Google Data

Building better experiences is the subject of the discussion at the annual EMEA DoubleClick Leadership Summit that kicked off yesterday at Google’s European headquarters in Dublin. And key to building a better consumer experience is reaching consumers with more precise and relevant marketing.

Today we’re excited to announce new DoubleClick precision marketing innovations that allow more relevant marketing for consumers, and that allow marketers to reach and measure their audiences across screens, programmatically, in a brand-safe and verifiable way.

Buy app inventory with more control.

Building better experiences means, in part, ensuring that your brand is present where and when you intend it to be. We know brand safety and control are important to advertisers, and we continue to develop tools that both safeguard your brand as well as help you reach the most relevant audiences for your message.

Sensitive category classifiers, now available in DoubleClick Bid Manager, let you specify categories of apps to exclude based on their fit for your brand. And coming soon to both DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Campaign Manager, app verification will provide you with greater insight around the apps your ads ran in, so you can understand where and how your brand appeared. (DoubleClick Bid Manager users can learn more about our brand safety capabilities here.)

Understand the impact to your brand across screens.

An important part of building better experiences is understanding when users see your ads, wherever they may be.

Active View measurement is rolling out for apps in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, so you can understand when consumers see your app ads. Brands like Bank of Montreal have already seen the benefits of using Active View in DoubleClick to measure viewability across the web, and these insights are now available for display and video app inventory.

Lastly, we’re announcing a new JavaScript API in Google Chrome, called Intersection Observer, which provides viewability measurement for your mobile and desktop web placements without the need for Flash. Built directly into the Chrome Browser, Intersection Observer improves viewability coverage for all video and display formats across screens by solving technical challenges associated with mobile viewability measurement. It also provides faster browsing and less battery drain, improving the consumer experience.

These innovations help marketers reach consumers with more precise and relevant marketing, enabling better user experiences across all screens for better results.

Posted by Steve Chang
Product Manager, DoubleClick

Are you a new publisher to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and/or DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and are wondering where to find engaging, publisher-facing training materials?

Do you regularly review Google help centers but want more tailored content?

Or are you already a seasoned publisher who has been waiting for new training materials that would help you drive growth to your business?

No matter your publisher expertise, you can access valuable training materials at Publisher University, a website created specifically for DFP and Ad Exchange users. With Publisher University, you can learn about the product areas that are most valuable to you through tailored, self-study training modules.

Since its launch in 2014, Publisher University has become a one-stop training destination for DoubleClick publishers. There are solutions suited to your needs:

• Courses: Start with a level 1 course for a well-rounded understanding of how DFP and Ad Exchange work, and then demonstrate your knowledge by passing an exam. The goal is to provide a clear learning path for both products. You’ll even receive a printable certificate, the perfect accessory for bragging to your co-workers.
• Video Library: If you’re looking to find training on a specific topic, you’ll find all of the publisher training materials conveniently located in one place. With the Video Library, you can go ahead and pick the topics that are most relevant for you.
• What’s New: The What’s New video series is a great tool to help keep track of the latest feature releases on DFP and Ad Exchange, and see how they work.

Publisher University is constantly improving to help you learn, and has made numerous improvements to serve our publishers better. Highlights include:

• International language support: All Publisher University content is available in 11 languages, including: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Chinese (Simplified) and Chinese (Traditional).
• Search: No need to click from page to page to find the video you’re looking for. Instead, you can search in the language of your choice for the topic you need to learn.
• Site responsiveness: Looking to learn on the go? Open Publisher University on your tablet or smartphone to let the learning continue when you’re away from your desk.

Access this high-quality content from the convenience of your own computer, phone or tablet. Especially with our latest updates to our learning resources, there’s never been a better time to learn.

Visit g.co/PublisherU today.

Posted by Danielle Chang
Ad Traffic Quality

Publishers create the stories, memes, shows and games that entertain and inform us everyday – and most of that content is funded by ads. Our goal at DoubleClick is to help these publishers thrive by delivering great user experiences on every screen, so they can keep us users happy and grow their revenue. That’s why we believe it’s important to share insights when we can, and partner closely with publishers to help them apply learnings from our research to support their businesses.

Calculating the cost of mobile speed

People expect great experiences wherever they’re consuming content, especially on mobile. But slow loading mobile sites are more than a user experience issue; they can cost publishers revenue. Our recent research, The Need for Mobile Speed, shows that mobile websites that load in 5 seconds can earn up to 2X more revenue than sites that load in 19 seconds, the industry average¹. To help publishers understand how much more revenue they could earn, we’ve published an interactive revenue calculator on DoubleClick.com showing how mobile page speed relates to ad revenue.

While there are many factors that can impact publisher revenue, the results provided by the calculator are based on analysis of thousands of mobile web domains combined with real revenue and site performance data from DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Google Analytics. By entering just a few data points from their current site, publishers can find out how much money they could earn with a faster site.

Partnering to solve mobile speed

Using lessons and insights from our mobile research, our teams work closely with publishers like Everyday Health and Sinclair Digital to help them improve their mobile experiences and deliver real business results.

After consulting and working together with our team, Everyday Health, Inc. took steps to accelerate their What to Expect mobile web pages.

“We were able to improve the time it takes to load the first part of the page by 33%, and we were able to improve the full page load by 78%, so that’s going to be miles better for a mom who’s impatient, or nervous, or anxious. She’s going to trust us more.”
-Diane Otter, Editor in Chief, Everyday Health

Sinclair Digital contacted various mobile experts to see what metrics they should use and how best to measure them. The DoubleClick team was able to give the Sinclair team a second opinion and specific advice on ways to reduce load times and increase engagement. After implementing changes, Sinclair’s was able to improve their average page speed by 500%.

Read more about how Everyday Health and Sinclair Digital improved their mobile web experiences and then see how much more you could earn with a faster mobile website.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer
Product Marketing Manager

^{1 DoubleClick, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, September 2016}

Google believes in the value of the open web, an ecosystem where users get access to information, and publishers are able to create and earn money from their content. And at DoubleClick, our product roadmap is focused on a simple premise: to help publishers thrive and create sustainable businesses with advertising. That commitment isn’t just for today, tomorrow or next quarter – we invest in solutions for the long-term, that will help publishers succeed for many years to come.

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the smartphone, when we talk about the open web we are really talking about mobile: more than half of all ad queries on DoubleClick’s publisher platform are on mobile¹. At the same time, the fastest-growing form of content across all digital channels is video². Today, we’re launching three new betas, all designed to help publishers thrive in a mobile and video world.

Putting users first and delivering better ads

People expect great experiences wherever they’re consuming content. That’s why we built a flexible, component-based native advertising solution to help publishers deliver better ads that fit a user’s context. We’re excited to announce that we are bringing video to Native Ads on DoubleClick in a new beta offering.

Since May 2016, native ad impressions served through DoubleClick have more than doubled³ with publishers including The New York Times, Aller Media, Vogue, Zillow Group, Slate, Epicurious and eBay adopting our solution. With the addition of video to our native ads solution, publishers can now capture premium video advertising budgets on their non-video content.

According to Chris Quinn, Head of Commercial Operations at Kijiji, a subsidiary of eBay and an early tester of this solution:

“The [DoubleClick] native video templates — content and app-install — enable Kijiji to give our advertisers an alternative to banner and static native. We were excited about the ability to run assets seamlessly without embedded video players, which will hopefully give us a jumpstart in the video space. Testing has just begun across our iOS app, and we look forward to seeing positive results and potentially incorporating into our greater offering in 2017.”

Maximizing revenue while delivering the best user experience

Our research shows that people will not wait for slow content on mobile: over half of visits are abandoned when mobile web pages take longer than 3 seconds to load⁴. In this environment, publishers only have a split second to deliver the most relevant and highest paying ads to maximize their overall revenue without increasing latency and losing users.

At DoubleClick, we’ve consistently delivered server-side solutions that create the most revenue possible across all of a publisher’s inventory without sacrificing speed. For example, Dynamic Allocation has helped publishers earn up to a 24% lift in their programmatic revenue⁵ and publishers like Gannett have seen 15% greater lift in eCPMs for revenue from programmatic channels with new products like DoubleClick for Publishers First Look.

When speed matters, the fastest solutions yield the best results. That’s why we’re excited about our latest offering, Exchange Bidding. Exchange Bidding helps publishers maximize demand for every impression by letting them put multiple exchanges into competition in real time without adding any new client-side code. Since we announced it earlier this year, the number of participating publishers has grown 4x, the number of exchange partners has doubled, and we’ve moved the product from alpha into closed beta in the US.

Continuing this momentum, we’re happy to announce that we are expanding the beta of Exchange Bidding to include mobile apps, with Smaato as one of our first mobile app exchange partners.

“By integrating directly with DoubleClick for Publishers, Smaato can compete in real time for ad impressions based on price and priority, in parallel with other exchanges. We’re delighted to be an early participant in Exchange Bidding and look forward to expanding this solution to all of our partners.”
-Christian Sieweke, Senior Product Manager at Smaato.

Engaging users with personalized video experiences on every screen

Mobile and connected streaming devices are the new destination for digital video. Last year, ad impressions served to Connected TVs via DoubleClick Bid Manager grew over 225%⁶. Across all these screens, people expect personalized experiences no matter what they’re watching.

Earlier this year, we launched Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) for live TV on DoubleClick as a way to bring addressable advertising capabilities to broadcasters. Whether for live sporting events in France or the Presidential debates in the United States, partners like TF1 and Fox News have used DAI to deliver seamless, personalized ad experiences to all screens. In fact, for some of our biggest partners, DAI represents about a third of all their digital ad impressions, and the majority of their Connected TV impressions are being served via DAI.

Today, we’re excited to announce a beta offering to extend Dynamic Ad Insertion to video on demand (VOD). Publishers like A+E Networks are now inserting relevant, highly targeted ads into both long- and short-form VOD content across all devices, and delivering personalized ads while eliminating common pain points like buffering. This feature will be capable of serving both direct-sold and programmatic campaigns – in both cases delivering smarter, data-driven ads that perform better.

At Google, we know we’re only successful when our partners are successful. Today, building for sustainability means thoughtfully innovating to deliver mobile and video solutions that help publishers earn the most from their content while respecting user desires for better experiences.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack
Director of Product Management, Publisher Platforms

^{1 DoubleClick internal data, Oct – Nov 2016
2 eMarketer, “Growth of Average Time Spent per Day with Major Media by US Adults, 2013-2018 (% change)”, October 1, 2016
3 DoubleClick internal data, May – Oct 2016
4 DoubleClick, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, September 2016
5 Boston Consulting Group, “The Publisher’s Path to Profitability”, July 2015
6 DoubleClickThe State of Play”, July 2016}

The digital landscape has changed the way people shop for the holidays. With the ability to instantly discover, research and purchase, people around the world are more informed and more efficient than ever before — transforming into supershoppers, seemingly overnight.

Supershoppers are a new breed of buyers, keeping their options open and relying heavily on mobile for inspiration, research and e-commerce. They learn the latest brands and the top gifts of the season, and they know where to find the best deals. Where do they gather their knowledge? From you, if you know how to reach them.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange offers access to the broadest reach of premium, clean and brand-safe inventory across screens. We’ve created a new guide to help you get the right message to these supershoppers and to provide some tips to help set your campaigns up for success this holiday season.

Native advertising is fast becoming the chosen method for advertisers looking to reach mobile consumers. Native ads allow advertisers to build better brand experiences, particularly on mobile, by matching the ad to the form and function of the surrounding publisher content. According to eMarketer, native advertising is already a $16B business and is expected to more than double to $33.5B by 2020.¹

However, while users find this type of ad format useful, the process of building and scaling native ads is largely still manual, with varying standards and formats across publishers.

Over the past year, Google has been working with publishers like the New York Times and Washington Post to help them adopt native ads. And in July, we announced an expanded offering for both publishers and advertisers to help accelerate adoption of this user-friendly format with programmatic. Advertisers can now easily build and buy native ads that run scalably across all publishers with Doubleclick Bid Manager.

The results are starting to come in…

Since launch, we’ve seen a lot of excitement amongst advertisers who want to get started with the solution, and initial campaigns are seeing success. For example, San Francisco Travel Association and their performance marketing platform, Sojern, used programmatic native in DoubleClick to easily create a campaign that successfully converted interested consumers into San Francisco-bound travellers.

See SF Travel’s components come to life as various native ad formats

The component-based nature of the ads allowed SF Travel to test different headlines and optimize the campaign to the best performers. Sojern was also able to integrate their own travel-based marketing platform with DoubleClick Bid Manager to help deliver a campaign that exceeded SF Travel’s goals.

The two-month campaign drove:

• A 1662% rise in hotel bookings: 16X their previous campaign
• A remarkable 92% drop in cost per acquisition

“Thanks to our work with the San Francisco Travel team and Google, programmatic native ads in DoubleClick are now a proven method for driving direct bookings,” says Jackie Lamping, VP of Marketing at Sojern. “We’ve since expanded this opportunity and made it available to all of Sojern’s clients.”

Read the full case study to learn more about San Francisco Travel’s campaign. If you’re interested in building a programmatic native campaign with DoubleClick, reach out to your DoubleClick sales rep for more information.

Posted by Jason Bigler
Product Management Director, DoubleClick

^{1 eMarketer, “US Native Advertising Update: Focus on Video,” July 16, 2016}

In the coming quarters, all major browsers, including Chrome, are phasing out the use of Flash technologies in favor of HTML5. HTML5 is not only available on more devices, but also offers improved security, reduced power consumption and faster page load times for users.

We began our transition to HTML5 with display ads across Google and DoubleClick back in 2015. We are now continuing that transition by shifting video ads in DoubleClick Digital Marketing, DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the Google Display Network to HTML5 over the next few quarters as follows:

• Starting April 3rd, 2017, new Flash video ads will no longer be able to be uploaded into DoubleClick Studio, DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers or AdWords.
• Starting July 3rd, 2017, Flash video ads will no longer be able to run through DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, DoubleClick for Publishers or AdWords. Additionally, our Active View and Verification tools for video will no longer use Flash.

Transition timeline for HTML5 Video

It’s important to begin updating your ads and websites to HTML5 technologies in preparation for these dates. We fully support HTML5 Video across DoubleClick and AdWords and provide the tools to ensure advertisers and publishers can easily migrate all video ads to HTML5.

For guidance and best practices to help your team with this transition, see this Chrome one-sheeter, visit the DoubleClick help center or contact your DoubleClick sales representative.

Posted by Peentoo Patel and Sunil Gupta

In the coming quarters, all major browsers, including Chrome, are phasing out the use of Flash technologies in favor of HTML5. HTML5 is not only available on more devices, but also offers improved security, reduced power consumption and faster page load times for users.

We began our transition to HTML5 with display ads across Google and DoubleClick back in 2015. We are now continuing that transition by shifting video ads in DoubleClick Digital Marketing, DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the Google Display Network to HTML5 over the next few quarters as follows:

• Starting April 3rd, 2017, new Flash video ads will no longer be able to be uploaded into DoubleClick Studio, DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers or AdWords.
• Starting July 3rd, 2017, Flash video ads will no longer be able to run through DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, DoubleClick for Publishers or AdWords. Additionally, our Active View and Verification tools for video will no longer use Flash.

Transition timeline for HTML5 Video

It’s important to begin updating your ads and websites to HTML5 technologies in preparation for these dates. We fully support HTML5 Video across DoubleClick and AdWords and provide the tools to ensure advertisers and publishers can easily migrate all video ads to HTML5.

For guidance and best practices to help your team with this transition, see Chrome one-sheeter, visit the DoubleClick help center or contact your DoubleClick sales representative.

Posted by Peentoo Patel and Sunil Gupta

Cross-posted from the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Blog

Over a year has passed since the AMP Project first launched with the vision of making mobile web experiences faster and better for everybody. From the very beginning, we’ve maintained that the AMP project would support publishers’ existing business models while creating new monetization opportunities. With regards to advertising, this meant giving publishers the flexibility to use the current technology and systems they’re used to, and evolving user-first mobile web initiatives like AMP for Ads (A4A).

With a growing number of publishers embracing the speed of AMP, today we’re addressing some of the ways in which we’re helping you do more with ads on AMP.

Serve ads from more than 70+ ad tech providers

Keeping with the open source nature of the project, more than 70+ advertising technology providers have already integrated with AMP. And that list is only growing. Existing tags that are delivered via a supported ad server also work in AMP. So, you can serve ads from both directly-sold campaigns as well as third-party ad networks and exchanges so long as they have support for AMP.

Keep 100% of the ad revenue

AMP is an open source project. It does not take a revenue share. AMP is not an advertising service provider or intermediary, and publishers can monetize AMP pages the same way you monetize HTML pages, keeping 100% of the revenue you earn based on negotiated rates with ad providers.

Choose the advertising experience on your pages

You can choose to serve any number of ads per page to serve in locations that works best for your content, including the first viewport. Just remember that regular ads in AMP load after the primary content. So, unless you’re loading the lightning fast A4A ads, we recommend placing the first ad below the first viewpoint to optimize for viewability and user experience.

Take advantage of video ad support

AMP currently supports 13 different video players, ranging from Brightcove to Teads, all of which can serve video ads. If you want to use a video player that is not currently supported in AMP, place the video player inside amp-iframe. Learn more.

Differentiate yourself with rich and custom ad formats

AMP accommodates a large variety of ad formats by default, ranging from publisher custom ad units to IAB standard outstream video and in-feed native ads. We value publisher choice and support efforts to create proprietary ad formats. For example, with responsive layouts in AMP, you can offer advertisers custom ads that can dynamically span the entire width of the mobile device. Learn more about how you can adapt your ads strategy for AMP.

Maximize revenue with interchangeable ad slots

In September 2016, both YieldMo and DoubleClick announced support for multi-size ad requests on AMP pages. With this launch, you can optimize yield by allowing multiple ad creative sizes to compete for each ad slot, capturing the most advertiser demand possible on AMP pages while still protecting the user’s experience.

Plan ahead with a view into AMP’s roadmap

Transparency is important to the success of any open source project and is a key value for AMP. Accordingly, we started publishing the AMP roadmap publicly nearly 6 months ago, including milestones for ads. These roadmaps are accompanied with bi-quarterly status updates and you can also see all AMP releases .

Over 700,000 domains have published AMP pages and a good many are monetizing them with ads. Early studies suggest that ads on AMP are more viewable and engaging than ads on non-AMP mobile pages. That’s because with AMP, you don’t have to choose between good user experiences and monetization opportunities. When balanced and optimized, you can have both.

Reach out — we’re eager to hear your suggestions and feedback to make sure that AMP pays off for everyone.

Posted by Vamsee Jasti
Product Manager, AMP Project

Search marketers know the pain of trying to make their campaigns speak the language of their business. Campaigns optimized for your business depend on specific insights, but it’s difficult to find those insights in standardized reporting and automation.

We’re introducing business data in DoubleClick Search so you can report on and automate search marketing in a way that’s unique to your needs — and learn if they’re being met. Whether for products, flights, hotels, marketing strategies or other aspects, you can incorporate business data tables to generate custom reports and manage your ads.

Focus on the metrics that matter most to your business

Business data in DoubleClick Search gives you the flexibility to view campaign data from the angles that align most with your business goals.

For example, if you’re a search marketer for an airline, you could use business data in DoubleClick Search to view your reports by region, airport or seating class to learn where — and among whom — your campaigns are succeeding, and which campaigns need adjustments.

Seeing your search marketing data in a business context can uncover deeper insights about where to invest search budgets. Your business dimensions can also help you understand how search fits into your broader marketing strategy.

Use your business data to automate campaign management

Business data in DoubleClick Search can also be used to automate campaign management. For example, if you’re building search campaigns for hotels, you can upload room availability data for each property. You can then use rules to pause campaigns with no vacancy and raise bids on hotels with empty rooms. Many other types of data, like inventory levels, competitive metrics and prices, can be used to change ad copy, bids, budgets, status and other properties of your campaigns.

Over the next few months, business data feeds will let you automatically update business data tables from a regularly fetched file. Rather than manually uploading a spreadsheet every time information changes, DoubleClick Search can automatically read data from your server and seamlessly incorporate updated information into your account. This data can be applied in rules and reporting, just like the business data you upload yourself.

See how this works:

Leverage sales and promotional events as signals for Smart Bidding

We’re also introducing the ability for you to upload data about product launches, promotions and other frequently recurring business events to your search campaigns. This data supplements your existing campaign metrics with extra information, providing additional context for DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding to use as it evaluates the effect of these events on conversions. With this information in hand, bid strategies set smarter bids that help you win more conversions while hitting your CPA or ROI targets.

For example, an e-commerce retailer may offer a free shipping promotion every few weeks. By uploading this promotional schedule into DoubleClick Search, Smart Bidding can analyze the effect of the free shipping offer on conversion rates before, during and after each sale. Over time, it will detect patterns in conversion rates driven by these events. Then, Smart Bidding will automatically raise or lower bids in order to achieve optimal results.

How will you get search marketing in sync with your business?

Advertisers like Cadillac are already using business data in DoubleClick Search for time savings and improved performance. They’ve thought through the numerous possibilities of business data and updated their accounts. Now it’s your turn to do the same.

“With business data in DoubleClick Search we can better leverage our search marketing investments through customized reports that allow us to differentiate between conquest customers and existing owners. We are committed to putting customers at the center of all that we do and this enables us to provide the right information to the right customer.” -Dan Han, Digital Advertising Assistant Manager, Cadillac

To learn more about business data in DoubleClick Search, visit our Help Center and reach out to your DoubleClick representative to bring better insights and automation into your campaigns.

Posted by Henry Tappen Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Last month we released a new study, “The need for mobile speed”, highlighting the impact of mobile latency on publisher revenue. Simply having your site load on a mobile device is no longer enough: Mobile sites have to be fast and relevant. The study analyzed 10,000+ mobile web domains, and from the results we gained several insights about the impact of mobile latency on user experience.

Critically, the study also revealed strong correlations between page speed and the following key performance indicators:

• Revenue
• Bounce rate
• Session duration
• Viewability

It’s clear mobile speed matters to the success of publisher sites, but making mobile load times a priority doesn’t always make achieving speed easy. To help you build a faster mobile web experience, we’ve created a mobile web speed toolkit. It outlines a 4-step process to diagnose and fix mobile speed issues:

1. Measure your site’s performance.
2. Assess the different components impacting speed.
3. Prioritize the order your site loads.
4. Test, remeasure and repeat to improve your site speed.

The mobile web speed toolkit offers tactical recommendations to begin achieving mobile speed.

The relationship between page speed and publisher revenue is clearer than ever before. Small improvements to your mobile site may yield big gains for your mobile revenue, so get your copy of the mobile web speed toolkit and start making changes today.

#SpeedMatters

Posted by Jay Castro
AdSense team

Today we’re introducing a new API that allows you to securely connect offline conversion events to your digital advertising programs, allowing you to measure the full impact of your digital spend. In addition to gaining a more comprehensive view on campaign performance, you’ll also be able to use these insights to better refine your audience lists.

Take the auto industry, for example. Consumers in the market looking to buy a new sedan might start by watching video reviews of popular models. When they’ve narrowed down a few options that fit their needs, they’re likely to search for local dealers and make calls to schedule test drives. Finally, after all of this research, they’ll make their decision and buy directly from one dealer.

If you’re a car maker trying to reach consumers in this journey, you’re probably looking at proxy metrics (i.e. lead forms, time on site, video completion rates, etc.) to measure the success of your digital campaigns, leaving you with a partial understanding of their impact. With the Conversions API you’re able to measure offline activities as well — such as calls, visits or transactions happening in the dealership — giving you a complete view of the customer journey.

Some industry-specific examples

Enabling better decisions

By considering offline actions such as store visits, call activities and in-store transactions you can gain insights that will allow you to make your ads more relevant for consumers and perform better. For example:

• Exclude existing customers from your new acquisition program and focus on retention and loyalty
• Re-market to consumers who have called your call center but didn’t purchase
• Cross-sell new products to frequent visitors of your stores

Getting started with the Conversions API

You can use one of the approved partners to securely integrate with DoubleClick. Approved partners span various use cases including CRM onboarding, call tracking and foot traffic attribution:

Conversions API is now available to all DoubleClick accounts. To get started, review the technical documentation in our Help Center, talk to your sales representative or contact one of the partners directly.

Posted by Luke Hedrick
Product Manager, DoubleClick

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

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)}

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.}