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.

DoubleClick Digital Marketing has always been an open platform to give marketers a more complete picture of how their digital marketing works together - across mobile and desktop, video and native. As the use of mobile devices continues to shape the consumer journey, we’re particularly focused on helping our partners make the most of in-app formats. In fact we’ve seen the volume of this type of inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager (our programmatic buying platform) increase fivefold over the past year.

Today we’re continuing this effort with a new partnership with Twitter. Through this partnership, DoubleClick clients will be able to buy Twitter’s Promoted Tweet ad format via DoubleClick Bid Manager across mobile (including in-app) and desktop. We will also make it easier for marketers to measure their Twitter ad campaigns directly within the DoubleClick platform.

This deal complements our ongoing push to bring new formats and inventory to DoubleClick, like our recent announcement about YouTube’s TrueView format. We’re excited about this partnership and look forward to continuing to help our clients make the most of digital advertising in a multi-screen world.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Group Product Manager, DoubleClick Digital Marketing

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

• Support for AdWords features:
  • Call extensions: Call extensions encourage calls to your business by showing a phone number with your ad. You can create call extensions in DS or create call extensions in AdWords and sync them into DS. You can also use DS to report on performance metrics such as clicks on ads that show a phone number, the number of calls made to a specific number, and call conversions. Learn more.
    
  • Ad customizers: Ad customizers are parameters in your ad copy that will be replaced by dynamic text when an ad is served. For example, you can include the {=Mixers.Brand} custom parameter in your ad copy. If you've uploaded a spreadsheet that defines a value for Mixers.Brand, AdWords will substitute the value when it serves the ad. When you create ads in DS, you can include ad customizers in your ad copy. You can also sync in ads with customizers. Learn more.
    
  • Adjust bids by location: A single AdWords campaign can specify different max CPC adjustments for different countries, regions, cities, or zip codes. This enables you to maximize conversions by location without having to maintain separate campaigns. Learn more.
    
  • Upgraded URLs: AdWords is in the process of introducing Upgraded URLs to make it easier to manage tracking parameters and third-party redirection URLs. DS will be introducing updates to support upgraded URLs.
    
    Important: Don't upgrade keywords and sitelinks yet. For now, it's important that you do not upgrade your keyword and sitelink URLs. We'll provide complete migration instructions for DS users soon.
    
    DS already supports upgraded URLs for product groups and will use the new AdWords URL fields after you edit a product group in DS. As a result, you'll be able to use new ValueTrack parameters for product groups. Other than the additional ValueTrack parameters, you won't see any difference with upgraded URLs when working with product groups.
    
    
• Unified Device Targeting in Bing Ads accounts: Bing Ads has completed its final migration of campaigns to Unified Device Targeting. Now, all campaigns and ad groups target all device types. Similar to AdWords, the default bid you enter applies to desktop computers, and you can enter bid adjustments for mobile and tablet devices.
  
  As a first step in supporting this change, DS has removed the old campaign and ad group settings for specifying device targets. If you want to adjust bids for mobile or tablet devices, you need to sign in to Bing Ads and make changes there. It's important to run a sync in DS after you make your changes. This will ensure DS will not change or erase any bid adjustments you make in Bing Ads.
  
  Now that Bing Ads has finished its migration, we highly recommend that you sign in to Bing Ads and review the results. If you previously had multiple campaigns targeting the same keywords on different devices, you may now be competing against yourself for ad placement. Review the Unified Device Targeting FAQs for more information and recommended actions.
  
• Create a geographic location of presence report: If you want to know more about how your advertising performs in, for example, cities in the United States compared to prefectures in Japan, you can now use DS to create a geographic location of presence report. Learn more.
  
• Attribution modeling for Google Analytics conversions: An attribution model determines how to distribute credit for a conversion across all of the activity in a conversion funnel. By default, Google Analytics conversions give all credit to the last click. You can create attribution models in Google Analytics that give some amount of credit to clicks on interactions higher up in the funnel. Then you can import the attribution models into DS and apply them to custom Google Analytics activities columns in DS. Learn more.

We also updated the following features:

• New URL for DS: The URL that you use to access DoubleClick Search has changed from https://www.google.com/doubleclick/search to https://ddm.google.com/ds. You still have access to the same great features, but now they're available at a new URL. DS user credentials will continue to work as expected and existing bookmarks/saved links will redirect to the new URL.
  
• Exclude data from bid strategy optimization: DS bid strategies calculate bids based on the performance history of keywords and conversions. Sometimes, an event may occur that causes a skew in the bid strategy calculations (for example, a web page outage). In DS, you can identify the event and instruct a bid strategy to ignore the performance history during the event. Learn more.
  
• Updates to Executive Reporting:
  • Segment charts and tables by sitelinks: Charts and tables in an executive report can now be segmented by AdWords sitelinks. For example, you can create a pie chart that shows how much revenue each sitelink has generated or line chart that shows how each sitelink has contributed to conversions over time. Learn more.
    
  • Download executive reports in PDF: You now have the option to download your reports in the Portable Document Format (PDF) in addition to the Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) format. Learn more.
    
  • Use formula columns in reports that span advertisers: You can now include formula columns in reports that display data from multiple advertisers. Learn more.
    
  • Use ad group or campaign labels for faster report generation: By default, when you use a label to segment or filter a chart in an executive report, DS collects and summarizes data from each keyword that you've applied the label to. Because working with such a large amount of data can take a long time, the DS UI displays only a quick preview. Now, you can set up a report to only collect data from labeled ad groups or campaigns instead of each keyword. This makes it faster to generate a report, and makes it possible for the DS UI to display the full data instead of the data preview.
    
• Updated search terms report: The search terms report (previously called the search query report) shows the search terms that trigger your ads to appear, and enables you to quickly add keywords or set negative keywords to optimize performance.
  
  You can now view the search terms report at the engine-account level (for AdWords, Bing Ads, and Yahoo! JAPAN accounts). That is, you can see all search terms across all campaigns in an account from a single report.
  
  In addition, the search terms report for AdWords accounts in DS now shows search terms retrieved via the AdWords API. Learn more.
  
• Broad-match negative keywords are now copied to Bing Ads: Previously when copying campaigns to a Bing Ads engine account, DS would ignore any broad-match negative keywords in the source campaign and copy only the exact-match and phrase-match negative keywords into the Bing Ads account. (Bing Ads does not support the broad match type for negative keywords.) However, now DS copies broad-match negative keywords and changes the match type to phrase in Bing Ads accounts.
  
• URL templates are always applied to existing keywords: When DS first released the URL templates feature, you could select the Rewrite keyword landing page URLs not currently using template option to prevent DS from applying the template to existing keywords. This option has been removed. Now, DS always applies the URL template to all existing keywords and any new keywords that you create. Learn more about URL templates.

See these updates in action in the new features training video for March.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Since 2008 we’ve been working to make sure all of our services use strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means people using products like Search, Gmail, YouTube, and Drive will automatically have an encrypted connection to Google. In addition to providing a secure connection on our own products, we’ve been big proponents of the idea of “HTTPS Everywhere,” encouraging webmasters to prevent and fix security breaches on their sites, and using HTTPS as a signal in our search ranking algorithm.

This year, we’re working to bring this “HTTPS Everywhere” mission to our ads products as well, to support all of our advertiser and publisher partners. Here are some of the specific initiatives we’re working on:

• We’ve moved all YouTube ads to HTTPS as of the end of 2014.
• Search on Google.com is already encrypted for a vast majority of users and we are working towards encrypting search ads across our systems. 
• By June 30, 2015, the vast majority of mobile, video, and desktop display ads served to the Google Display Network, AdMob, and DoubleClick publishers will be encrypted.
• Also by June 30, 2015, advertisers using any of our buying platforms, including AdWords and DoubleClick, will be able to serve HTTPS-encrypted display ads to all HTTPS-enabled inventory. 

Of course we’re not alone in this goal. By encrypting ads, the advertising industry can help make the internet a little safer for all users. Recently, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) published a call to action to adopt HTTPS ads, and many industry players are also working to meet HTTPS requirements. We’re big supporters of these industry-wide efforts to make HTTPS everywhere a reality.

Our HTTPS Everywhere ads initiatives will join some of our other efforts to provide a great ads experience online for our users, like “Why this Ad?”, “Mute This Ad” and TrueView skippable ads. With these security changes to our ads systems, we’re one step closer to ensuring users everywhere are safe and secure every time they choose to watch a video, map out a trip in a new city, or open their favorite app.

Neal Mohan, VP Product Management, Display and Video Ads

Jerry Dischler, VP Product Management, AdWords

Today at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco, we are announcing our latest investment to help brands make the most of digital: the TrueView ad format will be available for programmatic buying within DoubleClick Bid Manager.

This launch brings together two important trends we’re seeing: the importance of user choice in advertising and the ability to reach the right person at the right time with programmatic buying.

We introduced TrueView, an innovative cost-per-view (CPV) ad format, five years ago as a way to put user choice at the heart of brand advertising. With TrueView, viewers choose to engage, and brands only pay when they do. Today, the format is a brand mainstay, representing 85% of all in-stream ads on YouTube. And based on a recent study, we’ve seen that two-thirds of TrueView campaigns deliver significant lift in brand interest.

In parallel, programmatic buying has evolved from just a real-time bidding tool for direct response campaigns to an important technology and data-driven solution for brand building. Across our own platforms, we’ve seen the volume of programmatic transactions double year-over-year. With the consumer journey now fractured into many "micro-moments" across screens, programmatic can help brands understand and reach their audiences across devices and formats.

In the coming months, marketers and agencies will be able to buy the TrueView choice-based video ad format on a cost-per-view (CPV) basis through DoubleClick Bid Manager. This is the first time TrueView has been available outside of AdWords, allowing DoubleClick clients to take advantage of features like cross-campaign frequency capping, unified audience insights, measurement and billing across campaigns.

Some of our partners are already seeing success:

"At Netflix, we have always embraced consumer choice. In the advertising world, TrueView is the epitome of that choice. The fact that we can now scale it further via DoubleClick Bid Manager represents a powerful new channel for marketing our content across the world." 

Mike Zeman, Director of Digital Marketing, Netflix

“TrueView has empowered us to give our consumers greater choice while delivering a better engaging viewer experience. As an early adopter of the TrueView beta in DoubleClick Bid Manager in the UK we have seen great success in achieving our CPV goals.” 

Nestlé UK

“We’re really excited to bring TrueView on DoubleClick Bid Manager into our video campaign arsenal. This deepens our ability to achieve client success metrics on highly relevant and viewable video inventory combined with universal controls around targeting, frequency management and reporting.” 

Ian Johnson, EVP and MD, Global Product at Cadreon

“TrueView in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) allows us to strengthen our branding offering while benefiting from significant efficiency gains. Once we can leverage DBM’s capabilities such as 3rd party audience targeting and universal frequency capping, we will have a very powerful value proposition for advertisers.” 

Ali Nehme, Managing Director Digital, Vivaki Middle East and North Africa

This adds to our ongoing investments to help brands get the most out of the programmatic landscape like Google Partner Select, Active View, Verification and brand safety protections. We're committed to providing the most complete programmatic platform to our brand partners to help them connect with their audiences in all the moments that matter. Stay tuned for even more in the months to come.

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Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products

Cross posted from our DoubleClick for Publishers blog.

It's an exciting time for broadcasters. With the proliferation of streaming video, OTT devices, connected TVs and mobile devices, the line between offline and digital video is quickly blurring. Navigating this change, though, is tricky--broadcasters are now facing the challenge of how to manage an ads business that spans multiple devices and multiple ways of consuming content. We’ve been working on a few initiatives to help broadcasters with this challenge, I had the pleasure of introducing a few of these at the NAB Show this morning.

Better TV forecasting in DoubleClick for Publishers

One of the biggest challenges broadcasters face in this new landscape is accurately being able to forecast their inventory for their shows. What was once a fairly straightforward process--estimating how many ads they could show during a given program though one delivery method on one screen--now looks like a logic puzzle on steroids. 

Broadcasters now need to take into account the unpredictable nature of viewing habits on multiple screens, seasonality, spikes and fluctuations in traffic (e.g. for NCAA finals), different devices, ad loads, not to mention all of the new data that is available with digital.  How do you even begin to tell an advertiser that you can deliver on their campaign goals if the math is just this complicated? And especially as broadcasters plan for the upfronts?

To help them meet this challenge, we're introducing new ways for broadcasters to forecast in DoubleClick for Publishers by enabling them to forecast available internet TV inventory with greater precision and insights and the impact from patterns in commercial breaks. And coming soon, broadcasters will be able to use seasonality in forecasting for upfront cycles and model based on their offline data. Our goal with these changes is to make it easier for our broadcast partners to manage this process and put together great inventory packages for their upfront offerings.

mDialog inventory comes to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Last year, we acquired a company called mDialog with expertise in dynamically delivering ads to internet-delivered TV content (like streaming video, OTT devices and connected TVs). We’ve been working to bring their technology together with ours. Thanks to this work, we’ve now connected mDialog inventory to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. This means that TV providers will be able to monetize TV inventory across OTT devices (like Chromecast, Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TB), across all screens, programmatically. 

Partners like Fox News are already seeing success with this new feature:

'With more and more of our viewers consuming content across screens, digital video is, of course, a huge focus. Google bringing the mDialog technology to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange has allowed us to connect our Internet-delivered television content, whether live programming or full-episode shows with the controls we need to programmatic demand. This is a great step forward both towards being able to better monetize this cross-screen content and providing a great ads experience for viewers. We're excited to see where this goes."
- Zach Friedman,

VP of Digital Ad Sales at FOX News Channel & FOX Business Network

Investing for the future

We're experimenting with additional models, like linear TV, as well. As just one example, we're running trials of addressable ads into linear TV set-top boxes via our Google Fiber service in Kansas City. Powered by DoubleClick technology, we are helping local businesses connect with customers in that market by delivering more relevant messages to viewers.

Continuing to explore the evolution of TV

In our ongoing DoubleClick series on the Evolution of TV, we've been discussing the risks and opportunities around 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape. In Part 3 in our Evolution of TV series (find the rest of the series here) we dispel the hype about programmatic TV, address the challenges, and concentrate on its promise for brand advertisers, programmers, and broadcasters.

Download the new whitepaper from Think with Google for the in-depth story.

Ultimately delivering addressable ads whether across TV ads served via the internet or through the set-top box is about delighting users with the best viewing experience. It's a technology that everyone in the industry can get behind. Advertisers have always wanted the customization, programmers and distributors have always wanted it to maximize the value of every impression and viewers appreciate more relevant ads. Addressable TV is a win-win-win proposition.

Posted by Rany Ng, Director of Product Management, Video

This post is part of DoubleClick's Evolution of TV series. In this series we identify the risks and opportunities around 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape as TV programming shifts to delivery over the Internet.

Television advertising is big business. How big? TV ad spending in the U.S. is projected to reach almost $84 billion per year by 2018. Traditionally, many of these billions are spent during upfronts—that time of year when traditional TV networks and, increasingly, digital media companies gather to present their fall lineups and pitch marketers for ad dollars. Whatever TV inventory hasn't been sold, or is held back, is then sold in what is called the scatter market.

While this traditional TV buying and selling model has worked well for decades, it's not without its inefficiencies. "Programmatic TV" is a likely solution that could apply digital advertising's efficiency models to improve TV advertising.

What is "programmatic TV"?
In this new whitepaper we explore what exactly "programmatic TV" is and its promise for those involved.

We define "programmatic TV" as a technology-automated and data-driven method of buying and delivering ads against TV content. This includes digital TV ads served across the web, mobile devices, and connected TVs, as well as linear TV ads served across set-top boxes.

As with any new technology, though, the programmatic TV offerings on the market today fall short of the full potential of the technology. As a result, programmatic TV skeptics have reason to ask “why change what’s not broken?” We’re here to say that, while the TV buying and selling process isn’t exactly broken, there's a role for programmatic TV to make it better.

In Part 3 in our Evolution of TV series (find the rest of the series here) we dispel the hype about programmatic TV, address the challenges, and concentrate on its promise for brand advertisers, programmers, and broadcasters.

Download the new whitepaper from Think with Google for the in-depth story.

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Rany Ng,
Director of Product Management, Video