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

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)}