The AdWords team recently announced availability of the AdWords API for Shopping campaigns, letting search management platforms support this new way of managing, bidding, and reporting on Product Listing Ads. As an extension of the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, today we’re excited to announce that DoubleClick Search is offering beta support for Shopping campaigns. Clients should reach out to their Account Managers for access to these capabilities.
With this release, we’ve integrated AdWords’ streamlined, flexible workflows and powerful reporting tools for Shopping campaigns seamlessly with the DoubleClick Search platform. This will let advertisers:
Efficiently create and manage Shopping campaigns with faster workflow and automation tools. DoubleClick Search features the same intuitive interface for managing product groups as found in AdWords. Additionally, you can use existing DoubleClick Search tools like bulk edits to make large-scale changes to your Shopping campaigns, or schedule edits to automate changes to product groups, based on criteria that you determine.
Surface insights quickly with real-time, product-centric reporting. With DoubleClick Floodlight tags, you can track real-time conversions back to the individual product and product group. Formula columns let you create custom columns for products and product groups to track the metrics most valuable to you. You can dynamically roll up the product-level data along your most relevant product attributes, like categories or brands. You can also use cross-campaign reports for insights across your campaigns and ad groups.
To see how to set up, manage, and report on Shopping campaigns in DoubleClick Search, check out a preview video here.
With this first wave of Shopping campaigns support, we look forward to further helping marketers run effective search campaigns in powerful new ways. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to roll out support for additional features, including algorithmic bid optimization for Shopping campaigns.
For more information, reach out to your DoubleClick Search account manager to see how you can get started with Shopping campaigns today.
SMX West is coming up in just a week, and the DoubleClick Search team hopes to see you there!
We’ll be participating this year as part of the Learn with Google Classroom on Wednesday, March 12th. In addition to a speaking session at 3:30PM, we will have demo stations attached to the classroom and available all day for questions and conversation. Please come see us!
Still haven’t registered? Enter discount code GOOGLESMXW14 (case sensitive) and save 10%. Expo+ passes are free and get you into the Learn with Google Classroom, which includes DoubleClick Search.
Brands and their agencies want to better measure their digital campaigns, but they don’t want one-off science experiments or fuzzy numbers; they want metrics that are as meaningful and actionable as the click has become for performance advertising:
Did someone actually see my ad? And was it the right audience? What did people think about the ad? How did the ad change their mindset? What did people do as a result of seeing the ad?
As we invest to improve brand measurement for the entire industry in all these areas, we are keeping a few things in mind. First, measurement should be actionable - real time insights to improve campaigns as they run, not after-the-fact reports that can only improve future ad buys. Second, we know our clients want measurement that is open and transparent so we’re partnering with the industry to create metrics that serve as a true currency between buyers and sellers, and offer flexibility and choice to marketers.
Today at the IAB Leadership Summit, I gave an update on a few of our brand measurement products:
Active View Last year, comScore estimated that 54% of ads running on the web aren’t seen by the user. Maybe the reader scrolled past your ad; maybe she never got to it.
We’re supporting industry initiatives, like the IAB’s Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) to establish new standards. And late last year, we made it possible to buy based on viewability on the Google Display Network. This capability is based on our MRC-accredited Active View technology, a transparent and actionable viewability metric that we’re gradually rolling out to both marketers and publishers. It’s early days, but we’ve already seen more than 1,500 brands buying impressions based on viewability, across more than 100,000 sites on our network.
comScore vCE In TV, marketers use the concept of a Gross Rating Point (GRP), by which they measure the reach and frequency of their campaigns among different demographics. For digital campaigns, there are a number of options for marketers wanting a digital GRP across screens. For example, last year, we started testing comScore vCE (validated Campaign Essentials) and Nielsen OCR (Online Campaign Ratings) for campaigns on YouTube and across our network.
While we’re excited by the efforts in the industry to introduce GRPs to the digital market, we believe we haven’t yet reached the full potential of this metric. And so today, we’re excited to announce that we’re taking another step forward by partnering with comScore to turn vCE into a digitally actionable metric.
By working closely with comScore and the industry, we believe we can make a GRP metric that will be completely actionable: both advertisers and publishers will be able to see if a campaign is reaching the right audience in real time and make adjustments if it isn’t. No more waiting days or weeks for reports, no more wasted media, no more missed opportunities. This objective, third-party vCE metric is being built directly into our DoubleClick ad serving products, where it can serve as a transparent currency for both marketers and publishers to buy, sell and measure ad space across sites, formats and screens.
Brand Lift At the top of the pyramid, brands want to measure the impact of advertising on core brand metrics like awareness, favorability, purchase consideration and, ultimately, sales. We're developing a suite of Brand Lift products to help here. Last year, we began a small test of surveys to measure the impact of a brand's campaign.
Measuring ad effectiveness by conducting surveys is not new. But generally they’re slow to provide results, and get very low response rates.
In our early tests, we’re seeing 20-30% user response rates (significantly higher than traditional surveys), coming through in near real time. This enables brands to turn the results into immediate action: brands that are using Survey Lift have seen an 82% lift in ad recall, along with a 64% lift in brand awareness. For example MasterCard was able to double brand recall for one of their holiday campaigns based on insights gleaned from surveys. Based on this early promising feedback, we’ll be rolling these surveys out more broadly, for more types of campaigns, in coming months.
Going forward There’s lots more to come, and we're working on ways to help brands at all stages of the measurement pyramid. More actionable, open and transparent measurement will help bring more great campaigns and brands online, which in turn helps to fund web services and content. We’re looking forward to working with the industry and partners to help make this a reality.
Social has morphed rapidly over the last several years, yet sustaining engagement with social audiences continues to be a top priority for marketers, and it remains the key metric of social success. In the second infographic of our Wildfire by Google State of Social infographic series (based on exclusive research in partnership with Ad Age), we reveal the top expectations and challenges for brands in social and how they are measuring social’s value. For example:
42% of brands say the #1 impact of social is increased engagement (24/7 customer interaction is a distant second at 12%).
90% of brands agree that it’s crucial to integrate social into their other digital media initiatives.
57% of companies say content shares are the most important social metric, but conversion impact is closing the gap at 54%.
What are your brand’s top expectations for social and which metric leads in measuring social success? INFOGRAPHIC #2
Cross-posted from the Wildfire by Google blog How are top brands measuring, managing and budgeting for success in social? And what strategies will the top social brands follow in 2014?
Wildfire by Google, in exclusive partnership with Ad Age, recently conducted the largest survey of its kind to date, asking over 500 enterprise marketing managers and executives about their approach to social marketing. We learned what the best and most successful brands are doing to engage audiences, as well as what those that struggle with social are doing. In our three-part State of Social infographic series, we’ll share with you the key learnings and top strategies you can apply in 2014.
In this first infographic, we look at who is driving social strategy and who is paying for it. As social becomes more integrated into the overall digital and brand strategy, the key players are starting to change. Want to see where the influence is shifting? Just follow the money.
45% of companies with revenue over $1 billion have 50+ social employees.
Marketing, PR, and Customer Experience are the top teams with a stake in social, yet social impacts up to 10 teams across the enterprise.
68% of companies expect to increase social spend in the next budgetary cycle, indicating that social’s role in the marketing mix is recognized and prioritized.
This is the third post in our "Success with DS" series, highlighting tips and tricks around key DoubleClick Search features. Today’s submission is from Stephanie Bean -- DoubleClick Search Technical Product Specialist, and highlights some of the advanced capabilities of our newest launch -- executive reporting.
We recently launched executive reporting -- a powerful new way to create custom visual reports to analyze data and share with your end clients, teammates and managers. As you sit down for a slice of pumpkin pie for the holidays, consider whipping together some useful pie, line and bar charts!
Executive reporting offers a number of advanced features that make holistic campaign reporting and analysis even more powerful. Today we’ll talk about two of them: downloading data and merging objects.
Download and share reports easily: Let’s say your management team is requesting a monthly report to understand how campaigns are performing, but they want something they can decipher at a glance, not a spreadsheet full of numbers. What should you do? This is a great use case for executive reporting. You can segment and visualize the data as needed in the DoubleClick Search UI, download the report, and quickly share it with management.
Tip: Reports can be downloaded as Microsoft Excel, but don’t forget about the option of saving or printing as PDF!
Merge objects to see trends across campaigns: While executive reporting includes all your search-based metrics, including engine stats, Google Analytics metrics, Floodlight columns, formula columns, and labels, we understand that you may want to analyze them across different lines of business within a single chart. Perhaps management wants to see how brand vs. non-brand terms are performing across your retail business. When multiple advertisers are included in one report, executive reporting identifies objects with the exact same name, such as Floodlight columns and labels, and merges them.
Tip: To take advantage of opportunities with merging, consider implementing a consistent naming convention for your labels across advertiser accounts.
The launch coincided with DFA’s 15th anniversary, so we wanted to use this opportunity to hear from some of our longtime partners. Surely, the world has changed since the early days of DFA, 15 years ago. With new opportunities to reach consumers in more ways than ever, come many new challenges for digital marketers. And marketing platforms must continuously evolve to meet the demands of a shifting and ever-growing industry.
We asked industry leaders Kurt Unkel, President of Product & Solutions at VivaKi, Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, and Angelina Eng, VP of Digital Media Ops at Carat what they value in a platform in this day and age, and how DoubleClick has evolved to address those needs. Here’s what they told us:
Efficiency, reliability, and simplicity are crucial to helping marketers streamline the campaign management process. Kurt Unkel said, ”What we get with DoubleClick that we struggle to see anywhere else is simplicity - the ability to integrate a lot of disparate technologies into a common stack. That’s something that really makes a difference in our business, because it allows us to focus on the bigger, strategic things.”
Marketers need integration across channels and screens, and to be able to track and execute across their efforts within one system. Angelina Eng notes, “When we talk about all of these different things that are coming out - verification, video, mobile - how do make that work all together? A company that’s embracing that is one that we want to work with.”
Platforms must help marketers gain more actionable insights and act on them in real-time. “We have almost too much data at our disposal,” Megan Moldovan tells us, “and it can sometimes be hard to sift through all of that information and understand what it really means, and particularly understand what everything means when you look at it together.”
With DoubleClick, we are investing in tools to help your digital teams work more efficiently to maximize your results across channels and screens. In the coming weeks and months we will deep dive into many of the new product features available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Stay tuned to the blog to learn about the new tools that will simplify digital, help you engage across channels, and enable better decisions. If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on ourGoogle+ page.
Search marketers managing multiple campaigns across multiple accounts have to visualize their data in many different ways and tailor reporting for each group of stakeholders. Often, this means spending time pulling and aggregating reports, building macro-enabled spreadsheets, and wrangling your data into a specific format for a specific presentation -- only to do it all over again in a slightly different way the next time around.
DoubleClick Search believes in making search marketing faster, and over the past year we’ve invested in time-saving features like bulk editing enhancements, new scheduling options, and automated rules. Today, we’re excited to announce executive reporting, a fundamentally new way to report on and share your search campaign data.
With executive reporting, quickly get to the insights you need. Take the data from all your search campaigns, segment as needed, present it in an easily consumable visual format, and share with team members and stakeholders -- all within the UI, without spending hours downloading, reconciling, and updating spreadsheets.
As we designed executive reporting, we worked closely with our clients to ensure our solution was built to address the unique needs of search marketers, agency account managers, and executives. Matt Grebow, Sr. Manager, Search Marketing at TSA, who participated heavily in our feedback sessions, shared his needs for richer export fidelity with the engineering team.
“Most reporting platforms let you export data in a raw format, but this means extensive formatting in Excel and a lot of coding. DoubleClick Search Executive Reporting is flexible enough to use across clients with different goals. We can create templates on the fly and export reports in a client-ready format.”
Three ways to get started with executive reporting
Daily account management and stakeholder communication: As an account manager, you can easily pick the subset of data and the visualizations you need for each set of stakeholders. The reports will stay up to date, and you can have them ready for meetings, or download and share through email at a moment’s notice -- saving you time for strategy.
High-level team management and oversight: As a business leader, you can see an overview of your entire business in one place. If you’re needed for an escalation, you can quickly pull reports to understand account health and spot issues -- so you’re never unprepared.
Market insights for competitive advantage: Another advantage of seeing your entire business at a glance: if you manage a large volume of accounts, you can quickly analyze market-level data and see which account or campaigns are underperforming. Then, dig in to understand why and get them back on track.
Keep an eye on the blog next week for a follow up “SuccesswithDS” post on how the get the most out of executive reporting. In the meantime, give the new reports a try and let your account team know what you think. If you don't see the 'Executive Reports' tab in the DoubleClick Search interface, ask your account team to enable it for you.
Over the coming months, we’ll continue to invest in easy, flexible reporting options for DoubleClick Search. If you have a data warehouse, business intelligence tool, or visualization software and you’re interested in seeing your search data alongside other metrics for reporting purposes, check out our reporting API, currently in open whitelist.
This is the second post in our "Success with DS" series,highlighting tips and tricks around key DoubleClick Search features. Today’s post comes from Vijay Reddy, DoubleClick Platform Solutions Consultant.
Last time, we heard Technical Specialist Emily Brodman talk about how you can enjoy the rest of your summer vacation with inventory-aware campaigns that automatically create and update your search campaigns, based on yourGoogle Merchant Center feed. But now summer's gone, and Halloween's just around the corner. We figured you could use some of the time you save after implementing the automated rules below to put the finishing touches on your costume.
You may already know the basics of automated rules. You may know that it’s an easy, reliable way to save time by automating the tasks you do everyday. But did you know you could use rules to detect a downward trend in your campaign volume, increase your budget to reverse the trend, and to label keywords for easy reporting. Too good to be true? It’s not. We’ll start small and work our way up to doing exactly that. Navigate to the campaigns tab of a particular engine account, select a couple of campaigns you want the rule to apply to, then configure as follows: 1) Set your condition
2) Set your action to “Notify only”
3) Schedule the rule to run and click “Save rule”
Easy as 1,2,3 (literally)!
Tip: The date range your condition is evaluated over is the date range of the view you created the rule from. You may be thinking, “This is great and all...but in the real world, different campaigns have different volumes. Does this mean I have to create a new rule of every campaign?”
Formula columns to the rescue!
Instead of triggering off a static click threshold, let’s create a formula column that detects a trend in click volume: Create a formula column called “% Change Clicks.” You can copy the below formula: to_percent((Clicks.for_Date_Range(Yesterday()) -Clicks/num_days())/(Clicks/num_days())) Now recreate the previous rule, but this time trigger off the formula column you just created:
You now have rule that detects if yesterday’s clicks have dropped more than 30% below the trailing 7 day average! Tip: If you liked that formula column, you can see several more creative examples of formula columns in action here.Now, as Emeril would say, “Let’s kick it up a notch!” Our rule currently just notifies us that volume is trending down, but it doesn’t actually do anything about it. Enter Actions!
Different object types have different actions available. For example, a rule on keywords would have the option to change its landing page or max CPC. Rules on campaigns have their own menu of actions. Since the rule in question is detecting a drop in click-volume, it may make sense to bump up the campaign’s budget in an attempt to get volume back up. Just model your action like below:
Mission accomplished! What’s that you say? You want MORE automation? I thought you’d never ask. Extra Credit:
If you thought Rules +formula columns was a powerful combo, wait till you throw labelsinto the mix. Try creating a parallel rule that runs with the same condition as the previous rule, but instead of increasing budget it adds a label (e.g. “Budget Auto-Increased”). Now go back to the first rule and add NOT having that label as a condition for the first rule. This effectively means the each campaign can only be auto-increased once. What other creative ways can you think of to combine rules, formula columns, and labels?
Keeping up with your retail search campaigns is no easy task. On top of monitoring sales, profits, inventory levels, and the competition, you also want to seize every opportunity during short-lived periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
At DoubleClick Search, we've been focused on delivering the speed you need to maximize performance during the holiday season. So, today we wanted to shine a light on our investments in instant conversion data and the benefits it delivers.
Meredith Spitz, Sr. Analyst with Starcom, tells us why fresh and accurate campaign metrics are important:
“Knowing how we’re performing throughout the day has allowed us to take advantage of more opportunities, instead of relying on stale data. We’ve been able to hit our goals more accurately because of instant conversion data.”
Immediate insights, 32% conversion lift in volatile search landscapes with near real-time data
Real-time data can power performance in two key ways. First, as real-time data flows into DoubleClick Search reports, your talented search team has the information they need to make campaign optimizations on the fly, and drive performance. Up-to-the-minute insights make the difference between success and failure, while also saving time.
And when it comes to automated bid optimization, DoubleClick Search uses the same real-time data to update bids frequently - up to four times per day - using fresher data to more closely track to your goals.
At iProspect, they’re already seeing the benefits of faster bid optimization, as shared by Account Supervisor Jessica Dearien,
“We’ve been able to test DoubleClick Search bid optimization with real-time data and we’ve already seen fantastic results. That’s even more critical moving into the high-volume shopping days of the holiday season.”
The below graphic illustrates how updating bids four times a day helps track closer to a $5 CPA goal than updating bids only once per day. Please note the $5 CPA is for example purposes only - your goal CPA will vary based on the characteristics of your business.
Our team conducted an internal study to understand just how helpful, in aggregate, changing bids more often could be. We found that in volatile search landscapes, 4x daily bid changes improved conversion volume an average of 32% over 1x daily bid changes, while also keeping CPA slightly lower for a given CPA goal.*
*(Google internal study data)
In addition to bidding more frequently, DoubleClick Search’s bid optimization technology keeps your campaigns in top shape with capabilities like:
Near-real-time trend detection: We use both past and current data to predict future trends. Our bid optimization takes into account seasonality, holiday periods, and sudden spikes in demand due to offline events like weather, accounting for fluctuations in traffic around external events.
Performance-based spend allocation: DoubleClick Search intelligently allocates budgets dynamically to various keywords, based on their performance. It considers the opportunity cost of each keyword and allocates spend accordingly.
Portfolio bidding for low-volume keywords: These keywords are often overlooked by manual or simple bid optimization methods, as they provide little or no data to use. However, ignoring long-tail terms can add up across the board—leaving opportunity on the table. DoubleClick Search groups similar keywords together and bids on them as a whole.
To get the most out of your search campaigns this holiday season, rely on instant conversions from DoubleClick Search for the real-time insights and optimizations that will help your team succeed. For more information, check out our instant conversions video and bid optimization white paper.
