DoubleClick Search: Search marketing “stocking stuffers”: 5 festive st...

DoubleClick Search: Search marketing “stocking stuffers”: 5 festive st...: 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 dclk-holiday@googlegroups.com with your name and title. We’ll feature the best tips here on the blog!

DoubleClick Search: What industry leaders value in a digital marketing...

DoubleClick Search: What industry leaders value in a digital marketing...: -- --
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.

DoubleClick Search: Success with DS series: Advanced features in execu...

DoubleClick Search: Success with DS series: Advanced features in execu...:
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!

DoubleClick Search: New agency view and navigation bar offers more eff...

DoubleClick Search: New agency view and navigation bar offers more eff...:
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.

DoubleClick Search: DS features in November/December

DoubleClick Search: DS features in November/December:
In November and December, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search:

• Executive Reporting
  When it’s time to present performance data to your clients or executives, instead of manually downloading detailed data and distilling it into useful summaries, you can now create an executive report in DoubleClick Search (DS). DS executive reports are a powerful new way to create custom visual reports to analyze data and share with your end clients, teammates, and managers. Learn more.

• Analyze performance for all keywords or ads at the advertiser level
  You can now see the performance data for all of an advertiser’s keywords or ads across all engines. Most DS customers have multiple engine accounts, so this feature makes it easier to understand aggregate/overall performance. In the DS UI, simply navigate to an advertiser and click the Keywords tab or Ads tab. Learn more.

We also made the following feature updates:

• Better summary data for your bid strategies
  The bid strategy summary page now focuses on conversions, revenue, and bid strategy status by displaying the Bid strategy performance view by default. In addition to displaying goal type, target metric, and constraints, the Bid strategy performance view has been updated with new columns that show the conversion and revenue statistics relevant to that bid strategy. Learn more.

• Apply bid strategies to campaigns/ad groups via bulksheets: You can now use the Bid strategy column in a bulksheet to apply existing bid strategies to campaigns or ad groups. This makes it much easier to apply bid strategies to multiple campaigns and ad groups. Learn more.

• Use bulksheets to create, change, and delete labels
  There’s a new bulksheet that makes it easier to create multiple labels at once, and it also allows you to change and delete labels. Learn more.

• Segment sitelink performance data by campaign
  You can now view sitelink performance by campaign in a single view. For example, if you applied a sitelink to 3 campaigns in a single AdWords engine account, you can see a list of the campaigns with the number of sitelink clicks in each campaign. Learn more.

• Faster sync We reduced the time needed to sync engine changes into DS.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

DoubleClick Search: Introducing the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite:...

DoubleClick Search: Introducing the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite:...:
 Here at DoubleClick Search, we’ve been focused on developing tailored solutions for retail advertisers  -- delivering the scale, performance, and speed our customers need to maximize revenue for their businesses. Today, we’re excited to introduce the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, a robust toolset offering a smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management. The suite is comprised of solutions that help you automatically create and update text ad and PLA campaigns based on your product catalog, leverage real-time data to optimize against your product or category-level business goals, and measure it all with flexible, product-based reports.

Putting “product” at the core of commerce investments

We designed the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite with products at the core, letting you efficiently build, manage, and optimize campaigns by seamlessly integrating with your existing product investments. As the only platform directly integrated with Google Merchant Center, we make your product inventory visible and accessible within DoubleClick Search -- meaning there’s no need to navigate a separate interface, manage a manual upload, or wait for a separate team to deliver product feed data. Instead, anyone on your marketing team can act on live updates, as they happen.

For example, inventory-aware campaigns uses this live product information to automatically create and update text ads, keywords, and bids based on real-time changes to your Google Merchant Center feed -- inclusive of updates to pricing, availability, product descriptions, and more -- with no extra work, and at no extra cost to set up.

For ATG Stores, an ecommerce company for home goods, the ability to directly interact with Google Merchant Center data in DoubleClick Search was crucial in allowing the team to quickly iterate across their four million SKUs. “Inventory-aware campaigns have been a game changer,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG Stores. “It’s impressive to see that what would previously have taken a full week to do is now being updated in the system in less than an hour.” In addition to time savings, this smart automation also helped the team take advantage of broader long-tail keyword coverage to widen reach and uncover incremental revenue. As a result, ATG Stores tripled their return on ad spend (ROAS) for their inventory-managed campaigns.

Today, we’re extending the power of this product-centric automation with two new capabilities for Product Listing Ads (PLAs):

• Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation, an extension of inventory-aware campaigns, lets you automatically generate and update PLA campaigns in real time, based on your Google Merchant Center feed.
• Product Listing Ads optimization with intra-day bidding based on the freshest data lets you react quickly to changes in the market -- executing bids to meet your ROI goals on both high-volume products, as well as the long tail.

Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation

In addition to your text ads, you can now dynamically manage your PLA campaigns using the same, seamless workflow you use for the rest of your campaigns  -- ensuring you’re always up to date, maximizing coverage, and driving better ROAS and volume.

Already, advertisers are seeing the benefits. “The ability to auto-generate PLA campaigns from existing product inventory drastically simplifies our setup process,” said Carissa McStay, Associate Manager at global marketing firm The Search Agency. “I was able to generate new PLA campaigns with over 1000 ad groups by product type in a matter of minutes -- not only saving us hours of time, but ensuring that our new customers see the most compelling ads that are relevant to them.”

Product Listing Ads optimization (beta)

Our Performance Bidding Suite offers the flexibility to optimize from a variety of signals and conversion sources including formula columns, external data (like calls), and Google Analytics goals; now, these same powerful bidding algorithms extend to your PLA campaigns. With more product-level information available, DoubleClick Search bid strategies can fine-tune bids on high-volume products to drive the most revenue, as well as handle the long-tail products that may receive less traffic.

And like with the rest of DoubleClick Search bid strategies, PLA bid strategies benefit from access to the same real-time data, with bids based on up-to-the-minute conversions to capture every new opportunity. This allows advertisers to respond to market changes at the drop of a hat -- even during the busiest holiday shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Valentine’s Day.

As the global leader in performance marketing, iProspect understands that speed is often the difference between seized and missed opportunities for retail clients. "Real-time is the future of retail, and DoubleClick is leading the way with the ability to optimize from real-time conversion information,” says Jeremy Hull, Director of Bought Media at iProspect. “With fast, accurate data, DoubleClick Search offers clients the tools they need to optimize throughout the day as traffic shifts occur.”

Just the beginning

This product-centric focus will continue to guide our feature development, helping us quickly innovate additional tools that will drive revenue for the ecommerce business. To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and new technology integrations and partnerships, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, or follow us on Google+.

DoubleClick Search: DS features in January

DoubleClick Search: DS features in January:

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

• Inventory Product Listing Ads campaigns
  This release introduces a new type of campaign: an inventory Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaign, which makes it easy to scale up your PLA advertising with detailed reports and bidding on each of your individual products. Inventory PLA campaigns automatically generate ad groups and granular product targets for Product Listing Ads from data in your Merchant Center account. Learn more.

• Reporting API
  You can now use the DoubleClick Search API to programmatically download reports. You can combine the API data with data you already have about your products, customers, and business goals (from a CRM system, for example) to complete the picture of your search advertising impact. Learn more.

• Assess your bid strategy’s health
  The new Bid strategy health column displays messages about issues that prevent a bid strategy from performing optimally. If you click the message, DS navigates to the location in the UI in which you can address the issue. Learn more.

We also made the following feature updates:

• Google Analytics metrics and goals in Executive Reporting
  If you use Google Analytics to track your conversions, you can now enhance your executive reports with GA metrics and goals for multiple advertisers. For example, you can create a single chart that compares GA new visits with overall revenue for all of your advertisers.

• More actions and notification options in automated rules and bulk edits
  We made the following improvements to automated rules and bulk edits (including scheduled edits):
• You can now perform bulk edits and automated rules on a list of product targets.
• Change bid strategy and Change mobile bid adjustment % are new options when setting up a bulk edit or automated rule for campaigns or ad groups.
• When setting up your actions and alerts for a rule, you have more options for when to receive an email. For example, you can choose to receive emails only when a problem occurs.

• Improved support of targeting settings for Bing Ads ad groups
  When you create or edit an ad group in a Bing Ads engine account, you'll notice that the Languages, Locations, and Devices settings have been changed to more accurately reflect the way Bing Ads organizes these settings.

Be sure to attend the New Feature Review monthly webinar to see these features in action. There are sessions on February 6, so register today!

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team