Google Data

At DoubleClick Search, we’re always looking to expand our list of partners so we can offer clients a comprehensive search management solution. Today, we’re taking another step towards that goal by adding Baidu, China’s most popular search engine, to the list of platforms we support.

Now, agencies who use DoubleClick Search to manage ad campaigns across multiple search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo Japan—can extend their reach to Baidu users globally. The addition of Baidu also gives the Chinese market access to the smarts and efficiency of DoubleClick Search for the first time. 

Baidu support includes all the standard DoubleClick Search features you’d expect—holistic campaign management (including bulk sheets), conversion tracking, cross-media attribution, bid strategies, and flexible reporting—plus Baidu-specific features like province-level targeting.

Clients are already finding success with DoubleClick Search and Baidu. Jose Campon, GM for iProspect Beijing says, “We are very excited to have Baidu now available through DoubleClick Search. After some initial tests on top accounts, we saw astonishing results, with a 20% decrease in CPLs and efficiency gains across the board.” 

For more information about using DoubleClick Search with Baidu campaigns, visit our Help Center, or contact your DoubleClick account team.

For the last few years, this blog has been the go-to source for all things DoubleClick Search. From monthly product releases, to events, bylines and case studies – you could find it all here.

Starting March 13, your source of DoubleClick Search news will be on our newly redesigned DoubleClick Advertiser blog. With this update, you will be able to access news on DoubleClick Search alongside broader digital marketing news from our team.

On Friday, February 13th, we’ll be retiring the old doubleclicksearch.blogpost.com and redirecting it to the search section of our newly redesigned DoubleClick Advertiser’s blog.

The new dedicated DoubleClick Search blog URL will be: http://doubleclickadvertisers.blogspot.com/search/label/Search 

Please take this opportunity to subscribe to the new blog via Feedburner or the RSS reader of your choice. We look forward to seeing you soon at our new address.

In December and January, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):Forecast the performance of a bid strategy: Using historical data from an existing bid strategy, DS can estimate how the bid strategy may perform with a different targe…

This morning AdWords announced upgraded URLs, a fundamental change to the way they create and track URLs. The change is an easier and faster way to manage and track important information about each click on your AdWords ads.

As part of this upgrade, AdWords is moving from the concept of “destination URLs” to “final URLs and tracking templates”. In addition, AdWords will retire the existing {copy} valuetrack param available for sitelinks today. The upgrade will require that DoubleClick Search make some changes to landing page management for AdWords accounts.

No immediate change to DoubleClick Search workflows 
While we work on supporting upgraded URLs, DoubleClick Search customers should continue to use the existing destination URL format to ensure tracking and campaign management capabilities. If you’re interested in saving time managing URLs, check out the DoubleClick Search URL builder to help simplify your workflows and save hours per week.

Stay tuned for upgrade details 
AdWords will continue to support destination URLs until July 1st. We’ll share more details in the coming weeks about the recommended upgrade process for DoubleClick Search customers.

There’s no doubt that technology continues to transform the pace of business. In the past, it wasn’t possible to track online conversions back to ads in real-time. You couldn’t always be sure you were advertising only in-stock items or immediately traffic out seasonal assortment changes.

But now advanced digital marketers are able to take advantage of real-time conversion and product data in their advertising campaigns to great effect.

Forrester recently completed a global study of 240 retailers’ search campaigns. What they found was… opportunity. Most retailers still don’t take advantage of existing real-time capabilities in digital marketing, and leave a significant opportunity for savvy marketers who do.

Come hear Forrester and Google talk about: 

• Results from Forrester’s retail search study 
• Insights about the retail search market, and where you can take advantage 
• How to become more “real-time” in your own digital advertising 

Speakers:
Shar VanBoskirk, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Henry Tappen, Retail Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Time: 
Wednesday, February 18th at 11AM PST/2PM EST

Register now on the event site. 

We look forward to seeing you there.

When running an e-commerce site, you need an analytics solution to gain insight into visitors’ digital journeys and make swift & educated decisions. To help tie your eCommerce transactions with your search campaigns we’ve launched support for IBM Digital Analytics (prev. known as CoreMetrics) in DoubleClick Search.

IBM Digital Analytics is an enterprise class cloud based digital analytics platform and it collects and analyzes customer’s digital journey including data about conversion events on your site, such as cart additions, abandonments, bounces…etc. DoubleClick Search regularly pulls in the data and uses it to attribute visits & conversions to keywords and populate IBM Digital Analytics reporting columns. In DoubleClick Search you can access the columns via online reports, downloaded reports, and the reporting API. You can also take advantage of the ability to create formula columns and executive reporting charts that incorporate IBM Digital Analytics data.

If you’re interested in getting started, please share your IBM Digital Analytics client ID, DDX API auth token, username, timezone & currency with your DoubleClick Search support contact or . They’ll give you a heads up when your DoubleClick Search advertiser and IBM Digital Analytics account have been successfully linked.

In November, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

• Report purchase details in DS: Learn which products in your inventory make up your sales with purchase detail reports. Enable this feature by configuring your Floodlight transaction tags to report on revenue, cost, and profit for individual products sold in each conversion. DS reports can also show which campaigns (including keyword and Shopping campaigns), ad groups, and keywords contributed to the sales of those products. Finally, you can segment your reports using any attributes from your inventory feed.

• Executive Reports:
• • Share reports: Share a link to your executive reports with clients, executives, non-DS users, or anyone that you want to see how you’re performing toward your advertising goals.
  • Resize charts: DS has added chart resizing to the list of formatting options available in executive reports. With a single click, you can expand or contract a chart horizontally or vertically.

• Bid strategies: Set a minimum ROAS constraint: In addition to bid limit and position constraints, you can now set a minimum ROAS constraint. For bid strategies that are focused on maximizing revenue, set the minimum ROAS constraint to optimize bids and keep the marginal ROAS above a target threshold.

• Apply, remove, or change sitelinks for AdWords campaigns in the DS UI: If you need to apply sitelinks to several campaigns in your AdWords account, you can now use the DS UI in addition to bulksheets.

• Use the DS API to report on AdWords location extensions: If you’ve set up upgraded location extensions in DS, you can use the DoubleClick Search API’s Reporting Service to download adGroup, campaign, or feeditem performance metrics for location extensions.

  Note that reports downloaded from the DS API include only location extensions that have recorded at least one impression during the report’s time range.

Understanding retailers and their relationship to real-time 
In a recent post, we announced a study we ran with Forrester to understand how retailers were leveraging real-time data in their online advertising efforts. What we learned was that they believe real-time data presents both opportunities and challenges. Retailers see the potential for including this type of data in their campaigns, but they also think it can be too much work to respond to changes that can come and go in an instant.

DoubleClick Search makes real-time easy 
At DoubleClick Search, we want to make it easy to integrate real-time data into your campaigns. We’ve worked hard to build tools that give you the data you need to make quick decisions for your business. We also want to make your campaign optimization easy and automated, so you don’t need hours of planning to respond to sudden changes in demand.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll share stories of how advertisers are using real-time data to reach customers in their time of need, faster. This first post in our series is on the real-time gap and how DoubleClick Search helps you to bridge it. The “real-time gap” is the difference between retailers’ current SEM practices and their best possible performance.

Fact: Real-time data is important 
Any number of factors can affect consumer demand for your products and services—many of which are unpredictable. Heat waves and cold snaps appear unannounced, fashion trends crop up, and wild card sports teams make it into the playoffs. From weather concerns to new shoes to baseball playoffs, search queries give marketers insight into what matters most to people in a specific moment. And with today’s proliferation of smartphones and tablets, consumers search all day, every day, providing real-time data on what’s happening right now.

Barriers to adoption for real-time data 
If real-time data is so important, you would think that all retailers would integrate it into their campaigns, but it turns out there are a few common barriers to adoption.

First, many retailers believe it takes too much time and energy to respond to unplanned events. One respondent in our Forrester study explained: “I’m sure there are quick wins to be had. But we don’t have the experience or manpower needed to chase everything.” Another said, “I have so many demands on my time, managing for something unexpected isn’t convenient for me.”

Retailers also need to re-think what’s “good enough” when it comes to speed and real time feedback. Our Forrester research shows that only 20% of retailers have access to real-time click and conversion data, and that over half do not see data updated for a week. Despite this reality, 84% of these retailers who consider driving sales as a goal feel their marketing programs are either “effective” or “very effective” at achieving their goals. But, data received once a day (or even less frequently) means there are unlimited missed opportunities to capture revenue, brand awareness, or reduce cost.

DoubleClick Search makes real-time easy
We want to make it easy to collect and act on real-time data. Our smart bid optimization understands your goals, gets conversion information in real-time, and adjusts bids multiple times per day to meet those goals. And with conversion data from all channels, delivered in real-time, DoubleClick Search can react quickly to changing market conditions by optimizing based on real-time attributed conversion data.

Real-time data in action
Here’s just one example of how real-time data can positively affect sales. This is an excerpt from a recent iProspect report.

The chart below shows how one of iProspect’s clients, a top luxury apparel brand (let’s call it Brand X), looked to real-time data and execution to maximize its marketing during a busy shopping season. Brand X holds a highly anticipated three-day sale twice per year. In 2012, it used an SEM platform that did not offer real-time conversion insights or intra-day bidding. A year later, when it switched to DoubleClick Search, a tool that reacted more quickly, the difference was immense. The overall result: the company more than tripled revenue on the first day of the promotion year over year while decreasing cost per clicks (CPCs) by over 60%. 

Three-day Promotion: Better Results With Real Time 

Source: iProspect proprietary data 

Your partner for real-time data
At DoubleClick search, we want to be your partner in delivering real-time data to improve your advertising performance. In our next post in the series, we’ll talk about how retailers are taking advantage of real-time data to optimize text ads and Shopping Campaigns for their products.

The real-time imperative 
Real-time matters in retail search because external events continuously affect demand. Whether planned events like Black Friday, or unplanned ones like the next big snow day, campaigns that were optimized for demand are suddenly altered by new market realities. The speed at which a retailer’s search management tool can “see” the new behavior and adapt to it will help to determine how successful campaigns are over time, and because events can shift quickly, speed is ever-more important for success.

We know how important it is for our retailers to be running profitable campaigns with a minimum of ongoing manual effort. It’s why we’ve consistently invested in tools to be faster. From instant conversion data and intra-day bidding to integration with Google Merchant Center for ad creation and management, we’re committed to developing tools to support speed in search.

Understanding how retailers use real-time 
Today, in partnership with Forrester, we’re launching a study that shows how retailers access and use real-time tools to stay ahead in the digital game.

What we found was… opportunity 
According to Forrester’s survey, only 20% of retail search marketers have access to real-time conversion data, and less than half can see conversions before the next business day.

In addition to response times, we found that, on average, marketers are only able to merchandize about half their inventory in search ads, even though long-tail products can represent a significant revenue opportunity.

Get the full report
For all the results, along with Forrester’s recommendations for retail search success, check out the full report at Think with Google. To get the latest research, communications and case studies from DoubleClick, sign up for one of our newsletters.

To lift the lid on what it takes for digital marketers to succeed, today we’re releasing research from the The Boston Consulting Group that provides new evidence of the power of data-driven approaches including search-to-display remarketing, video remarketing and behavioral analytics.

BCG’s study of five large digital advertisers across four industries in the US and Europe found brands that use these advanced techniques can score big gains – a 32% average decrease in cost per action – and enhance both relevance and consumer experience by reaching engaged audiences at scale.

In some cases, advertisers improved cost per action by more than 50 percent. What’s more, the study also showed that advanced targeting can drive increased performance across all major metrics, improving action rates for clicks and view-throughs by as much as 200 percent, and reducing costs per click and per view by as much as 70 percent.

To achieve uplifts like these, the study identifies five critical steps you can put in motion now.

One: Adopt a unified technology platform
Unified technology platforms provide a single user interface and make it possible to source data from a single pool, eliminating the need to reconcile, consolidate and transfer data between multiple sources. Using one set of tools also ensures your teams aren’t cannibalising performance or bidding against themselves. Campaigns can be launched faster, and agencies can drive resource into gaining insights and optimizing campaigns rather than manually downloading and consolidating data.

Two: Implement advanced techniques 
Drive improvements in key metrics by making intelligent use of your own customer data. 

• Search-to-display remarketing – serving display ads to users who have clicked on your paid search link – lets you target an additional group of consumers actively searching for your product or service.
• Video remarketing involves serving an ad to users who have either watched your video or subscribed to your channel. This technique captures users early in the purchase journey when they are just starting to engage with your brand. 
• Behavioral analytics target users that have not only visited your website but also demonstrated particular behaviors – like spending a certain amount of time or visiting a certain number of pages – while there. 

Three: Bring the “math men” (and women) to the table 
Strategy and creativity will always be critical to successful campaigns, but today the ability to mine, manipulate and analyze data is equally essential. Include mathematicians, statisticians and quantitative experts in your team and apply their skills to campaign optimizations.

Four: Test and learn 
The Internet is the best marketing laboratory yet invented. Direct marketers know this, but increasingly brand marketers need to get on board, substituting metrics such as average session duration or interacting with a graphic or downloading information for direct sales.

Five: Overcome fragmentation 
Fragmentation in campaign development and execution, strategy, teams, tools and data can result in conflicts in goals and incentives, lack of transparency in performance and wasted effort. Ways to tackle this include rooting out the causes of fragmentation, connecting your data strategy with overall strategy, getting closer to your data, breaking down organizational silos and using multiple attribution models.

Keen to learn more about the results of the study and the actions you can take to reach engaged audiences at scale? Read the full research report here.

As part of our mission to offer the most actionable data and reporting, from all sources, DoubleClick Search lets you report on Google Analytics goals. You may not know that we also have the capability to use Google Analytics Goals as targets for DoubleClick Search bid-strategies. When you create a bid strategy in the Doubleclick Search Performance Bidding Suite, you can optimize to conversions and revenue based on Google Analytics goals and transactions. This feature extends the flexibility of DS bid strategies, which already support optimization to Floodlight activities and formula columns. This release also extends bid optimization support to goals based on site analytics metrics such as pages per visit and visit duration.

Make better decisions based on user behavior insights 
Google Analytics goals make it possible to have user behavior prior to purchase drive your bidding decisions. Conversion windows vary by vertical. Some customers finalize their purchases/actions within minutes or hours, while other customers may take days, weeks or even months to research before converting. If you understand the propensity of a user to convert based on their session behavior, you can bid more for keywords that drive higher quality customers. This is where site analytics data comes in as it provides useful post click data such as  “users from ad group X spend an average of 5 minutes on the site after clicking”.

Our Google Analytics integration gives you access to powerful new metrics to enhance bid optimization and create custom models that not only include the final conversion but also values keywords that lead to pre-conversion user behaviors including time on site, pages viewed, etc.

Getting started with Google Analytics goals 
Getting started with Google Analytics goals & DoubleClick Search bid-strategies is simple. They work in the same way as the DoubleClick Floodlight-targeted bid strategies you are already familiar with. Just create a new bid strategy using the wizard and select Conversions, Revenue, or Advanced targeting as the goal. Then Google Analytics can be selected as a conversion source (shown below).

If you want to mix Floodlight Tags and Google Analytics Goals in the same bid-strategy, first define the relative value of the Tags and Goal inside the formula column. For example, suppose you wanted a ROAS strategy for your travel agency. Your main objective is to drive revenue from ticket and package sales, but you value a user spending 10 minutes reading about vacation packages at $1.50 since you expect they will return later to buy. The following formula column would capture this valuation:

In the above formula: FL=Floodlight, GA=Google Analytics

Once you’ve created this formula columns, create a new bid strategy, in step 2 select the conversion source to be “formula column”. If you haven’t linked your Google analytics account with DS, you can find a step by step guide here. If you are interested in using the site analytics level goals, please follow the guide here (note: you only need to complete Step 1: Transferring Property). To learn more about DS bid-strategies and Google Analytics integration, please check out our help center article.

DoubleClick’s annual digital advertising summit is just around the corner, streaming live on YouTube on Wednesday, June 4th. (Sign up here to watch.) We caught up with Neal Mohan, Google’s Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products, to hear what’s on his mind as we get ready for the event.

Q: What topics should we expect to hear about this year? 
A: I don’t think it will come as a surprise that our team has been very focused on how to make digital work for brands and premium publishers. You can expect to hear a lot more about that. Also, since this event marks Google’s annual conversation on the future of digital advertising, we’ll discuss how digital is redefining consumer behavior, content development, and the ways that advertisers and publishers reach their customers.

Q: Will the live stream include any special guests? 
A: I’ll be joined by Nikesh Arora, our Chief Business Officer at Google, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO and Co-Founder of DreamWorks Animation. I’m looking forward to hearing Jeffrey talk about how technology has changed content creation.

Q: What consumer trends are impacting the way brands and publishers think about digital? 
A: When we started this DoubleClick event 14 years ago, going online was a deliberate act that required going to a computer and “logging-in”. The days of going online are coming to an end. Today’s digital experience is one that is always-on and always with us. As a result, digital has become far more personal, and one of the most personal forms of communication – video – is playing a more central role in our online lives. All these factors have major implications for brands and publishers, which we’ll discuss at the event.

Q: So…any scoops you can give us?
A: As I mentioned, video has been very much on my mind lately. Getting video right is something that is essential to our brand, agency, and publisher partners…expect to hear more about what we have planned to help make that happen.

We hope you can join us on Wednesday, June 4th at 9:30 am PDT / 12:30 pm EDT. Register to watch the live stream or to receive the recording. -The DoubleClick Team

The search marketing landscape can change quickly and marketers need tools that can adapt just as fast – to understand immediate opportunities, and react if necessary. Late last year, we announced executive reporting from DoubleClick Search to give marketers the ability to see their campaign performance quickly, across their entire business or in any specific view. Today, we’d like to highlight how a top digital agency has found success with our tools to increase efficiency and get a better handle on their business.

With hundreds of clients around the globe, The Search Agency’s leaders were finding it increasingly hard to keep an eye on the health of their business. Keen to quickly understand the performance while eliminating time-consuming monthly and quarterly reporting tasks, they adopted executive reporting from DoubleClick Search to help oversee company’s interests.

The team needed a way to get the big picture—fast. They also had to have details such as monthly and quarterly reports of all the agency’s business, aggregated for industries or individual clients, with in-depth costs by month, quarter or device.

“That kind of detail is essential for day-to-day work, but also for quick KPIs,” says Wiratunga. “If I’m walking into a board room with my department leads about a certain client or if I get called into a meeting with 15 minutes to prep, I need a way to see—on the fly—exactly what’s happening with an account and all of its issues.” 

After implementing executive reporting, Wiratunga was able to save multiple hours each month and quarter by eliminating repetitive reporting tasks for his team, and focusing them instead on more strategic work. He was also able to prepare for client escalations on short notice as needed. To get the full scoop on The Search Agency’s success, read the full customer story here.

The world’s major brands are now building their marketing campaigns for the digital world, from Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches, to Toyota’s Car Collaborator, to Kate Spade’s holiday ads.

Brands and their agencies want to better measure their digital campaigns, but they don’t want one-off science experiments or fuzzy numbers; they want metrics that are as meaningful and actionable as the click has become for performance advertising:

Did someone actually see my ad? And was it the right audience?
What did people think about the ad? How did the ad change their mindset?
What did people do as a result of seeing the ad?

As we invest to improve brand measurement for the entire industry in all these areas, we are keeping a few things in mind. First, measurement should be actionable – real time insights to improve campaigns as they run, not after-the-fact reports that can only improve future ad buys. Second, we know our clients want measurement that is open and transparent so we’re partnering with the industry to create metrics that serve as a true currency between buyers and sellers, and offer flexibility and choice to marketers.

Today at the IAB Leadership Summit, I gave an update on a few of our brand measurement products:

Active View 
Last year, comScore estimated that 54% of ads running on the web aren’t seen by the user. Maybe the reader scrolled past your ad; maybe she never got to it.

We’re supporting industry initiatives, like the IAB’s Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) to establish new standards. And late last year, we made it possible to buy based on viewability on the Google Display Network. This capability is based on our MRC-accredited Active View technology, a transparent and actionable viewability metric that we’re gradually rolling out to both marketers and publishers. It’s early days, but we’ve already seen more than 1,500 brands buying impressions based on viewability, across more than 100,000 sites on our network.

comScore vCE 
In TV, marketers use the concept of a Gross Rating Point (GRP), by which they measure the reach and frequency of their campaigns among different demographics. For digital campaigns, there are a number of options for marketers wanting a digital GRP across screens. For example, last year, we started testing comScore vCE (validated Campaign Essentials) and Nielsen OCR (Online Campaign Ratings) for campaigns on YouTube and across our network.

While we’re excited by the efforts in the industry to introduce GRPs to the digital market, we believe we haven’t yet reached the full potential of this metric. And so today, we’re excited to announce that we’re taking another step forward by partnering with comScore to turn vCE into a digitally actionable metric.

By working closely with comScore and the industry, we believe we can make a GRP metric that will be completely actionable: both advertisers and publishers will be able to see if a campaign is reaching the right audience in real time and make adjustments if it isn’t. No more waiting days or weeks for reports, no more wasted media, no more missed opportunities. This objective, third-party vCE metric is being built directly into our DoubleClick ad serving products, where it can serve as a transparent currency for both marketers and publishers to buy, sell and measure ad space across sites, formats and screens.

Brand Lift 
At the top of the pyramid, brands want to measure the impact of advertising on core brand metrics like awareness, favorability, purchase consideration and, ultimately, sales. We’re developing a suite of Brand Lift products to help here. Last year, we began a small test of surveys to measure the impact of a brand’s campaign.

Measuring ad effectiveness by conducting surveys is not new. But generally they’re slow to provide results, and get very low response rates.

In our early tests, we’re seeing 20-30% user response rates (significantly higher than traditional surveys), coming through in near real time. This enables brands to turn the results into immediate action: brands that are using Survey Lift have seen an 82% lift in ad recall, along with a 64% lift in brand awareness. For example MasterCard was able to double brand recall for one of their holiday campaigns based on insights gleaned from surveys. Based on this early promising feedback, we’ll be rolling these surveys out more broadly, for more types of campaigns, in coming months.

Going forward 
There’s lots more to come, and we’re working on ways to help brands at all stages of the measurement pyramid. More actionable, open and transparent measurement will help bring more great campaigns and brands online, which in turn helps to fund web services and content. We’re looking forward to working with the industry and partners to help make this a reality.

 — posted by Neal Mohan, VP, Display Advertising