Author Archives: Justin Huskamp

Forrester Report: A Faster Pace for Retail Paid Search

The real-time imperative 
Real-time matters in retail search because external events continuously affect demand. Whether planned events like Black Friday, or unplanned ones like the next big snow day, campaigns that were optimized for demand are suddenly altered by new market realities. The speed at which a retailer’s search management tool can “see” the new behavior and adapt to it will help to determine how successful campaigns are over time, and because events can shift quickly, speed is ever-more important for success.

We know how important it is for our retailers to be running profitable campaigns with a minimum of ongoing manual effort. It’s why we’ve consistently invested in tools to be faster. From instant conversion data and intra-day bidding to integration with Google Merchant Center for ad creation and management, we’re committed to developing tools to support speed in search.

Understanding how retailers use real-time 
Today, in partnership with Forrester, we’re launching a study that shows how retailers access and use real-time tools to stay ahead in the digital game.

What we found was… opportunity 
According to Forrester’s survey, only 20% of retail search marketers have access to real-time conversion data, and less than half can see conversions before the next business day.


In addition to response times, we found that, on average, marketers are only able to merchandize about half their inventory in search ads, even though long-tail products can represent a significant revenue opportunity.

Get the full report
For all the results, along with Forrester’s recommendations for retail search success, check out the full report at Think with Google. To get the latest research, communications and case studies from DoubleClick, sign up for one of our newsletters.

New research proves the power of data-driven approaches, improving consumer engagement and campaign effectiveness by 30 to 50 percent

To lift the lid on what it takes for digital marketers to succeed, today we’re releasing research from the The Boston Consulting Group that provides new evidence of the power of data-driven approaches including search-to-display remarketing, video remarketing and behavioral analytics.

BCG’s study of five large digital advertisers across four industries in the US and Europe found brands that use these advanced techniques can score big gains – a 32% average decrease in cost per action – and enhance both relevance and consumer experience by reaching engaged audiences at scale.

In some cases, advertisers improved cost per action by more than 50 percent. What’s more, the study also showed that advanced targeting can drive increased performance across all major metrics, improving action rates for clicks and view-throughs by as much as 200 percent, and reducing costs per click and per view by as much as 70 percent.

To achieve uplifts like these, the study identifies five critical steps you can put in motion now.

One: Adopt a unified technology platform
Unified technology platforms provide a single user interface and make it possible to source data from a single pool, eliminating the need to reconcile, consolidate and transfer data between multiple sources. Using one set of tools also ensures your teams aren’t cannibalising performance or bidding against themselves. Campaigns can be launched faster, and agencies can drive resource into gaining insights and optimizing campaigns rather than manually downloading and consolidating data.

Two: Implement advanced techniques 
Drive improvements in key metrics by making intelligent use of your own customer data. 

  • Search-to-display remarketing – serving display ads to users who have clicked on your paid search link – lets you target an additional group of consumers actively searching for your product or service.
  • Video remarketing involves serving an ad to users who have either watched your video or subscribed to your channel. This technique captures users early in the purchase journey when they are just starting to engage with your brand. 
  • Behavioral analytics target users that have not only visited your website but also demonstrated particular behaviors – like spending a certain amount of time or visiting a certain number of pages – while there. 


Three: Bring the “math men” (and women) to the table 
Strategy and creativity will always be critical to successful campaigns, but today the ability to mine, manipulate and analyze data is equally essential. Include mathematicians, statisticians and quantitative experts in your team and apply their skills to campaign optimizations.

Four: Test and learn 
The Internet is the best marketing laboratory yet invented. Direct marketers know this, but increasingly brand marketers need to get on board, substituting metrics such as average session duration or interacting with a graphic or downloading information for direct sales.

Five: Overcome fragmentation 
Fragmentation in campaign development and execution, strategy, teams, tools and data can result in conflicts in goals and incentives, lack of transparency in performance and wasted effort. Ways to tackle this include rooting out the causes of fragmentation, connecting your data strategy with overall strategy, getting closer to your data, breaking down organizational silos and using multiple attribution models.

Keen to learn more about the results of the study and the actions you can take to reach engaged audiences at scale? Read the full research report here.

Valuing Website Metrics: Introducing Bid Optimization Support for Google Analytics Goals in DoubleClick Search

As part of our mission to offer the most actionable data and reporting, from all sources, DoubleClick Search lets you report on Google Analytics goals. You may not know that we also have the capability to use Google Analytics Goals as targets for DoubleClick Search bid-strategies. When you create a bid strategy in the Doubleclick Search Performance Bidding Suite, you can optimize to conversions and revenue based on Google Analytics goals and transactions. This feature extends the flexibility of DS bid strategies, which already support optimization to Floodlight activities and formula columns. This release also extends bid optimization support to goals based on site analytics metrics such as pages per visit, visit duration, and new visitors.

Make better decisions based on user behavior insights 
Google Analytics goals make it possible to have user behavior prior to purchase drive your bidding decisions. Conversion windows vary by vertical. Some customers finalize their purchases/actions within minutes or hours, while other customers may take days, weeks or even months to research before converting. If you understand the propensity of a user to convert based on their session behavior, you can bid more for keywords that drive higher quality customers. This is where site analytics data comes in as it provides useful post click data such as "are we getting many new visitors?" or "users from ad group X spend an average of 5 minutes on the site after clicking".

Our Google Analytics integration gives you access to powerful new metrics to enhance bid optimization and create custom models that not only include the final conversion but also values keywords that lead to pre-conversion user behaviors including time on site, pages viewed, etc.

Getting started with Google Analytics goals 
Getting started with Google Analytics goals & DoubleClick Search bid-strategies is simple. They work in the same way as the DoubleClick Floodlight-targeted bid strategies you are already familiar with. Just create a new bid strategy using the wizard and select Conversions, Revenue, or Advanced targeting as the goal. Then Google Analytics can be selected as a conversion source (shown below).



If you want to mix Floodlight Tags and Google Analytics Goals in the same bid-strategy, first define the relative value of the Tags and Goal inside the formula column. For example, suppose you wanted a ROAS strategy for your travel agency. Your main objective is to drive revenue from ticket and package sales, but you value a user spending 10 minutes reading about vacation packages at $1.50 since you expect they will return later to buy. The following formula column would capture this valuation:

FL_ticket_revenue + FL_package_revenue + to_money(1.50 * GA_10_minute_session) 

In the above formula: FL=Floodlight, GA=Google Analytics

Once you've created this formula columns, create a new bid strategy, in step 2 select the conversion source to be "formula column". If you haven’t linked your Google analytics account with DS, you can find a step by step guide here. If you are interested in using the site analytics level goals, please follow the guide here (note: you only need to complete Step 1: Transferring Property). To learn more about DS bid-strategies and Google Analytics integration, please check out our help center article.

Valuing Website Metrics: Introducing Bid Optimization Support for Google Analytics Goals in DoubleClick Search

As part of our mission to offer the most actionable data and reporting, from all sources, DoubleClick Search lets you report on Google Analytics goals. You may not know that we also have the capability to use Google Analytics Goals as targets for DoubleClick Search bid-strategies. When you create a bid strategy in the Doubleclick Search Performance Bidding Suite, you can optimize to conversions and revenue based on Google Analytics goals and transactions. This feature extends the flexibility of DS bid strategies, which already support optimization to Floodlight activities and formula columns. This release also extends bid optimization support to goals based on site analytics metrics such as pages per visit, visit duration, and new visitors.

Make better decisions based on user behavior insights 
Google Analytics goals make it possible to have user behavior prior to purchase drive your bidding decisions. Conversion windows vary by vertical. Some customers finalize their purchases/actions within minutes or hours, while other customers may take days, weeks or even months to research before converting. If you understand the propensity of a user to convert based on their session behavior, you can bid more for keywords that drive higher quality customers. This is where site analytics data comes in as it provides useful post click data such as "are we getting many new visitors?" or "users from ad group X spend an average of 5 minutes on the site after clicking".

Our Google Analytics integration gives you access to powerful new metrics to enhance bid optimization and create custom models that not only include the final conversion but also values keywords that lead to pre-conversion user behaviors including time on site, pages viewed, etc. 

Getting started with Google Analytics goals 
Getting started with Google Analytics goals & DoubleClick Search bid-strategies is simple. They work in the same way as the DoubleClick Floodlight-targeted bid strategies you are already familiar with. Just create a new bid strategy using the wizard and select Conversions, Revenue, or Advanced targeting as the goal. Then Google Analytics can be selected as a conversion source (shown below).



If you want to mix Floodlight Tags and Google Analytics Goals in the same bid-strategy, first define the relative value of the Tags and Goal inside the formula column. For example, suppose you wanted a ROAS strategy for your travel agency. Your main objective is to drive revenue from ticket and package sales, but you value a user spending 10 minutes reading about vacation packages at $1.50 since you expect they will return later to buy. The following formula column would capture this valuation:

FL_ticket_revenue + FL_package_revenue + to_money(1.50 * GA_10_minute_session) 

In the above formula: FL=Floodlight, GA=Google Analytics

Once you've created this formula columns, create a new bid strategy, in step 2 select the conversion source to be "formula column". If you haven’t linked your Google analytics account with DS, you can find a step by step guide here. If you are interested in using the site analytics level goals, please follow the guide here (note: you only need to complete Step 1: Transferring Property). To learn more about DS bid-strategies and Google Analytics integration, please check out our help center article.

Valuing Website Metrics: Introducing Bid Optimization Support for Google Analytics Goals in DoubleClick Search

As part of our mission to offer the most actionable data and reporting, from all sources, DoubleClick Search lets you report on Google Analytics goals. You may not know that we also have the capability to use Google Analytics Goals as targets for DoubleClick Search bid-strategies. When you create a bid strategy in the Doubleclick Search Performance Bidding Suite, you can optimize to conversions and revenue based on Google Analytics goals and transactions. This feature extends the flexibility of DS bid strategies, which already support optimization to Floodlight activities and formula columns. This release also extends bid optimization support to goals based on site analytics metrics such as pages per visit, visit duration, and new visitors.

Make better decisions based on user behavior insights 
Google Analytics goals make it possible to have user behavior prior to purchase drive your bidding decisions. Conversion windows vary by vertical. Some customers finalize their purchases/actions within minutes or hours, while other customers may take days, weeks or even months to research before converting. If you understand the propensity of a user to convert based on their session behavior, you can bid more for keywords that drive higher quality customers. This is where site analytics data comes in as it provides useful post click data such as "are we getting many new visitors?" or "users from ad group X spend an average of 5 minutes on the site after clicking".

Our Google Analytics integration gives you access to powerful new metrics to enhance bid optimization and create custom models that not only include the final conversion but also values keywords that lead to pre-conversion user behaviors including time on site, pages viewed, etc. 

Getting started with Google Analytics goals 
Getting started with Google Analytics goals & DoubleClick Search bid-strategies is simple. They work in the same way as the DoubleClick Floodlight-targeted bid strategies you are already familiar with. Just create a new bid strategy using the wizard and select Conversions, Revenue, or Advanced targeting as the goal. Then Google Analytics can be selected as a conversion source (shown below).



If you want to mix Floodlight Tags and Google Analytics Goals in the same bid-strategy, first define the relative value of the Tags and Goal inside the formula column. For example, suppose you wanted a ROAS strategy for your travel agency. Your main objective is to drive revenue from ticket and package sales, but you value a user spending 10 minutes reading about vacation packages at $1.50 since you expect they will return later to buy. The following formula column would capture this valuation:

FL_ticket_revenue + FL_package_revenue + to_money(1.50 * GA_10_minute_session) 

In the above formula: FL=Floodlight, GA=Google Analytics

Once you've created this formula columns, create a new bid strategy, in step 2 select the conversion source to be "formula column". If you haven’t linked your Google analytics account with DS, you can find a step by step guide here. If you are interested in using the site analytics level goals, please follow the guide here (note: you only need to complete Step 1: Transferring Property). To learn more about DS bid-strategies and Google Analytics integration, please check out our help center article.

Q&A with Neal Mohan: A Sneak Peek at the DoubleClick Live Stream

DoubleClick’s annual digital advertising summit is just around the corner, streaming live on YouTube on Wednesday, June 4th. (Sign up here to watch.) We caught up with Neal Mohan, Google’s Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products, to hear what’s on his mind as we get ready for the event.

Q: What topics should we expect to hear about this year? 
A: I don’t think it will come as a surprise that our team has been very focused on how to make digital work for brands and premium publishers. You can expect to hear a lot more about that. Also, since this event marks Google’s annual conversation on the future of digital advertising, we’ll discuss how digital is redefining consumer behavior, content development, and the ways that advertisers and publishers reach their customers.

Q: Will the live stream include any special guests? 
A: I’ll be joined by Nikesh Arora, our Chief Business Officer at Google, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO and Co-Founder of DreamWorks Animation. I’m looking forward to hearing Jeffrey talk about how technology has changed content creation.

Q: What consumer trends are impacting the way brands and publishers think about digital? 
A: When we started this DoubleClick event 14 years ago, going online was a deliberate act that required going to a computer and “logging-in”. The days of going online are coming to an end. Today’s digital experience is one that is always-on and always with us. As a result, digital has become far more personal, and one of the most personal forms of communication - video - is playing a more central role in our online lives. All these factors have major implications for brands and publishers, which we’ll discuss at the event.

Q: So...any scoops you can give us?
A: As I mentioned, video has been very much on my mind lately. Getting video right is something that is essential to our brand, agency, and publisher partners...expect to hear more about what we have planned to help make that happen.

We hope you can join us on Wednesday, June 4th at 9:30 am PDT / 12:30 pm EDT. Register to watch the live stream or to receive the recording. -The DoubleClick Team

Q&A with Neal Mohan: A Sneak Peek at the DoubleClick Live Stream

DoubleClick’s annual digital advertising summit is just around the corner, streaming live on YouTube on Wednesday, June 4th. (Sign up here to watch.) We caught up with Neal Mohan, Google’s Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products, to hear what’s on his mind as we get ready for the event.

Q: What topics should we expect to hear about this year? 
A: I don’t think it will come as a surprise that our team has been very focused on how to make digital work for brands and premium publishers. You can expect to hear a lot more about that. Also, since this event marks Google’s annual conversation on the future of digital advertising, we’ll discuss how digital is redefining consumer behavior, content development, and the ways that advertisers and publishers reach their customers.

Q: Will the live stream include any special guests? 
A: I’ll be joined by Nikesh Arora, our Chief Business Officer at Google, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO and Co-Founder of DreamWorks Animation. I’m looking forward to hearing Jeffrey talk about how technology has changed content creation.

Q: What consumer trends are impacting the way brands and publishers think about digital? 
A: When we started this DoubleClick event 14 years ago, going online was a deliberate act that required going to a computer and “logging-in”. The days of going online are coming to an end. Today’s digital experience is one that is always-on and always with us. As a result, digital has become far more personal, and one of the most personal forms of communication - video - is playing a more central role in our online lives. All these factors have major implications for brands and publishers, which we’ll discuss at the event.

Q: So...any scoops you can give us?
A: As I mentioned, video has been very much on my mind lately. Getting video right is something that is essential to our brand, agency, and publisher partners...expect to hear more about what we have planned to help make that happen.

We hope you can join us on Wednesday, June 4th at 9:30 am PDT / 12:30 pm EDT. Register to watch the live stream or to receive the recording. -The DoubleClick Team

The Search Agency saves times and discovers insights at scale with executive reporting from DoubleClick Search

The search marketing landscape can change quickly and marketers need tools that can adapt just as fast - to understand immediate opportunities, and react if necessary. Late last year, we announced executive reporting from DoubleClick Search to give marketers the ability to see their campaign performance quickly, across their entire business or in any specific view. Today, we’d like to highlight how a top digital agency has found success with our tools to increase efficiency and get a better handle on their business.



With hundreds of clients around the globe, The Search Agency’s leaders were finding it increasingly hard to keep an eye on the health of their business. Keen to quickly understand the performance while eliminating time-consuming monthly and quarterly reporting tasks, they adopted executive reporting from DoubleClick Search to help oversee company’s interests.

The team needed a way to get the big picture—fast. They also had to have details such as monthly and quarterly reports of all the agency’s business, aggregated for industries or individual clients, with in-depth costs by month, quarter or device.

“That kind of detail is essential for day-to-day work, but also for quick KPIs,” says Wiratunga. “If I’m walking into a board room with my department leads about a certain client or if I get called into a meeting with 15 minutes to prep, I need a way to see—on the fly—exactly what’s happening with an account and all of its issues.” 

After implementing executive reporting, Wiratunga was able to save multiple hours each month and quarter by eliminating repetitive reporting tasks for his team, and focusing them instead on more strategic work. He was also able to prepare for client escalations on short notice as needed. To get the full scoop on The Search Agency’s success, read the full customer story here.

The Search Agency saves times and discovers insights at scale with executive reporting from DoubleClick Search

The search marketing landscape can change quickly and marketers need tools that can adapt just as fast - to understand immediate opportunities, and react if necessary. Late last year, we announced executive reporting from DoubleClick Search to give marketers the ability to see their campaign performance quickly, across their entire business or in any specific view. Today, we’d like to highlight how a top digital agency has found success with our tools to increase efficiency and get a better handle on their business.



With hundreds of clients around the globe, The Search Agency’s leaders were finding it increasingly hard to keep an eye on the health of their business. Keen to quickly understand the performance while eliminating time-consuming monthly and quarterly reporting tasks, they adopted executive reporting from DoubleClick Search to help oversee company’s interests.

The team needed a way to get the big picture—fast. They also had to have details such as monthly and quarterly reports of all the agency’s business, aggregated for industries or individual clients, with in-depth costs by month, quarter or device.

“That kind of detail is essential for day-to-day work, but also for quick KPIs,” says Wiratunga. “If I’m walking into a board room with my department leads about a certain client or if I get called into a meeting with 15 minutes to prep, I need a way to see—on the fly—exactly what’s happening with an account and all of its issues.” 

After implementing executive reporting, Wiratunga was able to save multiple hours each month and quarter by eliminating repetitive reporting tasks for his team, and focusing them instead on more strategic work. He was also able to prepare for client escalations on short notice as needed. To get the full scoop on The Search Agency’s success, read the full customer story here.

Learn DoubleClick Search fundamentals: join an upcoming webinar

If you're interested in developing your DoubleClick Search expertise, try our online eLearning and certification, then join our upcoming webinars to learn more. Register through the Training page in the DoubleClick Search Help Center (sign-in required). While you’re there, you can also learn more about our latest product releases.

DoubleClick Search Fundamentals eLearning and Certification 
Get an overview of how to manage large search campaigns in DoubleClick Search. This online, self-paced training course is designed for new and current DoubleClick Search users who want to understand the basics of campaign management, reporting and bid optimization.




Review the material, test your knowledge, and print out your certification when you pass. The course and exam are now available in select languages, including Spanish, Japanese, German, and Portuguese-Brazilian – try it today. Register



Upcoming webinar: Using Analytics Data Successfully in DoubleClick Search – 3/11 
Join this webinar to learn more about Analytics best practices, analyzing Analytics data in DoubleClick Search and how Analytics integrates with specific features, such as formula columns, bid strategies and rules. Co-led with our Analytics trainer. Register

Pre-recorded webinars available 
In case you missed a previous webinar, check out the recorded webinars page in our Help Center – you might be able to find a pre-recorded session ready to watch. We offer numerous videos, including previous New Feature Trainings, as well as videos on the Performance Bidding Suite, Reporting, Campaign Management, and more.

For more DoubleClick Search training updates, stay tuned on the DoubleClick Search blog, or follow us on Google+.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search Team