Author Archives: Kim

Whip your seasonal campaigns into shape: Four “knead to know” tips for search marketers

A pinch of salt, a dash of sugar...and a handful of data analysis? 

We all know baking is a huge part of the holidays. But amidst the hustle and bustle of planning scrumptious menus for friends and family, as a marketer you’re also juggling fleeting promotions, revising stale ads and trying to balance your budget — all in hopes of reaching holiday shoppers at the moment they’re looking to buy. So how do you avoid those half-baked campaigns during one of the busiest times of the year?

This season, we wanted to share a few of our favorite tools to whip your digital strategy into shape and help you make your holiday promotions a piece of cake. With the right ingredients to scale and streamline your seasonal campaigns, you can find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your perfectly baked holiday pastries — while we take care of the rest.

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1. Whip up new opportunities in an instant with real-time reporting and optimization
We get it. The holidays are busy, and you often find yourself running out of time — both in the kitchen and with your digital marketing. Forget the manual, hand-churned methods of the past that can leave your campaign results as stale as last year’s fruitcake. This year, turbocharge your campaigns with up-to-the-minute reporting and optimization in DoubleClick™ Search. We’ll whip up performance and conversion metrics as they happen, so you get a real-time view into how your campaigns are performing. Then we’ll use that near-instant conversion data to update bids throughout the day, —helping you get an ROI the size of a holiday feast.
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2. Handle on-the-go customers with mobile bid modifiers
As a master cook, you’re moving around non-stop during the holidays — and so are your customers. But as they’re searching for deals and checking them twice across screens, how do you set the right bids to showcase your hottest products to your most eager prospects — wherever they are? Mobile bid modifiers in DoubleClick Search help you adjust campaign bids to maximize performance for mobile searches. Ready to make your holidays a multiscreen event this year? We’ll raise a glass of eggnog to that!
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3. Find the right recipe with adaptive Shopping campaigns
Your digital marketing, much like your cooking, might need some extra help during the busy holidays. Take your go-to recipe from good to great by spicing it up with something special. This year, that secret ingredient can be adaptive Shopping campaigns, which ensures that your Shopping campaign structure is optimized to perform its very best. Adaptive Shopping campaigns dynamically optimize your Shopping campaign structure, based on product performance. That means you’ll set the right bids for your high-performing products, as well as save money on bids for low-performing products. And the best part? It’s all automatic, so you won’t have to make it from scratch.
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4. Measure your product sales with purchase detail reports
Proper measurement is one of the most important parts of cooking up an impactful campaign. Especially during the busy holiday season, trying to mix and match different reports can have you feeling like Scrooge. We’ll help your campaigns rise to the occasion this year with purchase detail reports for smarter product-centric measurement. Get clear visibility into the products consumers purchase, as well as the ads that drive those sales. Customize and report on your individual product sales by any product attribute—such as color, size and style—and do it for any type of campaign, including text, Shopping, and on AdWords™ or Bing.

Ready for more holiday treats? Tune in to the DoubleClick Advertisers blog tomorrow for even more tips for media agencies!

Whip your seasonal campaigns into shape: Four “knead to know” tips for search marketers

A pinch of salt, a dash of sugar...and a handful of data analysis? 

We all know baking is a huge part of the holidays. But amidst the hustle and bustle of planning scrumptious menus for friends and family, as a marketer you’re also juggling fleeting promotions, revising stale ads and trying to balance your budget — all in hopes of reaching holiday shoppers at the moment they’re looking to buy. So how do you avoid those half-baked campaigns during one of the busiest times of the year?

This season, we wanted to share a few of our favorite tools to whip your digital strategy into shape and help you make your holiday promotions a piece of cake. With the right ingredients to scale and streamline your seasonal campaigns, you can find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your perfectly baked holiday pastries — while we take care of the rest.

Screen Shot 2014-08-29 at 12.02.27 AM.png
1. Whip up new opportunities in an instant with real-time reporting and optimization
We get it. The holidays are busy, and you often find yourself running out of time — both in the kitchen and with your digital marketing. Forget the manual, hand-churned methods of the past that can leave your campaign results as stale as last year’s fruitcake. This year, turbocharge your campaigns with up-to-the-minute reporting and optimization in DoubleClick™ Search. We’ll whip up performance and conversion metrics as they happen, so you get a real-time view into how your campaigns are performing. Then we’ll use that near-instant conversion data to update bids throughout the day, —helping you get an ROI the size of a holiday feast.
Screen Shot 2014-08-29 at 12.02.36 AM.png
2. Handle on-the-go customers with mobile bid modifiers
As a master cook, you’re moving around non-stop during the holidays — and so are your customers. But as they’re searching for deals and checking them twice across screens, how do you set the right bids to showcase your hottest products to your most eager prospects — wherever they are? Mobile bid modifiers in DoubleClick Search help you adjust campaign bids to maximize performance for mobile searches. Ready to make your holidays a multiscreen event this year? We’ll raise a glass of eggnog to that!
Screen Shot 2014-08-29 at 12.02.42 AM.png
3. Find the right recipe with adaptive Shopping campaigns
Your digital marketing, much like your cooking, might need some extra help during the busy holidays. Take your go-to recipe from good to great by spicing it up with something special. This year, that secret ingredient can be adaptive Shopping campaigns, which ensures that your Shopping campaign structure is optimized to perform its very best. Adaptive Shopping campaigns dynamically optimize your Shopping campaign structure, based on product performance. That means you’ll set the right bids for your high-performing products, as well as save money on bids for low-performing products. And the best part? It’s all automatic, so you won’t have to make it from scratch.
Screen Shot 2014-08-29 at 12.02.46 AM.png
4. Measure your product sales with purchase detail reports
Proper measurement is one of the most important parts of cooking up an impactful campaign. Especially during the busy holiday season, trying to mix and match different reports can have you feeling like Scrooge. We’ll help your campaigns rise to the occasion this year with purchase detail reports for smarter product-centric measurement. Get clear visibility into the products consumers purchase, as well as the ads that drive those sales. Customize and report on your individual product sales by any product attribute—such as color, size and style—and do it for any type of campaign, including text, Shopping, and on AdWords™ or Bing.

Ready for more holiday treats? Tune in to the DoubleClick Advertisers blog tomorrow for even more tips for media agencies!

Going Back to School with DoubleClick: Digital marketing flashcards to help you make the grade this school year

This is day 5 of the “Going Back to School with DoubleClick” series. Ready for a quick review? Check out our past flashcards: day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4

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Like Kia, you can get top marks on your “report” card with better measurement across channels using a unified digital marketing platform. Kia wanted a better way to understand and optimize their marketing investment to address fast-changing consumer behaviors; to do so, they adopted DoubleClick to simplify and more accurately measure the impact of their digital marketing across channels. The result? DoubleClick attribution tools helped Kia improve their cost per acquisition (CPA) by 30%. Take a peek to learn more here.

Now, go on and ace that final exam! For more information on DoubleClick Digital Marketing, stay tuned to the DoubleClick blog, sign up for our newsletter,, or follow us on Twitter and Google+.

Advertisers see Shopping campaign success with new optimization, reporting tools from the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite

In March, we introduced Shopping campaigns support in DoubleClick Search, offering a simpler, more flexible way for retailers to manage their Product Listing Ads (PLAs). Thanks to these tools, advertisers have already seen success with Shopping campaigns. As Casandra Jones, Associate Director at iProspect, says: “It’s been incredibly helpful having DoubleClick Search be first to market with a solution for Shopping campaigns. We were able to transition to Shopping campaigns more quickly and determine best practices that work for our brands -- giving us a competitive edge, long before the majority of retailers hit the market.”

Since then, we’ve been focused on building solutions with the scale and speed you need to capture every retail opportunity. Now, we’re excited to announce three new tools from the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite to help make your reporting and optimization even easier. Below, we’ll unpack these features by highlighting the what, the why, and how customers are using our solutions today.

Automated campaign optimization with adaptive Shopping campaigns


What: Adaptive Shopping campaigns is a new way to dynamically create and optimize your Shopping campaign structure, based on product performance. Native integration with Google Merchant Center means we’ll monitor your feed and automatically subdivide existing product groups by product ID, based on the conversion rates of the products in each group.

Why: We’ve found that 90% of the median advertiser’s cost comes from only 9.5% of its products(1). However, advertisers often lump these high-spend products into bid groups with other, lower-converting products -- leading to bid values that are not optimized, based on relative performance. Adaptive Shopping campaigns ensure your most popular SKUs get the right bid by creating product groups for each item earning high traffic.

What do customers think? Andrea Bywater, Marketing Coordinator of Paid Search at BuildDirect, says: “Using adaptive shopping campaigns will be incredibly helpful in helping us group ‘winning’ SKUs together -- especially when things get even busier with the holidays and Black Friday just around the corner. Not only will this be more effective in saving time; it’ll also help us save money on products with lower conversion rates.”

Smarter, faster bid optimization for Shopping campaigns


What: Earlier this month, we rolled out bid optimization for Shopping campaigns -- giving you the ability to extend the same powerful bidding algorithms from our Performance Bidding Suite to your Shopping campaigns, with smarter bidding based on near real-time data.

Why: We know bid optimization can make or break campaign results. Bidding strategies need to be flexible enough to meet your business objectives, while algorithms need to be fast enough to act quickly in a competitive landscape. With bid optimization for Shopping campaigns, you can:

  • Easily define your goals -- setting individual bid strategies, or combining different strategies, just as you do with your DoubleClick Search text ads.
  • Target precisely and efficiently by setting Shopping campaign bid strategies on campaigns, ad groups, or even product groups.
  • Reach shoppers on the go by automatically setting a mobile bid modifier.

And as with the rest of your bids, bid optimization for Shopping campaigns benefit from up-to-the-minute conversion data. This means you can use fresher data to more closely track to your promotion goals -- even during the busiest marketing days.

What do customers think? Ashlee Wiltshire, Analytics & Technology Account Manager at Performics, recently helped her team implement Shopping campaign bid strategies for several of their key retail clients. Wiltshire says: “Within two weeks, we've seen CPCs come down 11.2% and ROAS improve by 3.4%. It's also freed up a lot of the teams’ time, and as a result we’re able to build out more granular campaigns without worrying about manually updating bids."

Better transaction insights with purchase detail reports (beta)


What: Purchase detail reports (currently in beta) let you better understand the products consumers purchased, and the ads that drove those sales. Once you specify the products sold in a transaction using the DoubleClick floodlight tag, you can customize and report on specific product sales by any attribute, including color, size, product line, and style. Best of all, these reports are available for any type of campaign -- whether that’s text, Shopping, on AdWords or on Bing.

Why: With ever-changing shifts in seasons and trends, retailers often focus on selling a certain products at a given time. Fashion advertisers, for example, need to sell the latest styles before they fall out of favor. In the past, figuring out if your search advertising actually lead to these product sales has been complex -- requiring lots of time and effort in reporting analysis. Purchase detail reports give granular transaction details for better insights into your campaign performance:

  • Identify the impact of your advertising on achieving core business goals like maximizing profitability or selling off inventory.
  • Improve ad targeting by matching ads to the products that consumers are most interested in purchasing.
  • Understand the real value of brand and general terms in selling your highest margin or most important products.

What do customers think? Justin Johnson, Paid Search Manager at Cabela’s, says: “Having insights into where we spend our money, in addition to what people are looking for,  has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions. With this data, we have a better look into where we may not have adequate coverage, and are able to quickly make changes to address that. Being able to pull in margin data to see if certain keywords are actually better or worse at driving profitable traffic than we anticipated helps us be more thoughtful with our spending.”

Reach out to your DoubleClick Search representative or our support team at [email protected].

To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and smarter optimization, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Google+.

1. DoubleClick Search internal data, 2014

Advertisers see Shopping campaign success with new optimization, reporting tools from the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite

In March, we introduced Shopping campaigns support in DoubleClick Search, offering a simpler, more flexible way for retailers to manage their Product Listing Ads (PLAs). Thanks to these tools, advertisers have already seen success with Shopping campaigns. As Casandra Jones, Associate Director at iProspect, says: “It’s been incredibly helpful having DoubleClick Search be first to market with a solution for Shopping campaigns. We were able to transition to Shopping campaigns more quickly and determine best practices that work for our brands -- giving us a competitive edge, long before the majority of retailers hit the market.”

Since then, we’ve been focused on building solutions with the scale and speed you need to capture every retail opportunity. Now, we’re excited to announce three new tools from the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite to help make your reporting and optimization even easier. Below, we’ll unpack these features by highlighting the what, the why, and how customers are using our solutions today.

Automated campaign optimization with adaptive Shopping campaigns


What: Adaptive Shopping campaigns is a new way to dynamically create and optimize your Shopping campaign structure, based on product performance. Native integration with Google Merchant Center means we’ll monitor your feed and automatically subdivide existing product groups by product ID, based on the conversion rates of the products in each group.

Why: We’ve found that 90% of the median advertiser’s cost comes from only 9.5% of its products(1). However, advertisers often lump these high-spend products into bid groups with other, lower-converting products -- leading to bid values that are not optimized, based on relative performance. Adaptive Shopping campaigns ensure your most popular SKUs get the right bid by creating product groups for each item earning high traffic.

What do customers think? Andrea Bywater, Marketing Coordinator of Paid Search at BuildDirect, says: “Using adaptive shopping campaigns will be incredibly helpful in helping us group ‘winning’ SKUs together -- especially when things get even busier with the holidays and Black Friday just around the corner. Not only will this be more effective in saving time; it’ll also help us save money on products with lower conversion rates.”

Smarter, faster bid optimization for Shopping campaigns


What: Earlier this month, we rolled out bid optimization for Shopping campaigns -- giving you the ability to extend the same powerful bidding algorithms from our Performance Bidding Suite to your Shopping campaigns, with smarter bidding based on near real-time data.

Why: We know bid optimization can make or break campaign results. Bidding strategies need to be flexible enough to meet your business objectives, while algorithms need to be fast enough to act quickly in a competitive landscape. With bid optimization for Shopping campaigns, you can:

  • Easily define your goals -- setting individual bid strategies, or combining different strategies, just as you do with your DoubleClick Search text ads.
  • Target precisely and efficiently by setting Shopping campaign bid strategies on campaigns, ad groups, or even product groups.
  • Reach shoppers on the go by automatically setting a mobile bid modifier.

And as with the rest of your bids, bid optimization for Shopping campaigns benefit from up-to-the-minute conversion data. This means you can use fresher data to more closely track to your promotion goals -- even during the busiest marketing days.

What do customers think? Ashlee Wiltshire, Analytics & Technology Account Manager at Performics, recently helped her team implement Shopping campaign bid strategies for several of their key retail clients. Wiltshire says: “Within two weeks, we've seen CPCs come down 11.2% and ROAS improve by 3.4%. It's also freed up a lot of the teams’ time, and as a result we’re able to build out more granular campaigns without worrying about manually updating bids."

Better transaction insights with purchase detail reports (beta)


What: Purchase detail reports (currently in beta) let you better understand the products consumers purchased, and the ads that drove those sales. Once you specify the products sold in a transaction using the DoubleClick floodlight tag, you can customize and report on specific product sales by any attribute, including color, size, product line, and style. Best of all, these reports are available for any type of campaign -- whether that’s text, Shopping, on AdWords or on Bing.

Why: With ever-changing shifts in seasons and trends, retailers often focus on selling a certain products at a given time. Fashion advertisers, for example, need to sell the latest styles before they fall out of favor. In the past, figuring out if your search advertising actually lead to these product sales has been complex -- requiring lots of time and effort in reporting analysis. Purchase detail reports give granular transaction details for better insights into your campaign performance:

  • Identify the impact of your advertising on achieving core business goals like maximizing profitability or selling off inventory.
  • Improve ad targeting by matching ads to the products that consumers are most interested in purchasing.
  • Understand the real value of brand and general terms in selling your highest margin or most important products.

What do customers think? Justin Johnson, Paid Search Manager at Cabela’s, says: “Having insights into where we spend our money, in addition to what people are looking for,  has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions. With this data, we have a better look into where we may not have adequate coverage, and are able to quickly make changes to address that. Being able to pull in margin data to see if certain keywords are actually better or worse at driving profitable traffic than we anticipated helps us be more thoughtful with our spending.”

Reach out to your DoubleClick Search representative or our support team at [email protected].

To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and smarter optimization, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Google+.

1. DoubleClick Search internal data, 2014

Going Back to School with DoubleClick: Digital marketing flashcards to help you make the grade this school year

This is day 4 of the “Going Back to School with DoubleClick” series. Ready for a quick review? Check out our past flashcards: day 1, day 2, day 3


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No need to pull those all-nighters; an integrated digital marketing platform can help you make better use of your time. Using DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform across the stack, Mindshare went from working more than 100 hours to around 30 hours over the Black Friday weekend -- reducing their work time by over 70 hours year-over-year. And as a bit of ‘extra credit’, the team still saw a lift of more than 25% in ROAS. These time savings allowed Mindshare to focus more on making strategic optimizations by looking more closely at the data and insights -- leading to record-breaking campaign performance for their client. Ready for the deep-dive lesson? Check out the lecture notes here.

Tune in tomorrow for our next flashcard on how integrated platforms can help you make the grade this school year, and beyond!  

Going Back to School with DoubleClick: Digital marketing flashcards to help you make the grade this school year

This is day 3 of “Going Back to School with DoubleClick” series. Ready for a quick review? Check out our past flashcards: day 1, day 2

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Sometimes it’s about working smarter, not harder. As shown in a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study, “Cutting Complexity, Adding Value”, campaign teams spend on average only 1 day in 5 on ‘value-creation’ activities, with 80% of their time spent on low-value activities such as trafficking. By adopting a unified ad technology, organizations can improve productivity by up to 33% across the campaign lifecycle. Skip study hall and learn how to save time with digital platforms; check out the cheat sheet here.

Tune in tomorrow for our next flashcard on how integrated platforms can help you make the grade this school year, and beyond!  

Going Back to School with DoubleClick: Digital marketing flashcards to help you make the grade this school year

This is day 2 of the “Going Back to School with DoubleClick” series. Ready for a quick review? Check out our day 1 flashcard here.

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Double-majoring in search and display? Unified advertising platforms can help you get that competitive edge. For VivaKi, an integrated platform provided the team with new ways to drive results across their digital marketing channels. By incorporating their paid search signals into their display activity using DoubleClick display remarketing from search ads, VivaKi aced the performance test with a 60%+ improvement in CPA across their travel and auto advertisers. Want to brush up on how they did it?  Check out the full report here.

Tune in tomorrow for our next flashcard on how integrated platforms can help you make the grade this school year, and beyond!  

Going Back to School with DoubleClick: Digital marketing flashcards to help you make the grade this school year

Alright bookworms, it's Back-to-School time. That means new teachers, new friends, new shoes -- and for digital marketers, new seasonal promotions.

Back-to-school searches have jumped 45% since last year, and many shoppers report that online research will have a notable impact on their in-store purchase decisions. So as a digital marketer, how do you work faster, act smarter, and make better decisions across channels -- all before that recess bell rings?  

In a recent report, 75% of organizations believe an integrated platform could meet all of their marketing needs. To help make your digital marketing campaigns look as good as that meticulously-planned “first day” outfit, every day this week we’ll be sharing a few fun and educational flashcards around need-to-know stats, tips, and tricks from DoubleClick.

So sharpen those pencils, crack open that notebook, and let’s get started! Here's today's flashcard:

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Integrated and real-time technologies can help you race to the top of the class -- and the results page. Using smart, fast, and unified tools that act from up-to-the-minute conversion data, iProspect exceeded their luxury retail client’s expectations by more than tripling revenue on the first day of their promotion, while decreasing cost per clicks (CPCs) by over 60% year over year. Ready to study up on how? Check out the full notes here. 

Tune in tomorrow for our next flashcard on how integrated platforms can help you make the grade this school year, and beyond!  

Success with DS: Custom Floodlight Variables and Reporting

Back in May we launched custom Floodlight variables (CFVs) in DoubleClick Search. CFVs allow you to track and report on non-PII user activity associated with conversions. If you use Floodlight tags to track conversions, you can now leverage CFV data in your DoubleClick Search reports.

CFVs can be either metrics or dimensions. Metrics reflect numeric data and dimensions reflect alphanumeric or numeric strings. Let’s say that I represent a bank and created a metric to capture the number of credit card sign ups and a dimension to track different credit card types, such as cc gold, cc silver...etc. With both metric and dimension data in DoubleClick Search I’m able to analyze the number of sign ups for each credit card type and make decisions about how to allocate the bank’s advertising budget.
Once CFVs are available in DoubleClick Search you can include CFV metrics in Floodlight columns and/or filter results by CFV dimensions. For example, I may want to see the number of credit card sign ups for a specific Floodlight tag and credit card type, such as “CC Gold”. For more info, please refer to this article.



For views containing Floodlight data, such as Actions, Transactions, or Floodlight columns, you can report on CFV dimensions using segmentation or dimension grouping. For example, I may want to understand how the different credit card types are performing across ad groups within a campaign. Segmenting a report by a CFV dimension will return a row with each ad group and CFV dimension value combination (e.g. one row for ad group #1 and cc gold & one row for ad group #1 and cc silver). If instead I want an aggregated view of CFV dimension data, I can select the CFV dimension from the Dimensions tab. This will return a row with data for each CFV dimension value (e.g. one row for cc gold & one row for cc silver).    


To take advantage of this feature you’ll need to take the following steps:
  1. Create CFVs in DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM). More info.
  2. Add the CFVS to the Floodlight tags on your website. More info.
  3. Set up CFVs within the Advertiser Settings section in DS. More info.

We encourage you to give CFVs a whirl and share your feedback and findings with your DS account management team.