This is the fourth in a series of 7 blog posts about the DoubleClick Search bid optimization white paper, Seven Factors to Consider When Choosing a Bid Optimization Platform.

Last week, we explored the importance of using a smart bid optimization tool to choose the right bids for your keywords. But even smart bids can quickly become irrelevant in a dynamic search landscape. That's why "speed" is as important as "smarts" when it comes to effective bid management.

To learn more about the importance of fast search management platforms that execute quickly to make use of every opportunity, follow the full blog post series on the DoubleClick Search Blog.

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog

With online advertising expanding across different ad formats, new devices, and multiple channels, it’s no surprise that reporting continues to be a challenge for marketers. In fact, 69% of business and technology leaders have pinpointed the inability to gather, understand, and act on all the data about their customers as a leading challenge(1). To answer this growing complexity, we at DoubleClick have been focusing on developing the right tools to power your business with all the insights you need. We’ve recently introduced ways we’re making reporting on all your data easy, to help drive insights exactly when you want them, where you want them. Today, we’re excited to announce 4 new features that build on this by ensuring important business data is accessible and actionable within DoubleClick Search: our offline conversions API, Google Analytics data integrations, Formula Columns, and Web Query support.

A few weeks ago, we announced Multi-channel funnels in DFA, which allows advertisers to quickly build, customize, and compare marketing attribution models. By creating and reviewing multiple models standard to the tool, DFA users will be able to more accurately assign value to the various advertising channels in their marketing campaigns. In DoubleClick Search, we debuted the availability of instant Floodlight conversion data for automatic, intra-day conversions in all DoubleClick Search reports, to bring you the freshest, most reliable campaign data.

Event API for easy offline conversion integration

DoubleClick Search already lets you leverage a variety of solutions to report on conversions, including our proprietary Floodlight tag, AdWords conversion tracking, or Google Analytics goals. But we understand that online advertising also fuels offline conversions. To capture these lost conversions and bring offline into your online world, we’re announcing the open beta of our Event API for uploading offline conversion automatically. Upload new conversions to account for in-store transactions, call-tracking, or other offline activities, or edit existing conversions to account for discounts, returns, credit, or fraud through integrated API access. Today, you can combine this information with our Performance Bidding Suite to optimize your campaigns based on even more of your business data.

Google Analytics website data, with the rest of your search

Couple this with the integration of Google Analytics metrics (beta), which incorporates statistics including bounce rate, page views, transactions, and revenue from Google Analytics, to get a clear picture of how search influences customer interaction on your website. These recent developments in reporting mean faster decision making with all your data holistically captured in DoubleClick Search -- all without mashing up and matching reports or worrying about the potential data drop off of reporting from separate tools. In the next few months, we’ll introduce the ability to use bid strategies with your website metrics, ensuring your campaign’s bid optimization is informed by important user engagement metrics.

Formula magic, directly in the interface

With this wealth of data at your fingertips, how do you more easily make sense of it all? In the past, you’d need to use a spreadsheet tool like Excel to create these calculated columns. Formula Columns lets you create your own customized columns, based on calculations that you apply to existing columns. Now, apply formulas directly in DS and streamline your workflow: track custom KPIs, re-express columns in your own terms, and calculate customized fees, costs, and weights, among other applications.

Web query for data, where you want it
And finally, when it comes to easily accessing all your important data right where you want it, we’re introducing Web query support: instead of scheduling or downloading a file to access your reports, DoubleClick Search now provides a URL that you can use to automatically download and refresh that report’s data -- directly in Excel. This makes it even easier for you to create common report templates in Excel and populate those with the latest DS data, removing the need to manually download and import reports.

Formula Columns, instant conversions, and Web Query support are are available now in DoubleClick Search. To learn more about the Event API or Google Analytics integration, please reach out to your Technical Account Manager, or our support team at ds-support@google.com.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search Team

1. Source: PricewaterCoopers (PwC), “4th Annual Digital IQ Survey,” Jan 31, 2012

This is the second in a series of 7 blog posts about our bid optimization white paper, Seven factors to consider when choosing a bid optimization platform.

At Google, we recognize that the freshness and accuracy of data is paramount to any data-driven system. And since bid optimization platforms are essentially decision engines, data lies at the center of the process, with the engine considering and analyzing data before deciding on the best bid for a given keyword. It’s no surprise, then, that low-quality and stale data going in often means poor results coming out.

To learn about our position on the quality of fresh data in the bid optimization process, and how the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite fits in, follow the full blog post series on the DoubleClick Search Blog.

Before jumping into managing search campaigns with any SEM tool, you’ll want to make sure that you and your teams can demonstrate proficiency with the right workflows and techniques to effectively manage large-scale search campaigns.

With this need in mind, we are pleased to announce the DoubleClick Search (DS) Fundamentals online training certification course for new users looking to learn the fundamentals of DoubleClick Search. This self-paced, interactive, online course allows a new user to ramp up on DS basics quickly.

The training modules use interactive graphics, videos, and guided tutorials to teach campaign management, reporting, and the Performance Bidding Suite for bid optimization. After completing the course, trainees take a quiz, and if they pass, will receive a certificate of achievement showcasing their proficiency with DS.





After completing and passing the full program, the trainee should feel comfortable launching and managing a search campaign, analyzing performance through reports, and creating bidding goals through the Performance Bidding Suite.

DS Fundamentals online training certification is offered in English and will be available in multiple languages soon. You can register here (sign-in required; click the link, then locate “DS Fundamentals” course at the top of the Search Results).

For more information on DoubleClick Search, visit our website: www.doubleclick.com/search

Posted by the DoubleClick Search Team

In our second edition of 'Programmatic in the future', join us tomorrow, 12/6 at 1:30ET/10:30PT as Mario Diez, CEO at Quadrant One, the industry’s premier private exchange marketplace, weighs in on what the potential of this technology is for publishers and advertisers everywhere. Log into your Google+ account and look for the Hangout on Air in the Think with Google +page stream. Hit the play button to tune in.

Last week, Curt Hecht, Chief Revenue Officer at The Weather Company, shared his views on on the value of transacting through programmatic channels in a conversation with Rob Beeler, Content Czar at AdMonsters.

In case you missed it, here’s what he had to say:




Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

Brand advertisers want to know that the inventory they are buying is safe, clean, and high quality. We take this very seriously at Google and employ both cutting edge technology and human review to ensure that DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) can offer the best environment to our buyers. We’re not alone in this fight. Media6Degrees has developed a proprietary system to filter out suspicious activity to protect their clients’ brands and we’re happy to say it validates AdX’s inventory quality. Brand advertisers who want to make sure their programmatic campaigns are running on safe and reliable traffic can look to DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Media6Degrees.

Finding the right customers -- at scale
Major M6D clients who buy media at scale -- brands like Verizon, Disney, Hyundai and Adobe -- rely on M6D and AdX to make sure they reach the right audience. For brands like these, placing their ads only on the best-quality inventory is paramount.

To find the right audience and the safest traffic, M6D relies on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. "We help marketers drive scale in online media campaigns," says Alec Greenberg, VP of Media Operations for M6D. "Once our platform identifies the audience that matches the brand signal of a client, that's where AdX comes in. I want to buy the best targeting inventory and not worry about what is or isn't clean," says Greenberg. “AdX delivers. It's clean inventory and a ton of volume.”

Screening out invalid activity
"Earlier this year we turned off about 1000 real-time bidding publishers where we'd seen suspicious activity," says Alec. "When we compared notes with Google, we found that AdX had already turned off every single one. Every other partner on our list had suspicious sites still active, but Google had filtered out 100% of them."

To ensure their clients only buy the cleanest safest inventory, M6D's engineers developed a proprietary system to sniff out suspicious traffic and remove it from consideration. While M6D is diligent at protecting their clients, they’d prefer their ad partners remove suspicious activity before it even gets to them. With AdX, they get a partner that has been fighting invalid ad activity with great success for years.

"We are fanatical about what we do," says Alec Greenberg. "We believe we have the best targeting system out there and that we're delivering real results driven by real human behavior. That's why Google provides the largest piece of our inventory every day."

"Their scale and their quality are second to none. For anyone entering the fray of programmatic buying, AdX should be the first partner you engage."

Read the full case study here.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Manager