Tag Archives: DoubleClick

DoubleClick Search Holiday Series: Automate your holiday campaigns

This is the second in post our DoubleClick Search Holiday Series. In our first post, we talked about preparation. Today, we cover automation.

The holidays always roll around too quickly. But this year, with DoubleClick Search, you can “set it, not sweat it.” Set rules for sales, schedule edits, and determine your parameters, then let DoubleClick Search handle the automated, 24/7 campaign management. We’ve created the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays to help you succeed.

Bulksheets

DoubleClick Search scheduled uploads let you prepare and validate bulksheets for bulk campaign actions in advance, then have them uploaded at a scheduled time and date, giving you peace of mind during this busy time.

Automated rules

Automated rules and alerts let you schedule changes to specific campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords, based on your criteria. Use formula columns in rules to deliver everything on your wish list. You can even specify advanced logic for your changes using DoubleClick Search formula columns. Learn more.

For example:
  • Daily at 2 P.M., raise budget by 20% for campaigns that have more than 5 conversions and have exhausted more than 80% of your daily budget.
  • Every Friday, pause all keywords that have had more than 1,000 clicks but zero conversions during the previous week.
  • Every Monday, raise max CPC by 15% for keywords that met all of the following criteria from the previous week:
    • More than 50 conversions
    • Cost per conversion under $10
    • Trigger ads in positions worse than three

Inventory-aware campaigns

Inventory-aware campaigns automatically convert your product catalog to highly relevant, up-to-date search ads. Reach your customers with the right message, every time, with inventory-aware campaigns that automatically update your ads whenever your products change, such as when a product goes out of stock or the price changes.

To give you even greater control over your inventory-aware campaigns this holiday season, we’ve added new functionality. Inventory-aware campaigns now allow you to highlight the number of varieties of an item you have available, such as “Over 90 styles of men’s ski jackets”, so your customers will know you offer a wide selection to choose from. We also added new functions to make setting up inventory-aware campaigns easy, even if your feed isn't perfect, such as the ability to trim, clean or reduce words, automatically.

In our next post, we’ll talk about measurement. Learn more about all five steps to turn searchers into customers this holiday season with the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Register now for a webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

Support for v201509 reports in AdWords Scripts

We have added support for AdWords API v201509 reports in AdWords scripts.

Changes to conversion columns

This release includes several changes that coincide with the recent announcement on conversion columns. Several reporting columns were removed and new columns were added. See the AdWords API release notes for more details.

Video and multi-channel reporting

We are now including statistics and metrics for AdWords for video and TrueView video campaigns in several reports. This includes a new Video Performance Report. Note that reports will only include data for newly created video campaigns in AdWords campaign management or campaigns that were migrated from AdWords for video.

We have also added new reporting columns that help multi-channel advertisers more easily manage reporting for specific campaign types like Search, Shopping, Display, and Video.

See Video and multi-channel reporting changes for more details.

Miscellaneous reporting changes

  • All columns that have a List or Map return type now return data in JSON format.
  • Shared set type is now returned as an ENUM instead of an Integer in SHARED_SET_REPORT and CAMPAIGN_SHARED_SET_REPORT.
  • Several new columns have been added to existing reports.
  • A few duplicate columns in existing reports were removed.
  • MatchType and MatchTypeWithVariant columns were renamed to QueryMatchType and QueryMatchTypeWithVariant in PAID_ORGANIC_QUERY_REPORT and SEARCH_QUERY_PERFORMANCE_REPORT.

See Miscellaneous reporting changes for more details.

If you use API versioning in your reports, you need to modify your code to use v201509 as shown below. If you don’t use API versioning, no code changes are required. 


var report = AdWordsApp.report(query, {
   apiVersion: 'v201509'
});
If you have any questions about these changes or AdWords scripts in general, you can post them on our developer forum.

- Anash P. Oommen, AdWords API Team

DoubleClick Search Holiday Series: Prepare to make your holidays merry

This is our first post in the DoubleClick Search Holiday Series to help you get ready for the 2015 holiday shopping season—a critical time for online marketers and retailers. Last year, consumers spent $616.1 billion on retail purchases during November and December1. As you might know from Google’s 5 Holiday Shopping Trends to Watch in 2015, 40 percent of that spend was made online.

In fact, 2014 was the most-connected holiday shopping season we’ve ever seen. Shoppers spent an unprecedented amount of time researching and buying online:

  • 78% used the internet for holiday research vs. 29% relied on friends, relatives, or colleagues (down from 2013)2.
  • 40% of holiday shopping was online2.
  • 53% of those who shopped online used smartphones or tablets, up from 41% the previous year3.

For you, this represents a huge opportunity to reach shoppers, either while they're still researching or when they're actually ready to buy. To help you capture this opportunity, we’ve created the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays that walks through five key steps for holiday success. Today, we’ll address the first step: Preparation.

  • First, unify your data for insights and action. Effective tagging will help track your success during the holidays.
  • Your labels are important, too. Track your holiday promotions, and make them easy to identify in reports by assigning labels to your seasonal campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords.
  • Finally, don’t neglect offline data integration. Often, conversions start online and finish offline. Use the DoubleClick Search conversions API to report on and optimize conversions from external data, including call-tracking and in-store transactions.

In our next post, we’ll talk about automation. Learn more about all five steps in the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Register now for a webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search
1 National Retail Federation, “Retail Holiday Sales Increase 4 Percent,” January 14, 2015.
2 Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,500.
3 Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,167, January 2014, n = 1,077.

New DoubleClick Search features to help you turn searchers into customers this holiday season

For search marketers, the holiday season starts well before the holidays. You’re busy making preparations to help holiday shoppers check items off their list with you. To make your job easier, we’ve been working hard all summer to bring new campaign management, measurement, and workflow features to DoubleClick Search.

Manage mobile campaigns on Bing and Yahoo! Japan more easily

Mobile search will influence the 2015 holiday shopping season more than any other shopping season before it. The Inside AdWords blog shared in May that more Google searches now take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan. Google's Micro-Moments Guide indicates that mobile conversion rates have shot up by 29% in the last year alone. DoubleClick Search has two new features that will help you capture the mobile search opportunity.

First, we've added mobile and tablet bid adjustments for Bing Ads campaigns. This makes it easy for you to adjust to Unified Device Targeting (UDT) in DoubleClick Search with mobile and tablet bid adjustments for Bing Ads that work just like mobile bid adjustments for AdWords.

Second, we've made it easier to optimize mobile bid adjustments on Yahoo! Japan. You can now set adjustments at the ad group level that will trump adjustments at the campaign level.

Improve the relevance of inventory keyword campaigns

On mobile and desktop, relevance is a key component of search marketing success. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in higher positions, and bring you the most success.

DoubleClick Search retail advertisers use inventory-aware campaigns to build highly relevant campaigns at scale by creating templates that automatically build keywords and ads based on their product feeds. We've made these templates even more powerful with new functions to let you fine-tune and customize your keywords and ad content.

Stay abreast of campaign performance

New DoubleClick Search features for measuring results will help you stay on top of campaign performance throughout the season and beyond.

You can now use bulksheets or the DoubleClick Search API to attribute a conversion in a shopping campaign to a specific product in your inventory feed. To help you analyze and optimize at scale, we've added three reports to the DoubleClick Search reporting API.

We've also made it a cinch to analyze what's happening in the Black Friday to Cyber Monday stretch, or any other period of time, with more flexible date functions for formula columns. For example, you can use Date subtraction to calculate the number of days between two dates, or use weeknum to return the week number for a specified date.

Enjoy improvements to usability and visibility

In order to help you get campaign work done fast, we've enhanced the usability and visibility of some DoubleClick Search features based on your feedback. You can now apply labels when you create new keywords or customize and rename report views.

If you're looking to use DoubleClick attribution models to better understand what's driving conversions, we now automatically pre-populate the time decay model so you can start using it immediately.

Let the holiday season begin

Today's announcement is the culmination of many months of work to help make your holiday campaigns as streamlined and rewarding as possible.

Visit the DoubleClick Search Help Center for a complete overview of what's new and view trainings to help you get started.

Posted by Anthony Chavez
Product Management Director, DoubleClick Search

Using the Google My Business API to manage your location extensions

Last year, we announced upgraded location extensions, a more efficient way to manage and use business locations in ads by linking Google My Business and AdWords accounts. To help you manage your business locations more easily at scale, we’re now releasing the Google My Business API.

Google My Business will be the central repository for managing your business locations. The creation of manual location extensions as feed items through the AdWords API has been deprecated and will sunset in Q2 2016. Please update your code before March 31, 2016 to avoid being impacted by this transition.

Supported features
The first version of the Google My Business API allows you to read, create, update and delete unverified business locations. Supported attributes are name, address, contact numbers, URL, categories, and business hours. Unverified locations can be used as location extensions in AdWords, but have to be verified to be eligible to show up on Google Maps.

Future releases of the Google My Business API will support additional functionality that will allow you to fully manage your location data across Google Ads and Maps.

Getting started with the Google My Business API
If you already use the AdWords API and manage more than 50 business locations, you can apply for access to the Google My Business API. Once granted, you will have access to the Google My Business API documentation and you can follow the steps there to get started. For accounts with 50 or fewer locations, please use Google My Business Locations for now.

Linking locations to accounts, campaigns or ad groups as location extensions
Users managing multi-location businesses (chains) must have a separate Google My Business account for each chain for bulk-verification. If you already manage locations under bulk-verified accounts in Google My Business today, you can link those accounts to AdWords to have your location extensions in sync.

For developers managing AdWords accounts with a large number of locations for small and medium businesses, we recommend creating one Google My Business account as a central repository for all locations. Each physical location should be created only once. If different owners and managers are involved per location or for sets of locations, we suggest using Business Accounts.

Once the AdWords accounts are linked to your shared Google My Business account, the locations will be available as feed items in AdWords. You are responsible for creating a CustomerFeed and using an appropriate matching function to make sure only locations that actually belong to the customer are linked to their related AdWords account. You can use CampaignFeeds or AdGroupFeeds for additional filtering based on campaigns or ad groups.

The best way to filter locations from a shared Google My Business account is to create location labels through the Google My Business API and use a matching function that uses these labels for selection. For example, you can label each location with its AdWords Customer ID in Google My Business and use these Customer ID labels for filtering in AdWords. Or you can label each location with a unique ID, as long as you keep track of these IDs.

Please see our guide for managing location extensions for further details, which also includes an end-to-end code example.

Migration of existing location extensions
If you are using manual location extensions through the AdWords API, we recommend migrating your locations to Google My Business before March 31, 2016. After this date, the creation of manual location extensions will sunset. All unmigrated locations stored in AdWords will be auto-migrated to Google My Business at a later date. Further details about the timeline and process will be announced in this blog.

Timo Bozsolik, AdWords API Team

AdWords API v201502 sunset reminder

AdWords API v201502 will be sunset on November 12, 2015, after which all v201502 API requests will begin to fail. This version was deprecated on June 25, 2015. If you are still on v201502, we recommend that you migrate directly to v201509 (released last week) and skip v201506. Please be sure to migrate soon to ensure your API access is unaffected.

We have prepared various resources to help with the migration: As always, if you have any questions about this migration, please contact us via the forum or the Ads Developers Plus Page.

- Michael Cloonan, AdWords API Team

Introducing the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, for a faster, open mobile web

Cross-posted from The Official Google Blog

Smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the way we access information, and today people consume a tremendous amount of news on their phones. Publishers around the world use the mobile web to reach these readers, but the experience can often leave a lot to be desired. Every time a webpage takes too long to load, they lose a reader—and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions. That's because advertisers on these websites have a hard time getting consumers to pay attention to their ads when the pages load so slowly that people abandon them entirely.

Today, after discussions with publishers and technology companies around the world, we’re announcing a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.

The project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages. To give you a sense of what a faster mobile web might look like, we’ve developed this demo on Google Search:

Over time we anticipate that other Google products such as Google News will also integrate AMP HTML pages. And today we’re announcing that nearly 30 publishers from around the world are taking part too.

This is the start of an exciting collaboration with publishers and technology companies, who have all come together to make the mobile web work better for everyone. Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly and LinkedIn are among the first group of technology partners planning to integrate AMP HTML pages.

In the coming months we’ll work with other participants in the project to build more features and functionality focused on some key areas:

  • Content: Publishers increasingly rely on rich content like image carousels, maps, social plug-ins, data visualizations, and videos to make their stories more interactive and stand out. They also need to implement ads and analytics in order to monetize the content and to understand what their readers like and dislike. The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project provides an open source approach, allowing publishers to focus on producing great content, while relying on the shared components for high performance and great user experience. The initial technical specification—developed with input and code from our partners in the publishing and technology sectors—is being released today on GitHub.
  • Distribution: Publishers want people to enjoy the great journalism they create anywhere and everywhere, so stories or content produced in Spain can be served in an instant across the globe in, say, Chile. That means distribution across all kinds of devices and platforms is crucial. So, as part of this effort, we’ve designed a new approach to caching that allows the publisher to continue to host their content while allowing for efficient distribution through Google's high performance global cache. We intend to open our cache servers to be used by anyone free of charge.
  • Advertising: Ads help fund free services and content on the web. With Accelerated Mobile Pages, we want to support a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies. Any sites using AMP HTML will retain their choice of ad networks, as well as any formats that don’t detract from the user experience. It’s also a core goal of the project to support subscriptions and paywalls. We’ll work with publishers and those in the industry to help define the parameters of an ad experience that still provides the speed we’re striving for with AMP.

We hope the open nature of Accelerated Mobile Pages will protect the free flow of information by ensuring the mobile web works better and faster for everyone, everywhere.

Posted by David Besbris
Vice President Engineering, Search

Webinar: Reach the right audience, faster with comScore vCE in DoubleClick

Just a few weeks ago we announced the release of comScore vCE in DoubleClick, the first completely tagless GRP measurement solution integrated directly into an ad server. With comScore vCE in DoubleClick, Brand Marketers in the US get the trusted comScore audience measurement solution for both video and display ads that delivers 100% coverage.

Register now for a webinar on October 21st at 11am PST / 2pm EST, where you’ll be joined by Anne Hunter, SVP Global Marketing Strategy at comScore, Inc. and Paul Trieu, Product Manager at Google, to learn about:

  • How reach, demographics and GRPs can help enhance campaign success
  • Share practical tips for enabling comScore vCE in DoubleClick in DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Campaign Manager
  • Unveil best practices on using comScore vCE in DoubleClick to measure campaigns
  • Perform a demo of the new simple and easy to read reports
  • Host Q&A
Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing, Video Platforms & Brand Measurement, Google

Sunset of the v201408 DFP API

On Monday, November 30, 2015, in accordance with the deprecation schedule, v201408 of the DFP API will be sunset. At that time, any requests made to v201408 will return errors.

If you're still using v201408, now's the time to upgrade to the latest release and take advantage of new features like line item level reconciliation (see our guide here). To do so, check the release notes to identify any breaking changes, grab the latest version of your client library and update your code.

Some changes to look out for:

This is not an exhaustive list, so as always, don't hesitate to reach out to us with any questions. To be notified of future deprecations and sunsets, join the DFP API Deprecation Announcements group and adjust your notification settings.

 - , DFP API Team

Announcing v201509 of the AdWords API

Today we’re announcing the release of AdWords API v201509. Here are the highlights:

  • Improved batch processing. The new BatchJobService supports all of the same operations as MutateJobService, but offers additional features such as support for creating dependent objects using temporary IDs, better error reporting, improved performance, and a much higher limit on the number of operations per job. Check out the accompanying guide to get started.
  • AdWords for video and TrueView video campaigns in reports. The AdWords API now supports TrueView campaigns that have migrated from AdWords for video, and several reports now include statistics and new metrics for these campaigns. See the release notes for the complete list of changes and additions.
  • New reporting columns for multi-channel advertisers are available on multiple reports making it easier to track interactions vs. clicks.
  • Customer Match. Build and target user lists from email addresses using the new CrmBasedUserList.
  • Structured snippets can now be created using extension setting services.
  • Conversion column changes. Conversion columns have been modified, added, or removed on multiple reports to coincide with the upcoming conversion reporting changes in AdWords. See the release notes for the complete list of changes.
  • HTML5 ads can now be added as TemplateAds using template ID 419. In addition, MediaService now supports uploading media bundles for use with this new template.
  • Geo targeted ad customizers. Target each ad customizer feed item to a specific geographic location.
  • Gmail sponsored promotions. The AdWords API now fully supports the Gmail image, single promotion, and multi-product ad formats via template ads.
  • Dynamic remarketing ads have new placeholder fields for setting upgraded URL attributes such as tracking templates, custom parameters, and final URLs.
  • Active View reporting. New fields for Active View viewable impressions, measurable impressions, measurable cost, and measurability are now available in multiple reports.

If you’re using v201502 of the AdWords API, please note that it’s being sunset on November 12th, 2015. We encourage you to skip v201506 and migrate straight to v201509. If you’re using v201506, be aware it’s now marked deprecated and will be sunset on April 11th, 2016.

As with every new version of the AdWords API, we encourage you to carefully review all changes in the release notes and the v201509 migration guide. The updated client libraries and code examples will be published shortly. With this release, we’ve also updated the Required Minimum Functionality document to include some of the newly added features. If you have any questions or need help with migration, please post on the forum or the Ads Developers Plus Page.

- Josh Radcliff, AdWords API Team