Author Archives: Kim

Making eyes at ROI: Love notes from DoubleClick customers




Each year, people are falling deeper in love with Valentine’s Day; in fact, this year’s numbers show consumers will spend $1.6 billion on candy to celebrate the day of love. And while Cupid’s been busy pairing up sweethearts, here at DoubleClick, we’ve been focused on connecting digital marketers with the right audiences to boost performance for their online marketing campaigns. To share that warm and fuzzy feeling, today we’re highlighting love notes from our top clients who are making eyes at ROI -- showcasing just a few ways they’re winning the hearts of consumers with faster, smarter tools from DoubleClick. 

Make sure your valentine knows you exist, with a creative message they can’t resist.
Every Romeo knows that snagging the prettiest Juliet starts with the perfect words and a timely delivery. That’s why Unfold Agency’s Brick Rucker and Daniel Weisinger have been using DoubleClick Rich Media for years to build beautiful creative messages that they can get in front of their target audience at the right time. Because they can review, approve and publish all their creatives themselves, they’re able to quickly turn their campaigns around and get them live on a deadline. 

“We believe in turning around creative quickly,” Weisinger says. “And most of the ad units we build are really complex.” By using DoubleClick, Unfold is able to push every banner as far as it can go, building innovative and engaging experiences within their rich media ad units. One recent creative even coordinated the ad unit with the surrounding skin of the website to provide a holistic brand experience for the user. “We’ve been using DoubleClick Studio for years...We’re as good as we are because DoubleClick created the platform for us.” 

Make it love at first ‘site’ with a sleek, new interface
Now that you have just the right message for your Valentine, you’ll also need to look sleek to really impress them. That’s why with DoubleClick Campaign Manager - the new version of DFA - we focused on building a beautiful, intuitive interface to help you work more efficiency and maximize your results across screens. 

For all those who have already upgraded to DoubleClick Campaign Manager, it’s been love at first ‘site’. Power users from Situation Interactive - Mara Winkler, Senior Media Planner, and Joyce Tse, Media Coordinator - told us about the benefits they’re seeing from using the new trafficking interface: “With the upgrade to DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we’ve been able to streamline the trafficking process. The new trafficking workflow makes it easy to edit everything without switching pages, and allows us to use our time more efficiently. For example, when we swap creative it’s an extremely easy and intuitive process, and changes are reflected almost immediately. This helps us to ensure that the correct creative is running at all times.”

Go ga-ga over programmatic buying
As Cupid would have it, no meaningful connections with your sweetheart should be overlooked, and neither should an opportunity to connect or reconnect with your customers. 

The agency Deutsch LA turned to programmatic to help a major real estate company reach customers at scale, at the lowest possible cost. To drive success, Deutsch brought the best of targeting, formats and inventory together on the DoubleClick Bid Manager platform.

To maximize share-of-voice, the team paired contextual and audience targeting using both display and video formats. Best-in-class semantic contextual targeting ensured they could engage users in the moment they read content related to their client’s products. While contextual comprised of 20% of campaign spend, it drove the highest clickthrough rate, at a CPA 50% lower than the rest of their buy. Stephanie Waddle, VP and Digital Associate Media Director at Deutsch LA tells us why she’s a fan: “Targeting endemic content is important for our client. It qualifies our audience and drives lower CPAs. In addition, it keeps them top of mind in a very competitive category.” 

The team also coupled their cross-exchange buy with a programmatic direct buy, to augment reach with increased focus on private marketplaces. Integrating their reserved and programmatic display buy within the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform gave the team added efficiencies and fresh, holistic reporting across their buy.

Get your heart racing with real-time insights
And when it comes to seeing the results of your efforts, any Valentine’s Day planner knows it’s never good to wait until the last minute -- not with dinner reservations, and certainly not with your digital campaigns. 

With instant conversions in DoubleClick Search, DigitasLBi was able to analyze their performance in a heartbeat, and use that up-to-the-minute information to influence bid decisions. “It’s been a great tool for DigitasLBi,” says Ashley Tsoumas, Search Marketing Analyst at DigitasLBi. “DoubleClick Search makes bid and budget adjustments automatically based on your goals, and then within the same day, you have an understanding of how those adjustments have impacted the overall business.” For one particular account across all Google and Bing keywords, these optimizations from instant conversion feedback contributed to 30% more orders at 68% lower CPO, month-over-month.

Customers are feeling the real-time romance across the DoubleClick platform, too. Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, tells us how unified reporting lets her team take advantage of every opportunity across their digital marketing with fresh, accurate data:  "Integration of search, display, RTB -- the ability to track all of that within one system, see how thats impacting media and actually start to act on that in real-time across all channels is an amazing new feature."

For more customer love stories, be sure to check out our list of case studies here. 

Happy Valentine’s Day from all of us at DoubleClick!

Introducing the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite: A smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management


Here at DoubleClick Search, we’ve been focused on developing tailored solutions for retail advertisers  -- delivering the scale, performance, and speed our customers need to maximize revenue for their businesses. Today, we’re excited to introduce the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, a robust toolset offering a smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management. The suite is comprised of solutions that help you automatically create and update text ad and PLA campaigns based on your product catalog, leverage real-time data to optimize against your product or category-level business goals, and measure it all with flexible, product-based reports.

Putting “product” at the core of commerce investments
We designed the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite with products at the core, letting you efficiently build, manage, and optimize campaigns by seamlessly integrating with your existing product investments. As the only platform directly integrated with Google Merchant Center, we make your product inventory visible and accessible within DoubleClick Search -- meaning there’s no need to navigate a separate interface, manage a manual upload, or wait for a separate team to deliver product feed data. Instead, anyone on your marketing team can act on live updates, as they happen.

For example, inventory-aware campaigns uses this live product information to automatically create and update text ads, keywords, and bids based on real-time changes to your Google Merchant Center feed -- inclusive of updates to pricing, availability, product descriptions, and more -- with no extra work, and at no extra cost to set up.

For ATG Stores, an ecommerce company for home goods, the ability to directly interact with Google Merchant Center data in DoubleClick Search was crucial in allowing the team to quickly iterate across their four million SKUs. “Inventory-aware campaigns have been a game changer,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG Stores. “It’s impressive to see that what would previously have taken a full week to do is now being updated in the system in less than an hour.” In addition to time savings, this smart automation also helped the team take advantage of broader long-tail keyword coverage to widen reach and uncover incremental revenue. As a result, ATG Stores tripled their return on ad spend (ROAS) for their inventory-managed campaigns.

Today, we’re extending the power of this product-centric automation with two new capabilities for Product Listing Ads (PLAs):

  • Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation, an extension of inventory-aware campaigns, lets you automatically generate and update PLA campaigns in real time, based on your Google Merchant Center feed.
  • Product Listing Ads optimization with intra-day bidding based on the freshest data lets you react quickly to changes in the market -- executing bids to meet your ROI goals on both high-volume products, as well as the long tail.

Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation
In addition to your text ads, you can now dynamically manage your PLA campaigns using the same, seamless workflow you use for the rest of your campaigns  -- ensuring you’re always up to date, maximizing coverage, and driving better ROAS and volume.

Already, advertisers are seeing the benefits. “The ability to auto-generate PLA campaigns from existing product inventory drastically simplifies our setup process,” said Carissa McStay, Associate Manager at global marketing firm The Search Agency. “I was able to generate new PLA campaigns with over 1000 ad groups by product type in a matter of minutes -- not only saving us hours of time, but ensuring that our new customers see the most compelling ads that are relevant to them.”

Product Listing Ads optimization (beta)
Our Performance Bidding Suite offers the flexibility to optimize from a variety of signals and conversion sources including formula columns, external data (like calls), and Google Analytics goals; now, these same powerful bidding algorithms extend to your PLA campaigns. With more product-level information available, DoubleClick Search bid strategies can fine-tune bids on high-volume products to drive the most revenue, as well as handle the long-tail products that may receive less traffic.

And like with the rest of DoubleClick Search bid strategies, PLA bid strategies benefit from access to the same real-time data, with bids based on up-to-the-minute conversions to capture every new opportunity. This allows advertisers to respond to market changes at the drop of a hat -- even during the busiest holiday shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Valentine’s Day.

As the global leader in performance marketing, iProspect understands that speed is often the difference between seized and missed opportunities for retail clients. "Real-time is the future of retail, and DoubleClick is leading the way with the ability to optimize from real-time conversion information,” says Jeremy Hull, Director of Bought Media at iProspect. “With fast, accurate data, DoubleClick Search offers clients the tools they need to optimize throughout the day as traffic shifts occur.”

Just the beginning
This product-centric focus will continue to guide our feature development, helping us quickly innovate additional tools that will drive revenue for the ecommerce business. To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and new technology integrations and partnerships, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, or follow us on Google+.

Introducing the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite: A smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management


Here at DoubleClick Search, we’ve been focused on developing tailored solutions for retail advertisers  -- delivering the scale, performance, and speed our customers need to maximize revenue for their businesses. Today, we’re excited to introduce the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, a robust toolset offering a smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management. The suite is comprised of solutions that help you automatically create and update text ad and PLA campaigns based on your product catalog, leverage real-time data to optimize against your product or category-level business goals, and measure it all with flexible, product-based reports.

Putting “product” at the core of commerce investments
We designed the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite with products at the core, letting you efficiently build, manage, and optimize campaigns by seamlessly integrating with your existing product investments. As the only platform directly integrated with Google Merchant Center, we make your product inventory visible and accessible within DoubleClick Search -- meaning there’s no need to navigate a separate interface, manage a manual upload, or wait for a separate team to deliver product feed data. Instead, anyone on your marketing team can act on live updates, as they happen.

For example, inventory-aware campaigns uses this live product information to automatically create and update text ads, keywords, and bids based on real-time changes to your Google Merchant Center feed -- inclusive of updates to pricing, availability, product descriptions, and more -- with no extra work, and at no extra cost to set up.

For ATG Stores, an ecommerce company for home goods, the ability to directly interact with Google Merchant Center data in DoubleClick Search was crucial in allowing the team to quickly iterate across their four million SKUs. “Inventory-aware campaigns have been a game changer,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG Stores. “It’s impressive to see that what would previously have taken a full week to do is now being updated in the system in less than an hour.” In addition to time savings, this smart automation also helped the team take advantage of broader long-tail keyword coverage to widen reach and uncover incremental revenue. As a result, ATG Stores tripled their return on ad spend (ROAS) for their inventory-managed campaigns.

Today, we’re extending the power of this product-centric automation with two new capabilities for Product Listing Ads (PLAs):

  • Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation, an extension of inventory-aware campaigns, lets you automatically generate and update PLA campaigns in real time, based on your Google Merchant Center feed.
  • Product Listing Ads optimization with intra-day bidding based on the freshest data lets you react quickly to changes in the market -- executing bids to meet your ROI goals on both high-volume products, as well as the long tail.

Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation
In addition to your text ads, you can now dynamically manage your PLA campaigns using the same, seamless workflow you use for the rest of your campaigns  -- ensuring you’re always up to date, maximizing coverage, and driving better ROAS and volume.

Already, advertisers are seeing the benefits. “The ability to auto-generate PLA campaigns from existing product inventory drastically simplifies our setup process,” said Carissa McStay, Associate Manager at global marketing firm The Search Agency. “I was able to generate new PLA campaigns with over 1000 ad groups by product type in a matter of minutes -- not only saving us hours of time, but ensuring that our new customers see the most compelling ads that are relevant to them.”

Product Listing Ads optimization (beta)
Our Performance Bidding Suite offers the flexibility to optimize from a variety of signals and conversion sources including formula columns, external data (like calls), and Google Analytics goals; now, these same powerful bidding algorithms extend to your PLA campaigns. With more product-level information available, DoubleClick Search bid strategies can fine-tune bids on high-volume products to drive the most revenue, as well as handle the long-tail products that may receive less traffic.

And like with the rest of DoubleClick Search bid strategies, PLA bid strategies benefit from access to the same real-time data, with bids based on up-to-the-minute conversions to capture every new opportunity. This allows advertisers to respond to market changes at the drop of a hat -- even during the busiest holiday shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Valentine’s Day.

As the global leader in performance marketing, iProspect understands that speed is often the difference between seized and missed opportunities for retail clients. "Real-time is the future of retail, and DoubleClick is leading the way with the ability to optimize from real-time conversion information,” says Jeremy Hull, Director of Bought Media at iProspect. “With fast, accurate data, DoubleClick Search offers clients the tools they need to optimize throughout the day as traffic shifts occur.”

Just the beginning
This product-centric focus will continue to guide our feature development, helping us quickly innovate additional tools that will drive revenue for the ecommerce business. To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and new technology integrations and partnerships, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, or follow us on Google+.

New agency view and navigation bar offers more efficiency in DoubleClick Search

Today we’d like to let you know about two upcoming changes to the DoubleClick Search interface that we’ve designed to enhance usability and workflow efficiency: the new agency view that enables viewing and reporting across multiple advertisers, and the new navigation bar that provides a more useable way to quickly find and access information across your advertisers.

Agency view
Agencies using DoubleClick Search often spend time toggling between the many clients they manage. The new agency view in DoubleClick Search shows key data from multiple advertisers into one integrated, consistent view to help advertisers more easily act on the biggest opportunities. This new view allows agencies to:

  • Quickly compare client accounts at a glance, and prioritize their day’s activities
  • Use familiar reporting tools in DoubleClick Search, including date comparison, downloading reports, and customizing views, for better organization across accounts.



Navigation bar
The new navigation bar allows customers to seamlessly move across their accounts in the following ways:

  • A new horizontal layout minimizes scrolling and provides a full view of account components.
  • A “search-as-you-type” function lets you quickly find the objects you’re looking for.
  • “Favorites” labels for your advertisers or agencies ensure your most important ones stay at the top of your list.
  • Keyboard shortcuts let you easily select or deselect specific accounts



The new agency view and navigation bar are in early preview for DoubleClick Search customers. If you’re interested in learning more, contact your DoubleClick Search representative.

Search marketing “stocking stuffers”: 5 festive strategies to lighten your workload this holiday season

Running top-notch digital campaigns for the holidays can be a lot of work, and your to-do list can seem never-ending. On top of the festivities of the season, you’re 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 succeed online during one of the busiest times of the year, and reach the right people with the right message, at the drop of a (Santa) hat?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve shared some best practices to whip your campaigns into shape, just in time for the holidays. Today, we wanted to recap a few of our favorite search marketing “stocking stuffers” to put the cheer back in your holiday and help you go faster, smarter, and better than ever before. With tools to scale and streamline your seasonal campaigns, find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your toasty apple cider -- while we take care of the rest.

Deliver just the right gift with inventory-aware campaigns.
Admit it: Manually managing your product inventory to stay on top of changing products, new promotions and seasonal search trends can leave you feeling like a Grinch. To lighten your load this holiday season, inventory-aware campaigns let you use your existing Google Merchant Center Feeds to automatically update your search campaigns -- showing the right product to the right customer, when they’re looking to buy. To get started with inventory-aware campaigns, check out some tips and tricks here.

On our “nice” list: ATG Stores. Search advertising is the primary driver of traffic to ATG’s website and is key to helping ATG scale their online marketing across a breadth of products -- spanning four million SKUs from 3,500 different manufacturers. Using inventory-aware campaigns, ATG Stores expanded their reach with 160 new campaigns containing over 6 million new long-tail keywords -- resulting in 3x higher ROAS for their business. “Inventory-aware campaigns help our customers by showing them how many units we have in stock, and at what price. It’s going to be a much more compelling experience for our shoppers,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG.

Do the work of a team of elves with automated rules.
Stay up 'til midnight waiting for Santa -- not your campaign updates -- with a little help from automated rules. Schedule changes to specific ads and keywords, based on criteria you specify, to ensure that your holiday campaigns are in tip-top shape (which means you can spend less time on repetitive tasks, and more time setting up those reindeer traps!). To get started with automated rules, check out some tips and tricks here.

On our “nice” list: Media Experts. As Chris Sylvestre, Manager of Search Marketing at Media Experts puts it, “Using automated rules this season, I’ll be more focused on what ingredients to put in my eggnog than I’ll be about our campaigns launching on time!” Maurice Revah, Senior Search Marketing Analyst, continues: “Automated rules allow us to activate and pause time sensitive promotions for our clients, regardless of the time of day. This enables us to operate outside of regular business hours, increasing productivity beyond measurement.”

Solve the cross-channel puzzle with display remarketing from search ads.
It’s not a miracle on 34th Street: you can get your search and display campaigns connected and performing this holiday season, and beyond. Display remarketing from search ads will help you close the loop on those last-minute shoppers who searched for your product or service but didn't convert. With this feature, re-engage your audience with display ads across exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across Google Display Network -- and do it all with an easy, tagless workflow. To get started with display remarketing from search ads, check out some tips and tricks here.

Race to the top of the search page with real-time bid optimization.
Looking for a solution that’ll help you go as fast as Rudolph? Put your best bid forward with our Performance Bidding Suite, designed to drive campaign performance through speedy, data-driven bid optimization. DoubleClick Search uses instant conversion data to update bids in near real-time, to more closely track to your seasonal goals, and help you get the ROI the size of a holiday feast. To get started with display remarketing from search ads, check out some tips and tricks here,

Get a full view of your online advertising with more data integrations.
To capture sales that occur after the inevitable rush to the malls, our Conversions API allows you to upload and edit conversions automatically so you can factor in purchases that started with your search ads, but resulted in transactions outside of your website. With this feature, you can upload new conversions to account for in-store transactions, or edit existing conversions to account for discounts and exchanges (...let’s face it -- we knew you didn’t need another pair of snowman pajamas).

On our “nice” list: ymarketing. With the DoubleClick Search Conversions API, ymarketing easily and automatically integrated their call tracking information (as well as data from other outside data sources) into DoubleClick Search. Steven Hellbusch, Performance Media Supervisor at ymarketing, says: “With the Conversions API, we can attribute calls to the specific keyword by search engine in almost real time. The ability to then optimize off of both online and offline conversions has allowed us to better meet our clients’ goals. With all of our data in one place, we have a more accurate picture of what’s happening from a user experience, and more importantly, we have ability to unearth new opportunities for our client.”

Do you have a DoubleClick tip or trick that gets you through the busy holiday season?
Email it to us at [email protected] with your name and title. We’ll feature the best tips here on the blog!

Holiday Best Practices: Adjust your bid strategy settings for optimal performance

This holiday season, we’re offering quick tips (30 minutes or less to implement!) to whip your campaigns into shape, just in time for the holidays. Reach out to your DoubleClick Search solutions consultant or the DoubleClick Search Support team for more advice on how to implement today’s tip.

This week’s tips go out to anyone who is currently running bid strategies in their accounts. This holiday season, let Santa do all the heavy lifting while DoubleClick Search bid optimization updates your keywords automatically.

DoubleClick Search uses near-instant conversion data to account for current trends like seasonality, holiday periods, or sudden spikes in demand due to offline events like weather. With this data-driven optimization, you can be sure that a burst of sale activity won't send a bid strategy haywire, but will help our algorithms quickly learn and deliver results, so you make the most bang for your buck during the holiday season. 

If you have any kind of bid strategy implemented in your accounts, set up a saved view to make reporting and adjusting easier. Some useful columns to include are:
  • % at min bid -- this column shows you the amount of time each keyword has spent at their min bids, in the date range you’ve selected
  • % at max bid -- this column shows you the amount of time each keyword has spent at their max bids, in the date range you’ve selected
  • Primary constraint or bid strategy health -- these columns will be populated with reasons why the keyword might not have reached a target bid (for example, it was constrained by minimum or maximum bid limits)

Now, let’s put these columns into practice. You can filter down this saved view to only show keywords that are hitting their min or max bids at over 50% of the time -- then think about adjusting the bid ranges for any keywords that show up in the filtered list. DoubleClick Search bid strategies do their best work with more relaxed bid constraints, so you want to minimize the number of keywords in this view.

To further minimize the time you’ll spend monitoring your bid strategies, you can set up automated rules and alerts to notify you if keywords are hitting their min or max bids, not receiving clicks and/or conversions, or falling out of a certain position range goal you’ve set. Set up a recurring rule to email you a notification every day or week, and that will serve as the reminder for you to log in and check your saved view!

In under 30 minutes, you can make sure your bid strategies are working to meet your goals over the holidays. Set aside your worries, knowing that you’ll get notifications in your inbox if anything needs adjusting. Reach out to the support team at [email protected] or your account reps for more bid strategy workflow and optimization tips or to get assistance with setting up the saved views or automated rules & alerts.

Holiday Best Practices: Setting up labels for quick reporting and remarketing

This holiday season, we’re offering quick tips (30 minutes or less to implement!) to whip your campaigns into shape, just in time for the holidays. Reach out to your DoubleClick Search solutions consultant or the DoubleClick Search Support team for more advice on how to implement today’s tip.

Today’s tips are all about labels: use them for reporting or use them for remarketing, but make sure you use them!

Are you looking to optimize your reporting for the holiday season? DoubleClick Search labels make it simple to keep track of your holiday promotions. For instance, assign one or more labels to your seasonal campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords to group them by initiative. For easy comparison, report on multiple labels to break down your holiday promotions into narrower silos (eg “Black Friday Branded Terms” vs “Black Friday Unbranded Terms”). When you’re ready, report on your labels to see statistics across your holiday promotion labels from a top level perspective.



Want to spend even less time on reporting? Set up a scheduled report to have your data delivered to you, when you want it.

Are you looking to take advantage of more cross-channel opportunities between search and display? You already have labels in place -- now make them actionable by putting them into a remarketing list, allowing you to target your search users with display ads. With display remarketing from search ads, re-engage your audience who clicked on your search ad, by showing them display ads across exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across Google Display Network. We recommend filtering to keywords with a high CTR and low conversion volume: convince your browsers to be buyers, and improve your overall conversion volume!

You can simplify your reporting and give your holiday campaigns extra love with remarketing in less than 30 minutes. Reach out to the support team for more workflow and remarketing tips, to get assistance with structuring your labels, or for advice on setting up additional audience segments.

Holiday Best Practices: Automatically capturing longtail keywords with inventory aware campaigns


This holiday season, we’re offering quick tips (30 minutes or less to implement!) to whip your campaigns into shape, just in time for the holidays. Reach out to your DS solutions consultant or the DoubleClick Search Support team for more advice on how to implement today’s tip.

This tip goes out to retail advertisers who have linked their Merchant Center accounts to DoubleClick Search. Inventory campaigns, when carefully crafted with Brand + Category keywords and custom templates, can drive thousands of revenue dollars and save whole days of optimizing ad copy and keyword creation, but what if it’s mid-November and you’re underwater with thousands of new and updating products? Use inventory campaigns piecemeal to just create those pesky long-tail product-specific keywords, right when you need them.

Try creating an inventory campaign that’s scoped to every product for a single, long-tail campaign that covers the full product inventory. Name of the game here is:
  • For your ad groups, split them out by AdWords_Grouping or Brand, whichever makes sense for the sorts of products you sell, or whatever might map to your PLA campaigns.
  • For your first ad template, make a static ad template, modeled from your best performing ad copy. Advertise your shipping deals, if possible!
  • For keyword templates, pick the quick wins for complete product coverage, like:
    • Title, phrase or exact match
    • Brand Title, broad match

The inventory-aware campaign will handle all the rest -- pausing keywords if the products go out of stock/are removed from the feed, and adding new keywords as new products come into stock. DoubleClick Search integrates seamlessly with the Google Merchant Center feed for intraday updates (almost as good as elves helping you work).

In less than 30 minutes, you can set your long-tail keywords up for success. Reach out to our support team for more inventory-aware implementation tips -- helping you answer your “what-if” scenarios, or structuring your campaign. Get your long-tail, full-coverage campaign implemented for all the holiday shoppers making their lists (and checking them twice).

Piston boosts ROAS by 51%, conversions by 50% for retail client using inventory-aware campaigns


A few months ago, we announced improvements to our inventory-aware campaigns feature, which automatically creates and optimizes a retailer’s search campaigns, based on updates made to their Google Merchant Center product feed. Since then, we’ve seen some impressive results across the board, showing that inventory-managed keywords more than doubled return on ad spend for heavy users(1).

Today, we wanted to highlight one of our success stories around this feature. The following story comes from Piston -- a bicoastal digital agency in the US, who helped their retail client maintain a “stylish profile” by keeping their campaigns relevant using inventory-aware campaigns.

After working around the clock to keep up with ever-changing product descriptions, prices, and landing pages during a busy holiday season, Piston turned to inventory-aware campaigns to scale their campaign management across their retail client’s 8,000+ products.

“When we’re looking for a solution, the key questions we ask are: can this save us time, can this save us money, and does it have features that can really help us impact our bottom line? And with DoubleClick inventory-aware campaigns, the answer was always ‘Yes’.” says Jennifer Johnstone, Senior Performance Marketing Strategist at Piston. “Inventory-aware campaigns allow us to save time from manually managing product inventory, enable us to spend our dollars on more efficient product level keywords, and help us drive more revenue than manual campaign builds.”

One quarter after adopting inventory-aware campaigns, Piston saw a 51% rise in ROAS, a 26% jump in CTR, and a 50% boost in conversion rate, compared to manually-managed campaigns. Additionally, inventory-aware campaigns allowed them to expand keyword coverage on both products and SKUs by 49% -- all while saving an estimated 38 hours over one quarter since implementation.

To get the full scoop on Piston’s success with inventory-aware campaigns, download the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog and Google+ page for even more customer success stories.

1. Google internal data, 2013