• 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 target or spend amount. 
  You can use the forecast to gain such insights as:
  
  • The CPA, ERS, or ROAS target you need to achieve a specific range of conversions. If you know how many conversions you want to achieve per week, you can see which target you're likely to need.
  • How the bid strategy is likely to perform with a specific amount of weekly spend.
  • The trade-offs between cost and conversion volume as you adjust your CPA, ERS, or ROAS targets.
  Learn more.
• Copy campaigns to AdWords, Bing Ads, and Yahoo! JAPAN engine accounts: If you need to manage the same campaigns on multiple engine accounts, instead of manually creating the campaigns in each account you can copy an existing AdWords account. If you make additions or changes to one of the campaigns, you can copy the additions and some of the changes into the other accounts. Learn more.

• Create and apply sitelinks by uploading a bulksheet: You can now use the same bulksheet to create and edit sitelinks and add them to campaigns and ad groups. Before this update, you needed to create sitelinks in one bulksheet and apply them to campaigns and ad groups in a second bulksheet. Learn more.
• URL templates no longer encode URL parameters: If you use a redirect URL to pass tracking data to an additional tracking system, the additional system may require you to HTML-encode your landing page URLs. Instead of adding this redirect URL to each keyword's landing page, you can use a URL template to automatically apply the redirect URL and encode the landing page URLs. Previously, if you set up a URL template to encode landing page URLs, DS also encoded any URL parameters you specified in the template. DS has been updated so that it no longer encodes the URL parameters in a template. Learn more.
• Bid strategy health column: The bid strategy health column now lets you know if any bid strategies are constrained because it's been too long since offline conversions have been uploaded into DS. Learn more.
• Pause engine accounts: Agency managers can now change the status of an engine account from Active to Paused, temporarily stopping such activities as trafficking, bid optimization, and inventory management. Learn more.

• 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 

Register now on the event site. 

• 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.

• Identify the impact of advertising on business goals like maximizing profitability or selling off inventory
• Improve ad targeting by matching ads to products that consumers are most interested in
• Understand the value of brand and general terms in selling your highest margin or most important products

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%. 

• 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. 

“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.” 

• 42% of brands say the #1 impact of social is increased engagement (24/7 customer interaction is a distant second at 12%).
• 90% of brands agree that it’s crucial to integrate social into their other digital media initiatives.
• 57% of companies say content shares are the most important social metric, but conversion impact is closing the gap at 54%.

In this first infographic, we look at who is driving social strategy and who is paying for it. As social becomes more integrated into the overall digital and brand strategy, the key players are starting to change. Want to see where the influence is shifting? Just follow the money.

• 45% of companies with revenue over $1 billion have 50+ social employees.
• Marketing, PR, and Customer Experience are the top teams with a stake in social, yet social impacts up to 10 teams across the enterprise.
• 68% of companies expect to increase social spend in the next budgetary cycle, indicating that social’s role in the marketing mix is recognized and prioritized.

1. Daily account management and stakeholder communication: As an account manager, you can easily pick the subset of data and the visualizations you need for each set of stakeholders. The reports will stay up to date, and you can have them ready for meetings, or download and share through email at a moment’s notice -- saving you time for strategy.
2. High-level team management and oversight: As a business leader, you can see an overview of your entire business in one place. If you’re needed for an escalation, you can quickly pull reports to understand account health and spot issues -- so you’re never unprepared.
3. Market insights for competitive advantage: Another advantage of seeing your entire business at a glance: if you manage a large volume of accounts, you can quickly analyze market-level data and see which account or campaigns are underperforming. Then, dig in to understand why and get them back on track. 

• Near-real-time trend detection: We use both past and current data to predict future trends.  Our bid optimization takes into account seasonality, holiday periods, and sudden spikes in demand due to offline events like weather, accounting for fluctuations in traffic around external events.

• Performance-based spend allocation: DoubleClick Search intelligently allocates budgets dynamically to various keywords, based on their performance.  It considers the opportunity cost of each keyword and allocates spend accordingly.

• Portfolio bidding for low-volume keywords: These keywords are often overlooked by manual or simple bid optimization methods, as they provide little or no data to use. However, ignoring long-tail terms can add up across the board—leaving opportunity on the table. DoubleClick Search groups similar keywords together and bids on them as a whole.

• Tying inventory levels and promotions to search campaigns, in real-time
• Boosting performance with retail-specific bid optimization strategies and best practices
• Finding more cross-channel opportunities through remarketing tactics

• Algorithmic: The model automatically distributes credit across marketing channels. You define your own success metrics, like e-commerce transactions or other goals, and the model adapts and regularly refreshes using the most recent conversion path data.
• Transparent: With our unique Model Explorer, you’ll have full insight into model behavior and understand how marketing touch points are valued — no “black box” methodology.
• Actionable: Detailed insights into the individual contribution of a marketing channel (in both converting and non-converting paths) provide clear guidance, so you can so you can make better data-driven marketing decisions
• Support: Google Analytics Premium customers can take advantage of their relationship with a dedicated services and support team.
• Cross-platform Integrations: In addition to our deep integrations with Google products such as AdWords, the Google Display Network, and YouTube, you can pull in data from virtually any digital channel.

Click image for full-size