Manager that removes impressions generated by ad injectors before any bid is made.

Unwanted ad injectors: disliked by users, advertisers, and publishers

Unwanted ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, in the pages users visit while browsing the web. Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

We’ve received almost 300,000 user complaints about them in Chrome since the beginning of 2015—more than any other issue, and it’s no wonder. Ad injectors affect all sites equally. You wouldn’t be happy if you tried to get the morning news and saw this:

Not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing them in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

Ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.

Removing injected inventory from advertising

Earlier this quarter, we launched an automated filter on DoubleClick Bid Manager to prevent advertisers from buying injected ads across the web. This new system detects ad injection and proactively creates a blacklist that prevents our systems from bidding on injected inventory. Advertisers and agencies using our platforms are already protected. No adjustments are needed. No settings to change.

We currently blacklist 1.4% of the inventory accessed by DoubleClick Bid Manager across exchanges. However, we’ve found this percentage varies widely by provider. Below is a breakdown showing the filtered percentages across some of the largest exchanges:

We’ve always enforced policies against the sale of injected inventory on our ads platforms, including the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Now advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager can avoid injected inventory across the web.

No more injected ads?

We don’t expect the steps we’ve outlined above to solve the problem overnight, but we hope others across the industry take action to cut ad injectors out of advertising. With the tangle of different businesses involved—knowingly, or unknowingly—in the ad injector ecosystem, progress will only be made if we all work together. We strongly encourage all members of the ads ecosystem to review their policies and practices and take actions to tackle this issue.

Vegard Johnsen
Product Manager, Google Ads Traffic Quality

Actionable measurement for mobile app install campaigns in DoubleClick

Mobile has forever changed the way we live, and it’s forever changed what we expect of brands. It’s fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments. Each one is a critical opportunity for brands to shape our decisions and preferences. In these I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go consumer moments, people are turning to mobile apps, in addition to websites, to find what they need.

Given this consumer shift, companies from industries as diverse as Finance, Retail and Travel have jumped into the game, building branded app experiences to engage with their customers. So it’s important that marketers be able to measure and attribute their app-related activities, whether installs, engagement, or purchases, back to their advertising campaigns.

That’s why, today, we’re excited to announce the ability to integrate app install and event data from key third party measurement partners into DoubleClick. Working with third parties (starting with TUNE) we are able to increase the measurement accuracy between different app attribution trackers and DoubleClick, ensuring your data is accurate and reliable.

With this launch, marketers can now use supported third party measurement partners to attribute in-app activities back to the in-app ads they have run through DoubleClick, enabling them to reach their performance goals as they acquire new app customers.

This launch provides customers with:

  • Choice: Use one of several (supported*) app tracking tools, while still accurately attributing installs to your DoubleClick ad campaigns.
  • Accuracy: Get reliable and accurate metrics so you can report on your results with confidence, while getting the benefits of a unified view of all your programmatic or reservation app attribution data inside DoubleClick reporting.
  • Better performance: Minimize cost-per-acquisition to get the best performance for your budget. You can optimize your bids in DoubleClick Bid Manager against your post-view and post-click conversions. You can also create targetable audience lists based on these in-app activities (e.g. customers who’ve installed your app or customers who’ve logged in).

By allowing more choice to advertisers using their preferred third party app measurement tools, we are able to provide more robust and actionable metrics for marketers running mobile app install campaigns on DoubleClick.

To get started with this feature, please follow the directions here for DoubleClick Bid Manager, and here for DoubleClick Campaign Manager (accessible by customers only.)

Posted by Steve Chang
Product Manager, DoubleClick Digital Marketing

*At launch, this feature supports a verified integration with TUNE. Verified support for other third party app trackers is expected to launch later this year.

Back to school with DoubleClick: Learn the ins and outs of HTML5

Earlier this summer we held #HTML5Week to introduce you to resources that can help you develop engaging and relevant HTML5 creative. Now that Chrome has rolled out updates to Flash support, we're heading back to the virtual classroom to provide you with the latest information you need to make the transition to HTML5.

In this vein, we’re kicking off an HTML5 Hangout series, where over five weeks we’ll set aside an hour to explore topics ranging from how to QA HTML5 ads to building dynamic creative (See the complete Hangout schedule).

Our first hangout on September 10th (3pm - 4pm EST) will introduce you to HTML5 development tools and best practices. Register here.

Note: If you’re new to HTML5, we recommend walking through our Rich Media Fundamentals training before attending the HTML5 Hangout series.

We hope to see you in the classroom!

Posted by Hemmy Edge
DoubleClick Rich Media Product Trainer

Updating Google Web Designer to help ease the transition to HTML5

As browsers change the way they support Flash, HTML5 is becoming the de facto language for building display ads. In fact, the IAB just launched their updated Display Creative Guidelines to fully embrace HTML5.

To support this transition, we’ve been pivoting our products to better serve an HTML5-first world. In July, we announced file size increases and bidding updates to DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. (These changes will begin rolling out in September.) And today, we’re excited to announce a series of new features for Google Web Designer that help make it easier to build HTML5 ads.

Build content that adapts to different screen sizes:

Instead of laying out your assets using pixel-based values for a specific sized ad (e.g. width = 250 pixels and height = 300 pixels), percent-based authoring lets you build the ad using relative values (e.g. width = 20% of the screen size and height = 10% of the screen size.) Asset size/position is then determined by the screen or viewport size, so that you can build an ad that works on varying screen sizes. Additionally, full-screen support lets ads expand to the full size of the screen. Learn More.

Publish in-app ads to AdMob:

You can now create content in Google Web Designer and publish to the AdMob network. When you choose the AdMob environment from the “New File” dialog, you can select from all the default sizes that AdMob supports. Learn More.

Design better creative:

  • When you build an ad with the new “tilt” event, a viewer can trigger animations or events by simply tilting their mobile device. This is a great way to build ad units that take advantage of the inherent interaction modes of a mobile device. Learn more about events.
  • Users can now create ads that send text messages by using the updated Tap-to-Call component.
  • Find that perfect color and make sure you don’t forget it! The color panel has been updated with a larger color mixer and the ability for users to save color swatches.

More HTML5 resources:

Earlier this summer, we hosted #HTML5Week to provide educational resources for creative developers looking to make the transition to HTML5. View the recordings of our high-level and step-by-step hangouts for more information.

We’re also partnering with the IAB to launch the second wave of the Make Mobile Work Initiative, aimed at educating marketers on how to build successful mobile campaigns. Check out our first webinar from last week, which focused on mobile video and featured speakers from Google, Snapchat, and Tremor Video.
Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick