Tag Archives: Tips and tricks

Success with DS series: Advanced features in executive reporting

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.

Happy reporting!

Success with DS series: Shortcuts to time savings with automated rules

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 your Google 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 labels into 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?