Tag Archives: Advertisers

New features for outstanding holiday search campaigns

With the holiday season fast approaching, DoubleClick Search customers get an early gift: new features to make their holiday campaigns more successful.

This year, new DoubleClick Search features will save you time and help you measure campaigns more effectively.

Improved workflows for finding and creating keywords

We’ve made a few adjustments to workflows in DoubleClick Search, making the management of your campaigns more efficient and productive.

First, we’ve made editing positive and negative keywords in DoubleClick Search as simple as entering data in an online spreadsheet. Each keyword gets a row, and column headings such as "Ad group," "Match type" and "Max CPC" let you easily adjust these important settings for each keyword.

It’s also easier now to add keywords. You can combine new the keyword experience with the search terms report available in DoubleClick Search, to find and build new keywords to include in your campaign in a matter of a few clicks. When you identify a positive or negative keyword that better matches the customer intent, you no longer have to leave the report to add it. New enhancements allow you to add new keywords to your campaigns directly from the search terms report, and more advanced filters check to see if the keywords already exist in the ad group, campaign or account.

To help you get started, we’ve added tips for using the keyword editor and how to use the search terms report to harvest keywords in the DoubleClick Search Help Center.

Greater control and flexibility for bid optimization

DoubleClick Search now supports device bid adjustments for AdWords. You can use these to set individual bid adjustments for each device type — mobile devices, computers and tablets. DoubleClick Search reports provide critical insights into performance by device type, allowing you to set these device bid adjustments to maximize performance.

While device bid adjustments enable you to optimize with greater precision, you still need to factor in other signals which impact performance, like location, day of week and audience. To optimize at scale across this wider range of contextual signals, you should take advantage of automated bidding. DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding utilizes the power of Google’s machine learning to set more informed bids and help you get the most out of your marketing budget. Bid strategies with cost per acquisition (CPA), effective revenue share (ERS) or return on ad spend (ROAS) goals can all be optimized through Smart Bidding by device, location, remarketing lists and other factors.

And, to measure bid strategies more effectively, DoubleClick Search customers have new options to customize the data that appears in bid strategy reports. You can now segment bid strategy reports and add Floodlight activity columns.

Review our Best practices for setting up Smart Bidding strategies to develop the best possible approach to bid adjustments.

Additional transparency for measuring performance

DoubleClick Search executive reports now enable you to quickly see what can be optimized by displaying the top or bottom performers. They also enable you to filter reports using predefined or custom metrics, so you can choose to only see the data you want.

For example, if you’re a retailer and want to see the top 20 keywords that lead to a purchase, you can easily do so in an executive report that looks like this:

And, so you can ensure your top performing keywords are being seen, DoubleClick Search can now report on impression share for AdWords keywords, in addition to AdWords and Bing Ads accounts, campaigns and ad groups. We’ve also added Bing Ads quality score in DoubleClick Search.

Lastly, we’re rolling out the full launch of hourly reporting later this month. Hourly reporting can provide insightful data during special sales, where conversion behaviors are less predictable. Or, you can use these reports to quickly detect outages or problems with your conversion tags.

Review account activities more effectively

With all hands on deck during this busy period, the revamped change history report makes it easier for you to see who's changing an ad account, when they're making changes and details about the changes they made. These reports are fast and offer powerful filters to view and download activity by user email, change type, system and entity changed. Learn who your most active users are and implement reports to better manage your team.

If you’d like to learn more about any of these new features for your upcoming holiday search campaigns, contact your DoubleClick Search account manager.

Posted by Bashar Kachachi
Product Management Lead, DoubleClick Search

Build your DoubleClick Bid Manager expertise with our new training platform

Becoming a digital advertising expert takes time, and it’s important to get off to a good start. Only 50 percent of marketers say they’re confident in their knowledge of digital advertising,1 despite the wide range of educational materials available. Sometimes “more” isn’t the same as “better.” Many advertisers start learning about AdWords in our help centers, which offer an enormous trove of product information. But you’ve told us that you want quick, bite-sized training in more interactive formats. And we heard you.

We’re pleased to announce Academy for Ads, a new digital training platform designed to help you learn how to use Google’s ad products in a mobile-first world. We built Academy for Ads to promote learning on-the-go, whether you’re on a laptop, a desktop, or a mobile device.

Grow your Google product know-how

Guided by input from our team of product experts, Academy for Ads courses cover the topics that matter most to DoubleClick and Google advertisers – from Bid Manager and AdWords basics and the essentials of campaign management to bid strategies, reporting, optimization and more ways to successfully advertise with Google. We’re adding new content all the time, including a DoubleClick Campaign Manager Learning path in just a few weeks.

Learning paths, Assessments and Achievements

We’ve organized the courses into “Learning paths” that you can walk through at your own pace. At the end of each path, take an Assessment and earn an Achievement to show that you know your stuff. Earning an Achievement for Bid Manager or Ad Exchange helps you prepare for the more advanced training in the Help Center.

A few example Learning paths:

  • Digital concepts: Learn the essentials of online ads — from third-party ad-serving to real-time bidding, programmatic media buying and remarketing. Get started with DoubleClick Bid Manager*: Learn your way around Bid Manager, what it offers and how you can use it to manage your online marketing campaigns.
  • DoubleClick Ad Exchange: Learn how real-time bidding works in an open auction sale on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. This learning path also covers the available programmatic deal types, along with the types of inventory available for mobile, video, display and television buys.

*Only accessible to DoubleClick Bid Manager clients

Academy for Ads is useful for anyone getting started with Google or DoubleClick training, and can help pave the way for the AdWords Certification program offered by Google Partners, as well as the Google Best Practices program, which offers more advanced AdWords education. DoubleClick users may also find additional training in DoubleClick’s help centers.

Get started

If you already use Google Partners, you can sign in through the Partner portal at g.co/learnwithpartners — or, you can go directly to g.co/AcademyforAds to sign up and start sampling courses and Learning paths. We’re constantly adding content, including advanced DoubleClick training. So if you like what you learn, keep coming back for more.

Posted by Tracy Bizelli
Head of Academy for Ads

1 6 Fundamentals to Managing Digital Marketing in 2015, TFM Insights (January 2015)

New tools to connect with consumers across all devices

As part of our Advertising Week announcements, we’re introducing new digital innovations to help advertisers close the loop between television and digital, online and offline, and mobile and desktop.

Consumers make purchase decisions across many different moments, and over 75% of people1 switch from one device to another while shopping. This makes reaching consumers with the right message — in the right moment — more complex. Today we’re introducing new cross-device capabilities in DoubleClick, including cross-device remarketing, to make it easier to close the loop across screens and reach people where they are, on whatever device they’re using.

Connect moments across devices

In July 2015, we introduced the ability to measure cross-device conversions (when a consumer purchase journey starts on one device but is completed on another). These metrics are helping advertisers like American Express and Ringling Bros. better understand consumer behavior and make better decisions about allocating budgets.

The insights have proven to be useful, but we’re excited to help you put them into action. Today we are announcing that you can automatically optimize your bids based on how users are interacting with your ads and converting across devices. This capability will be available as an option for automated bidding2 in DoubleClick Bid Manager, helping you to drive greater impact from cross-screen campaigns.

Re-engage with consumers across devices

As consumers make purchase decisions, they may interact with your business multiple times along the journey. For example, when they’re shopping for their next car, they might download a brochure on their laptop while at work, watch videos while commuting home and read reviews on their tablet on the couch — all before booking a test drive. As an automotive marketer, you could use remarketing to re-engage with consumers who downloaded the brochure and encourage them to book a test drive — but in the past you could only reach them on their laptop.

Today we’re announcing cross-device remarketing in DoubleClick Bid Manager, allowing you to reach consumers across all of their devices, in the moments when they’re most receptive and your ads are most relevant. Cross-device remarketing will be rolled out as a beta early next year. You can contact your DoubleClick team to learn more.

To reach people in real time across all of the moments that shape their decisions, you need a platform that makes it easier to connect with them on all of their devices. DoubleClick surfaces the right cross-device insights while also allowing you to take the right actions to reach your marketing goals.

Posted by Payam Shodjai
Product Management Director, DoubleClick

1 Google/IPSOS Connect, March 2016, Digital Devices Bridge the Physical World, n=2013 US online respondents 18+
2 Only accessible to DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts.

What’s the deal with programmatic deals?

A few weeks back, Paul Muret, Google’s VP of Display, Video and Analytics, made several announcements about enhancements to the DoubleClick platform to support Programmatic Direct deals. Paul also shared that the number of Programmatic Direct deals transacted on DoubleClick Ad Exchange tripled in 20151 alone.

Everyone knows that programmatic is growing and is increasingly becoming the way we transact digital advertising. But what’s the deal with programmatic deals, or as we say, Programmatic Direct?

To answer that question, we dug into the data to analyze the key drivers of Programmatic Direct growth on our platforms. You can explore some of the data for yourself, with our interactive report: The State of Programmatic Direct.

Looking through Ad Exchange data from October 2014 to December 2015, one thing became incredibly clear: In every region, across every platform and publisher category, there are fascinating trends of adoption to be found.

Programmatic Direct has gone mainstream...

Depending on whom you ask, the history of programmatic exchanges can be traced back nearly a decade. However, it was only a few years ago that some of the world’s largest global spenders started making big commitments to programmatic and “programmatic” became ANA’s Marketing Word of the Year.

It hasn’t taken as long for advertisers and publishers to use programmatic technologies to transact the deals they’d traditionally buy and sell directly. In reviewing the data from DoubleClick AdExchange, we found that:

  • 90+ marketers on the Ad Age Top 100 Global Marketers list made Programmatic Direct deals in 20152.
  • More than half of the publishers in the US comScore top 50 list from December 2015 offered their inventory through Programmatic Direct deals3.

… On every screen

Programmatic may have been born on the desktop, but Programmatic Direct is taking off on mobile — probably not a surprise if you’re reading this article on your phone. Programmatic Direct impressions served on mobile and tablet grew 4x faster than desktop in the period surveyed4.

… In every region

The growth of Programmatic Direct isn’t limited to any specific country or region. So, where is it well adopted and where is it growing fast?

  • Programmatic Direct impressions in Ukraine, Turkey and Spain each more than doubled in just 12 months5.
  • Japan was the strongest adopter in APAC but Taiwan and Indonesia saw Programmatic Direct impressions grow more than 20% monthly6.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we dig through the data to share more insights. You can also explore our interactive research report to find additional trends, like how quickly Programmatic Direct impressions on mobile apps grew for game publishers in Japan. To get started, take a look at the infographic below.

Posted by Carlo Acenas
Associate Product Marketing Manager
Yamini Gupta
Sr. Product Marketing Manager 1 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, year end 2014 to year end 2015.
2 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014-Dec 2015. Minimum $1K spend.
3 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014-Dec 2015. Cross-referenced with comScore 50 US list, December 2015.
4 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 - Dec 2015.
5 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 - Dec 2015.
6 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 - Dec 2015.

Get more powerful bid automation with new DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding

Efficient and effective bid management is a foundational component of any successful digital marketing program. Today, we’re excited to announce Smart Bidding, our new name for conversion-based automated bidding across AdWords and DoubleClick Search that reflects the powerful machine learning behind it.

Making bidding smarter for improved performance

Smart Bidding is built on Google’s deep experience using machine learning to power a wide range of products, including the Google assistant, automatic album creation in Google Photos, and AlphaGo, the first computer program to ever beat a professional player at the game of Go. Smart Bidding can factor in millions of signals to determine the optimal bid, and it continually refines models of your conversion performance at different bid levels to help you get more from your marketing budget.

Even when it encounters areas with lower conversion volume, Smart Bidding's learning capabilities quickly maximize the accuracy of your bidding models to improve how you optimize the long-tail. It evaluates patterns in your campaign structure, landing pages, ad text, product information, keyword phrases and many more to identify more relevant similarities across bidding items to effectively borrow learnings between them.

With Smart Bidding improvements, advertisers using Target CPA and Target ROAS in DoubleClick Search saw an average 16% lift in conversions at the same or better ROI.1

On top of its machine learning capabilities, Smart Bidding is built on three pillars, inspired by feedback we’ve heard from you about what’s important in a bidding solution:

  • Precise bid optimization tailored to a user’s context
  • Flexible performance controls that factor in your unique business goals
  • Transparent reporting that provides clear insight into how your bids are performing

In DoubleClick Search, we have several innovations coming soon across these areas. Get a full overview of DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding here.

New bidding signals that give you a richer view of user context

DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding tailors bids based on a user's context to set the right bid and maximize performance. It factors in a wide range of signals like device, location and remarketing lists to automate bids and bid adjustments across engines. We’re continuously exploring new signals to add to our bidding models that are impactful predictors of performance. These include recent additions like weekday seasonality, and others like sales and promotional calendars that are coming soon, enabling our system to customize bidding models to your business that help you make the most of these important events.

Set multiple performance targets that incorporate your custom data

To help you include more of your own business intelligence in the bidding feedback loop, custom Floodlight variables can now be used as inputs for DoubleClick Search bid strategies. With custom Floodlight variables, you can enrich a conversion event with additional information such as “new customer”, “gold loyalty status”, “device” and more. You can then set unique ROI goals based on this additional information. For example, you can target a $10 CPA for new customers and $5 CPA for existing customers, or aim for a 50% higher ROAS from your most loyal customers.

Identify the most impactful campaign opportunities for Smart Bidding

We’ve also built bid strategy opportunities in DoubleClick Search which identify campaigns with the greatest potential for improved performance. After defining a goal, bid strategy opportunities finds campaigns that are most likely to benefit from Smart Bidding, forecasting how much each campaign's conversion volume could grow if it were managed by a bid strategy.

Once you select the campaigns for automated bidding, the Smart Bidding wizard guides you through the setup, and recommends initial ROI targets (CPA/ROAS) and constraints to ensure a successful transition to Smart Bidding.

Bidding insights that can automatically troubleshoot issues

Coming soon, an enhanced version of bid strategy health will continually analyze your bid strategies for a number of known issues. For example, it will monitor for conversion tracking issues and bid and budget constraints, and alert you if they are adversely impacting your campaigns. It also forecasts the performance impact of resolving these issues and provides a recommendation and one-click solution to quickly implement the fix.

Advertisers like AnadoluJet and eBags are already using DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding to drive better performance.

AnadoluJet is the rapidly growing, low-cost branch of Turkish Airlines. They used Smart Bidding with cross-device conversions to intelligently bid on clicks across devices, ensuring campaign budgets were being allocated most effectively across each device. It drove a 30% incremental lift in clicks and conversions across devices. Read the full case study here.

eBags has been the #1 online bag retailer in the U.S. since 1999 and recently expanded internationally. eBags saw an opportunity to get improved performance by switching from their in-house tool to DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding. It helped the company grow revenue by 38% at a higher ROAS. Read the full case study here.

To learn more about DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding, visit the Help Center and check out our best practices.

Posted by Anthony Chavez
Product Management Director, Search Ads, Google

1 Google internal data. August 2015 before and after of adding Google’s machine learning to DoubleClick Search bidding algorithms.

From the DoubleClick Leadership Summit: Better, faster ads at scale

Delivering a better experience for users has been our top priority since Google was founded, from the products we develop and the ads that we show to how we do business with our partners and clients. This will be on full display at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit, our annual gathering of large advertiser, agency and publisher clients beginning today.

This year, our focus is on how we can work together to create better, faster ad experiences across every screen, starting with mobile.

You can join us for the livestream of my opening keynote, starting at 9 a.m. P.T. during which I’ll share updates about new innovations on the DoubleClick platform and how we’re helping advertisers and publishers adapt to today’s mobile world.

Making ads on the mobile web faster

Our research shows that the average mobile site takes 19 seconds to load. Think about that for a minute. That’s a long time! Not only is this frustrating for users but it’s also a huge missed opportunity for publishers -- we estimate mobile sites that load within 5 seconds can earn up to 2x more revenue than those at the 19 second average.

To help make the mobile web faster for users, Google joined a global community of publishers and other tech companies to launch the open sourced Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (also known as AMP). Early analysis shows that mobile web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data on average than non-AMP mobile web pages.

AMP is already making a difference for a variety of publishers such as the Washington Post, which is seeing first-hand how AMP pages deliver great mobile web experiences that build user loyalty.

But just speeding up the content is not enough - slow-loading ads are also a problem. We’re announcing two new features that will make ad experiences better on the mobile web:

  • AMP for Ads - With AMP for Ads, we're bringing everything that's good and fast about AMP to ads. Unfortunately, most advertisers’ campaign creative are not fully optimized for mobile experiences. AMP for Ads allows advertisers to build beautifully-designed ads in AMP HTML so that the entire AMP experience, both the publisher’s content and the advertiser’s creative, load simultaneously at AMP-speed.
  • AMP Landing Pages - AMP Landing Pages are fast, custom pages, built by advertisers so that when someone clicks on their AMP ad, they continue to have an AMP experience. AMP Landing Pages are also built with AMP HTML so that advertisers or their agencies use the same process to create these pages as they do with AMP content pages.

Building the next generation of ads with DoubleClick

Over the past year, Google has been working with publishers to help them adopt native ads - ads that match the look, feel and style of their surrounding content on a publisher’s website. Users find this type of ad format useful, particularly on mobile. However, in the advertising industry, the process of building and trafficking native ads is still largely manual.

Today, we are announcing significant updates for native ads across our platforms that will help to accelerate adoption of this user-friendly format with programmatic.

  • For the first time, advertisers will be able to buy native ads programmatically in DoubleClick Bid Manager, across all screens. Instead of providing fully-designed creatives, advertisers upload the components of the ad - headline, image, text, and so on - and DoubleClick automatically assembles them to fit the context and format of the site or app where they appear.


  • For publishers, we’re now offering a complete native ads solution in DoubleClick. Publishers can now make native ad inventory across web and apps available programmatically or through traditional direct sales.

Creating value with programmatic

Programmatic buying delivers results, so it’s no surprise that brands and agencies are continuing to invest. Today, we’re excited to announce a new global partnership with one of the world’s largest entertainment brands, Time Warner Inc.

DoubleClick will work with all of Time Warner’s businesses, networks and brands, such as, Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, Harry Potter and CNN, among others, as well as Time Warner’s agencies, for programmatic buying, ad serving, and measurement globally.

Time Warner is not alone in growing their investment in programmatic. We’ve seen tremendous momentum on our own platforms. In 2015 alone,

  • Programmatic video revenue for TV and media companies increased more than 6x on DoubleClick for Publishers.
  • Video spend by advertisers using Programmatic Direct on DoubleClick Bid Manager grew more than 7x.
  • The number of Programmatic Direct deals on DoubleClick AdExchange tripled.

Together with our advertiser and publisher partners, we've made huge strides in improving the digital ads experience for users. Digital ads can be lightning fast, engaging and as beautiful as the site and app where they appear.

We've come a long way from ads that just blink text in blocky boxes - and yet we know there is still work to do. Today’s announcements represent our continued commitment to help our clients and partners deliver better and faster ad experiences for users.

Posted by Paul Muret
Vice President of Display, Video and Analytics, Google

Visit the DoubleClick website at www.doubleclick.com next week for a series of articles with more details on today’s announcements.

Just eight days until the DoubleClick Announcements livestream

Join me on Tuesday, July 19th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET for a livestream broadcast of my keynote address from the DoubleClick Leadership Summit (DLS). I’ll be sharing updates on the latest innovations on the DoubleClick platform and how we’re helping advertisers and publishers adapt to today’s mobile world.

At Google, one of our enduring principles is to “focus on the user and all else will follow.” This has been an important guidepost throughout our history, and it has never been more relevant than it is today. People are more ‘mobile’ now than ever before. We spend every waking hour connected to our devices. We expect to find what we want, when we want it. But with only a split second to engage and capture attention, user experience matters more than ever.

In my keynote, I’ll share an update on the technologies we’re developing to help advertisers, agencies and publishers create better experiences for people on the go. You can expect to hear more about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Native Ads, as well as new, more immersive experiences like 360 video. I’ll also be unveiling new product features to help our clients and partners more effectively reach, engage, monetize, and measure audiences across screens.

I’m looking forward to the livestream on July 19th. Please register to watch here.

Posted by Paul Muret
Vice President of Analytics, Display, and Video Products, Google

Google display ads go 100% HTML5

In February, we announced that DoubleClick Digital Marketing, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and the Google Display Network are going 100% HTML5. Starting June 30th, 2016, display ads built in Flash can no longer be uploaded into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, or AdWords.

DoubleClick advertisers who currently use Flash ads in their campaigns have several ways to ensure your creative can continue to show up in your live campaigns. Read more here.


Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Join us as we announce the latest innovations in digital marketing

Tune in on July 19th for the DoubleClick Announcements Livestream. Watch live as Paul Muret, Vice President of Display, Video Ads and Analytics at Google, shares new product announcements and DoubleClick's vision for the future.

Register and get the link to the livestream in your inbox before the event.

The event will be streamed live on DoubleClick.com on July 19th, 2016 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET.

Posted by The DoubleClick Marketing Team

The creative process for programmatic: A toolkit for creative agencies

Programmatic advertising accounts for 67% of all digital display ad sales1. When you consider that data-driven creative is the creative powerhouse behind programmatic, and that 70% of a media campaign’s performance hinges on the creative2, it’s clear that knowing how to build data-driven creative is a must for any agency with an eye toward the future.

As important as data-driven creative is, adopting is easier said than done. That’s why we put together a set of resources to help marketers, media agencies, creative agencies and production teams understand how to connect the dots between data and creative, to build more effective campaigns. We launched our first piece, a guide for marketers, back in March, along with an infographic to illustrate the process.

Today, we’re excited to launch a toolkit for creative and production teams, to help you understand how data can fit into your creative process.


Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

1 eMarketer, 2015
2 Internal data, Google Media campaigns, October 2015