Inside AdWords: 4 ways to win in retail this 4th of July with Doub...

Inside AdWords: 4 ways to win in retail this 4th of July with Doub...: This post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Search Blog

Ah, the 4th of July: a time for day-long picnics at the park, fishing trips by the lake, night skies filled with fireworks -- and of course, shopping. If you’re a search marketer focused on retail, you know that holidays like the upcoming 4th of July can be an enormous opportunity to capture additional traffic from shoppers looking for the best deals online. So while you’re planning your annual hot dog eating contest, we want to help you start a new tradition this year to win in retail, using integrated solutions from DoubleClick Search. Today, we’re offering up a few retail-ready features to make sure you kick off your holiday search campaigns with a bang:

Manage your product inventory, along with your barbecuing. There’s no need to step away from the grill: with inventory-aware campaigns, create and update your search ads, keywords, and bids automatically, based on your product inventory. And seamless integration with Google Merchant Center means you can leverage your existing feeds, with no extra work, at no extra cost. Set up rules that let you:

• Expand your reach by automatically creating new ad groups, ads, and keywords based on product availability. And with deep coverage across your product catalogues, we’ll generate those highly relevant long-tail keywords that can be a chore to manage manually. In fact, we’ve seen that inventory-managed keywords more than doubled return on ad spend for heavy users(1).
• Cut out the repetition in managing existing campaigns, by tying the behavior of ads and keywords to your inventory levels. For example, you can pause keywords when a related product is out of stock, and reactivate them when it’s back in stock, or update ad copy to align with promotions and style changes. You can also change landing page URLs when the links in the feed change.
• Express rich customization with ad templates that enable granular product-level messaging at scale. We’ve seen that this rich customization delivers higher conversion rates by attracting only the most qualified clicks.

Plan a PLA picnic: you bring the fruit salad, we’ll bring the richer search ads. With our fully integrated solution, DoubleClick Search makes creating and managing Google ShoppingProduct Listing Ads (PLA) campaigns as easy as apple pie. Incorporate product-rich information and measure, optimize, and report on PLA performance using the same familiar workflow you use with the rest of your ads:

• Integrate with Google Merchant Center to easily view Merchant Center feeds in the DoubleClick Search UI, and to preview exactly what products fall under a product target.
• Save time and upload product targets in bulk, using our standard upload sheet workflow to quickly create product targets for your highest revenue-generating products.
• Analyze PLA campaign success with existing reporting features from DoubleClick Search. For example, track budget and key KPIs for PLA campaigns using our budget pacing reports. And with full PLA integration, your reports reflect the same Floodlight or Google Analytics conversion data you use for the rest of your campaigns, to give you a more accurate view of attribution.