DoubleClick Advertiser Blog: DS features in October

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

Include data from IBM Digital Analytics in DS reports: You can now report on IBM Digital Analytics data directly in DoubleClick Search (DS). After your DS advertiser and Digital Analytics accounts are linked, you’ll be able to see conversion events—including revenue and item counts—from Digital Analytics in the DoubleClick Search UI. You can also download and schedule reports with this data, retrieve the data from the DoubleClick Search API’s Reporting Service, as well as use the data in formula columns. To get started, email your DS support contact and let them know that you want to link DS with Digital Analytics. See Link a DS advertiser with Digital Analytics for the information to include in your email.
Manage AdWords location extensions in DS: Location extensions show your local business address, phone number, and a map marker in text ads served by AdWords. Now you can use DS to manage the location extensions that you've set up in AdWords.
Report on the quantity of items in transactions: Now you can use DS to report the number of items in transactions recorded by Google Analytics and Floodlight activities. Just add the GA quantity, Action quantity, and Transaction quantity columns to a report, or to a formula column.

We also updated the following features:

Bid strategies:
- Choose an attribution model for distributing credit: By default, bid strategies attribute full credit for a conversion to the last paid click. In effect, bid strategies optimize bids to maximize the number of last click conversions in the funnel. If instead you prefer to optimize for paid search clicks throughout the funnel, you can select an alternate attribution model such as time-decay.
- Set a maximum CPA: Bid strategies optimize bids across the whole portfolio to increase efficiency by bidding more for some keywords and less for others. This can mean that the average bid for some individual keywords drives a CPA that's over the target CPA, even though the overall strategy is profitable. To attempt to keep the average bid of each keyword in the profitable CPA range, you can now set a max CPA constraint.
Executive Reporting: Customize the axes for bar and line charts
- Start axis at zero: Now, if you want to show the scale of change between data points in your bar and line charts, you have the option to start the axis at zero. For close data ranges, starting at zero expands the scale of the range.
- Combine the range for measurement on one axis: When comparing different metrics in bar and line charts, you can also combine metrics that use the same unit of measurement on one axis. For example, you can combine clicks and impressions on the same axis because they are measured the same way.
Updated editor for text ads: To make it easier to create text ads, the ad editor now provides separate fields for each line along with a preview of the ad. As you enter text, you'll see the number of characters that you can type in each line. And for a shortcut, you can paste an entire ad into the Headline field. DS will automatically fill in the fields with text you pasted.
DS API's Reporting Service:
- Download sitelink reports: You can use the reporting API to download reports with metrics for AdWords sitelink extensions.
- Report on custom Floodlight variables: In DS, you can use custom Floodlight variables to report conversion data that is unique to your business needs, such as the genre of a movie that a user purchases, the name of the store from which an item is purchased, shipping costs, and so on. The data can be uploaded by a Floodlight tag on the advertiser's site or by the DS conversions API, and now you can use the DS reporting API to download reports that contain the data.