For the last few years, this blog has been the go-to source for all things DoubleClick Search. From monthly product releases, to events, bylines and case studies - you could find it all here.

Starting March 13, your source of DoubleClick Search news will be on our newly redesigned DoubleClick Advertiser blog. With this update, you will be able to access news on DoubleClick Search alongside broader digital marketing news from our team.

On Friday, February 13th, we’ll be retiring the old doubleclicksearch.blogpost.com and redirecting it to the search section of our newly redesigned DoubleClick Advertiser’s blog.

The new dedicated DoubleClick Search blog URL will be: http://doubleclickadvertisers.blogspot.com/search/label/Search 



Please take this opportunity to subscribe to the new blog via Feedburner or the RSS reader of your choice. We look forward to seeing you soon at our new address.

In December and January, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

• Forecast the performance of a bid strategy: Using historical data from an existing bid strategy, DS can estimate how the bid strategy may perform with a different target or spend amount. 
  You can use the forecast to gain such insights as:
  
  • The CPA, ERS, or ROAS target you need to achieve a specific range of conversions. If you know how many conversions you want to achieve per week, you can see which target you're likely to need.
  • How the bid strategy is likely to perform with a specific amount of weekly spend.
  • The trade-offs between cost and conversion volume as you adjust your CPA, ERS, or ROAS targets.
  Learn more.
• Copy campaigns to AdWords, Bing Ads, and Yahoo! JAPAN engine accounts: If you need to manage the same campaigns on multiple engine accounts, instead of manually creating the campaigns in each account you can copy an existing AdWords account. If you make additions or changes to one of the campaigns, you can copy the additions and some of the changes into the other accounts. Learn more.

We also updated the following features:

• Create and apply sitelinks by uploading a bulksheet: You can now use the same bulksheet to create and edit sitelinks and add them to campaigns and ad groups. Before this update, you needed to create sitelinks in one bulksheet and apply them to campaigns and ad groups in a second bulksheet. Learn more.
• URL templates no longer encode URL parameters: If you use a redirect URL to pass tracking data to an additional tracking system, the additional system may require you to HTML-encode your landing page URLs. Instead of adding this redirect URL to each keyword's landing page, you can use a URL template to automatically apply the redirect URL and encode the landing page URLs. Previously, if you set up a URL template to encode landing page URLs, DS also encoded any URL parameters you specified in the template. DS has been updated so that it no longer encodes the URL parameters in a template. Learn more.
• Bid strategy health column: The bid strategy health column now lets you know if any bid strategies are constrained because it's been too long since offline conversions have been uploaded into DS. Learn more.
• Pause engine accounts: Agency managers can now change the status of an engine account from Active to Paused, temporarily stopping such activities as trafficking, bid optimization, and inventory management. Learn more.

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

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

This morning AdWords announced upgraded URLs, a fundamental change to the way they create and track URLs. The change is an easier and faster way to manage and track important information about each click on your AdWords ads.

As part of this upgrade, AdWords is moving from the concept of “destination URLs” to “final URLs and tracking templates”. In addition, AdWords will retire the existing {copy} valuetrack param available for sitelinks today. The upgrade will require that DoubleClick Search make some changes to landing page management for AdWords accounts.

No immediate change to DoubleClick Search workflows 
While we work on supporting upgraded URLs, DoubleClick Search customers should continue to use the existing destination URL format to ensure tracking and campaign management capabilities. If you’re interested in saving time managing URLs, check out the DoubleClick Search URL builder to help simplify your workflows and save hours per week.

Stay tuned for upgrade details 
AdWords will continue to support destination URLs until July 1st. We’ll share more details in the coming weeks about the recommended upgrade process for DoubleClick Search customers.

When running an e-commerce site, you need an analytics solution to gain insight into visitors’ digital journeys and make swift & educated decisions. To help tie your eCommerce transactions with your search campaigns we’ve launched support for IBM Digital Analytics (prev. known as CoreMetrics) in DoubleClick Search.

IBM Digital Analytics is an enterprise class cloud based digital analytics platform and it collects and analyzes customer’s digital journey including data about conversion events on your site, such as cart additions, abandonments, bounces...etc. DoubleClick Search regularly pulls in the data and uses it to attribute visits & conversions to keywords and populate IBM Digital Analytics reporting columns. In DoubleClick Search you can access the columns via online reports, downloaded reports, and the reporting API. You can also take advantage of the ability to create formula columns and executive reporting charts that incorporate IBM Digital Analytics data.

If you’re interested in getting started, please share your IBM Digital Analytics client ID, DDX API auth token, username, timezone & currency with your DoubleClick Search support contact or [email protected]. They’ll give you a heads up when your DoubleClick Search advertiser and IBM Digital Analytics account have been successfully linked.