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?

Success with DS Series: Technology + People

When adopting a search management tool, the people you work with can be just as important as the technology itself.

At DoubleClick Search, we know it’s important for you to have a dedicated team to help you meet your unique goals. That’s why we continually work to improve both our technology and our services -- reflected in our 90% (and growing!) customer satisfaction score (1). Today, we're kicking off our “Success with DS” series with a video highlighting what our customers have to say about the "people" part of the SEM tool equation. And over the next few weeks, we'll be introducing you to a few of our Services team members, who will walk you through tips and tricks around some of our key features.

In the video, we hear our customers talk about the value of strong partnerships with teams that can provide strategic, consultative guidance throughout the breadth and depth of their online advertising initiatives. Here are just a few ways our service partners across sales, support, and product work with you to invest in your success:

• Custom onboarding for a quick ramp-up. During onboarding, our team will develop a customized launch plan, coordinate trainings, and lead you through setting up initial campaigns, so you can quickly and easily put your search expertise into practice in DoubleClick Search.
• Ongoing relationships. After your initial onboarding, your dedicated Account Managers will continue to work closely with you to review new features, best practices, analyze campaign performance, offer optimization recommendations and budget consultation, and set up custom reporting, as needed.
• Flexible training for every need. Whether you need training on new features, advanced features, or require an entire product overview, our team provides a variety of training opportunities to fit your schedule. We offer self-paced training, recorded videos, and live webinars to ensure a quick ramp-up period. Check out our training solutions here.
• Speedy technical assistance. With world-class global support, you can expect fast turnaround times from industry-savvy experts who really understand your business. Read more about our priority levels here.
• Connect with Product leads. Our Engineering and Product teams are all ears. At DoubleClick Search, we value customer feedback and input, and offer a variety of forums to connect directly with our Product team, including customer visits, webinars, usability sessions, industry events, and other custom events.

Want to find out more about how our Services team can help you meet your goals? Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog to learn how you can achieve “success with DS” with some advice from the folks who know it best -- starting with a few inventory-aware campaigns tips and tricks later this week.

1. Google internal data, 2013

Go back to school, DoubleClick style: 5 ways to win this school year with retail solutions from DoubleClick Search

Dust off your textbooks and boot up your laptops: it’s time to go back to school!

While “Back to School” might be a dreaded time for students, it also presents unique challenges (and opportunities) for retail search marketers. More than 60% of shoppers will begin their Back to School shopping online, and most shoppers report that online research will have a notable impact on their in-store purchase decisions. In a highly competitive online space, how can you as a search marketer work faster, act smarter, and make better decisions -- all before that final school bell rings?  

Today, we want to help you beat the Back to School blues and take advantage of the second largest retail event of the year. So we’re opening our school supply box and sharing a few successes we’ve heard from search marketers who’ve done their homework. Below are just a few powerful tools from DoubleClick Search to make sure you’ll get voted “most likely to succeed” in retail this school year, and beyond.  

Keep your promotions organized with inventory-aware campaigns Shake off that lazy summer feeling and get your new Back to School promotions in tip-top shape with inventory-aware campaigns, which let you use your existing Google Merchant Center feeds to efficiently and automatically update your search campaigns.

Our star student: Piston. Jennifer Johnstone, Senior Performance Marketing Strategist at Piston, mentions: “Inventory-aware campaigns allow us to save time from manually managing product inventory, enable us to spend money on more efficient product level keywords and help us drive more revenue than manual campaign builds.” The team cut out the busywork by setting up inventory rules to automatically pause keywords when products go out of stock, and change landing page URLs when links in their feed change. The team also increased profits by expanding their keyword lists, auto-generating highly relevant SKU-level keywords. In a matter of weeks, Piston saw a 51% uplift in ROAS, 26% higher CTR, and a 50% higher conversion rate for their retail client -- all while saving around 38 hours over the past quarter.

Get to the top of the class (and the search page) with smart bid calculations Become a math whiz with powerful bid management tools from the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite, which considers dozens of factors to make intelligent bidding decisions in near-real time.

Our star student: iProspect. To better manage their search campaigns at scale, iProspect adopted the Performance Bidding Suite for automated bid optimization—with some impressive results. Casandra Jones, Account Supervisor at iProspect, notes: “The one feature from DoubleClick Search that our team can’t live without are the bid management tools. It’s saving us 8 hours a week, compared to manual bidding.” Within 6 weeks of adopting Floodlight tag bidding -- a bidding strategy that leverages Floodlight to set unique goals for varying conversion types -- iProspect saw significant improvements for their retail client: 10% increase in click volume, 20% increase in daily revenue, and 20% decrease in costs.

Secure cross-channel opportunities with display remarketing from search ads Not sure how to juggle your cross-discipline studies? With display remarketing from search ads, use paid search clicks from DoubleClick Search to show consumers display ads across major ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across the Google Display Network, all with an easy and tagless workflow.

Our star student: VivaKi. In the search for the best deals, online shoppers can quickly get distracted. VivaKi implemented DoubleClick's display remarketing from search ads to make sure they didn’t lose their audience. With a turn-key setup on one integrated platform, the VivaKi team set up their remarketing lists in just a few clicks, and were ready to begin reaching customers with display ads via DoubleClick Bid Manager. As a result, VivaKi increased conversions by 32% for a leading insurance company, and reduced CPA by 66% for an automotive client.

Take notes on the important details, using labels across your entire campaign Don’t get lost in all the “noise”. Highlight the need-to-know details using labels from DoubleClick Search to categorize, manage, and report on your most important campaigns, ads, groups, or keywords at a glance.

Our star student: The Search Agency. The Search Agency used labels from DoubleClick Search to break out of their existing campaign structure and easily track and manage attributes most important to them. Matt Grebow, Director of Paid Search at The Search Agency, notes: “Labels help us quickly identify account segments that are important to our clients, and provide the flexibility to adjust these segments along with any shift in business focus.” Beyond simply tagging different campaign attributes, we’ve seen our customers use labels in unique ways with other DoubleClick Search features, including combining labels with automated rules to manage their promotion schedules.

Ace your “report” card with better measurement from DoubleClick Find out how your campaigns are stacking up with insights from our real-time, holistic reporting solutions. With a single view of your customer across display, rich media, mobile, video, and more, discover what’s working, hone in on new opportunities, and find your spot on the digital marketing honor roll.

Our star student: Digitas. In a dynamic search space, waiting 24 hours for reports to be updated, then mashing up and matching data from those separate reports, can feel like nails on a chalkboard. “I think the biggest factor that goes into our decision-making process for a platform is its ability to handle data, “Sean McDonald, Vice President and Group Director at Digitas, remarked. “DoubleClick really allows us to view the data all in one place, and make decisions based off of what’s best for our clients, rather than what's best for our individual teams.” With reporting by device type, quickly compare how campaigns are performing on desktop computers, mobile devices, and tablets, down to the individual keywords. For cross-channel insights, use DFA Attribution tools to better analyze conversion paths.

Ready for the next lesson? Play teacher’s pet and tune in to the DoubleClick for Advertisers blog later this week to learn how DoubleClick Bid Manager can help advertisers engage with in-market consumers during the Back to School season, and get set up for success for the upcoming holidays.

1. Google data, 2013: http://googleshopping.blogspot.com/

Introducing DoubleClick Search Tips & tricks series: using budget pacing reports in conjunction with web query and scheduled reporting

Welcome to our new “tips and tricks” series for DoubleClick Search.  We’re going to be bringing you a series of posts written by our awesome services team that will help you get the most out of the tool, save time and create more successful search campaigns.  We start off the series with budget pacing reports + web query & scheduling.

Budget pacing reports provide a convenient way to track budgets for your campaigns, as well as key performance metrics like revenue or conversion targets. If you use Excel to track reports for your campaigns, it's easy to integrate budget pacing report data by using the web query feature of DoubleClick Search.
Budget pacing reports, like most other aspects of the DoubleClick Search interface, can be turned into a web query link or a scheduled report. This way, if you have an existing Excel solution, you can pull trending campaign data straight into Excel without having to write any of your own formulas.

1. Create the budget pacing report in DS, selecting a campaign or ad group of campaigns and assigning them to a budget.
2. In the Budget Pacing section, click Download and then click Web Query to create a web query report with each of your budgetary groupings.
3. If you'd rather turn this into a scheduled report, simply click Scheduled Report and follow the instructions, and the data will be emailed to you on a regular basis.
4. You can also click into the report to view its progress, and then click the Download button and click Web Query or Scheduled Report to create these based on more granular data.

Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog for more tips & tricks over the next few weeks!

Five resolutions for better search management in 2013

We know marketers are always looking to run better search campaigns by going bigger, moving faster, and taking new opportunities across formats, devices, and channels. Our mission with DoubleClick Search is to help them do that. Over the past year, we’ve further invested in making DoubleClick Search a best-in-class platform for search management, to meet the needs of agencies and advertisers. We’ve often called 2012 our year of transformation: after rebuilding DoubleClick Search from the ground up in 2011, our team focused 2012 on delivering powerful tools to make managing the world’s largest search campaigns more efficient and effective than ever before. Simply put, our goal is to make search simple -- providing easier, smarter, and faster ways to manage your campaigns -- and do it all as part of your broader digital marketing efforts through the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.


With this vision in mind, we’re kicking off the new year with a new look to our website, and a continued focus on investing in a search management platform that will save you time, get great campaign results, and help you make better digital marketing decisions. And in the spirit of self-betterment, we invite you to join us in resolving to make 2013 your best year yet. Here are a few suggested resolutions to improve your life as a search marketer:

1. I will remember important dates. Keeping track of anniversaries, birthdays, and other special occasions can be tricky enough. While Google Calendar can help you organize your personal events, DoubleClick Search has you covered the rest of the time, with reliable access to your campaigns on any day of the year, without the worry of extended downtime and missed opportunities. Backed by Google infrastructure, DoubleClick Search is up and running when you need it most -- during critical dates like Black Friday, Christmas day, and throughout the holiday season. We’ll keep the lights on throughout 2013, so you can worry about finding that perfect anniversary gift.

2. I will go to bed earlier. We get it; there’s just not enough time in the day. On top of back-to-back meetings, lunch dates, squeezing in some gym time and having dinner ready by 7, the last thing you want to do is manage a campaign that needs to go live at midnight. With DoubleClick Search, we help you get your life (and your search ads) on track with a set of scheduling features, including scheduled sync, scheduled UI edits, and scheduled upload sheets to effortlessly automate campaign changes around the clock. Coupled with easy bulk operations in the interface and ID-less uploads that have lowered bulksheet errors by 50% (1), save time and your sanity by cutting out repetitive tasks. Go on and catch those extra zzz’s -- we’ve got it covered.

3. I will save more for a rainy day. So you really, really want that new pair of shoes -- but resisting temptation can be hard. Ease your way into fiscal responsibility with DoubleClick Search Budget pacing reports, which allow you to keep track of your monthly search budgets at a glance. Visualize week-over-week, day-over-day, or month-over-month trends to quickly identify search campaigns that are under-spending or underperforming, and adjust keywords, bids, or budgets accordingly. (Now after setting up your Budget pacing reports, go out and get those shoes -- you deserve them!)

4. I will be a better listener. No smartphones out during dinner. No talking over your friends. And no more ignoring key search insights. Just as listening to your friends and colleagues can mean more opportunities to develop better personal relationships, listening to your search campaigns can help you nurture better campaign results to meet your business goals. Our Performance Bidding Suite offers a variety of transparency features into the bid optimization process, including bid rationale, preview intended bids, chart bid history, and primary constraint to help you get down to the nitty-gritty of what might or might not be working. Are your min and max bids too constrained? Is your goal too aggressive? Just lend us your ear and we’ll help you discover those insights.

5. I will spend more time with family. Your family is important -- they’re your bedrock, your confidants, and your circle of trust. That unified sense of integration and understanding is important to us, too. Because we know that search is one piece of a broader digital marketing “family”, we built DoubleClick Search to natively integrate with our display ad server, demand-side platform, and our rich media and analytics platforms -- all a part of DoubleClick Digital Marketing -- to help you take advantage of more opportunities across channels. Use Display remarketing from search ads to “close the loop” on paid search efforts, showing users display ads across major ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across the Google Display Network. Then, call your mom. She misses you.

Here’s to your best year yet. Happy New Year from DoubleClick Search!

(1) Google internal data

Lighten the load this season with the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays

Online holiday shopping is turning into a yearly endeavor for consumers -- and a yearly challenge for marketers. As a search marketer, how do you succeed in search during one of the busiest times of the year, to reach the right people with the right message, when it matters?

With the holidays quickly approaching, we want to be right there with you to ensure that yours are stress-free and merry. In our Guide for the Holidays, we outline past seasonal insights along with current trends we’re seeing, to help you discover how to win this holiday season with DoubleClick Search solutions that’ll let your search go faster, smarter, and better. You’ll learn how to best take advantage of the season’s trends with our intuitive workflow and improve your campaign performance with strategic, time-saving features. The guide covers tips and best practices on:

• Top 2012 holiday trends and recommendations
• Automating Your Workflow
• Display remarketing from search ads
• Performance Bidding Suite
• Mobile
• Reporting
• Support Resources

Plan for success this season with the DS Holiday Guide: click here to access the guide.

To view a demo of the features highlighted in our guide and ask live questions, attend our live webinar on November 14th. Sign up today!

Happy Holidays from the DoubleClick Search Services team.

See a preview of the bids for a bid strategy

We recently announced the launch of the Target bid column in DoubleClick Search (DS) reporting, which shows you the bid that DS would have used if there were no secondary constraints in the keyword’s bid strategy. Here’s a way you can use the column to get a preview of the bids in a bid strategy, so you can feel confident that it will result in a solid return on your investment.

You’ve heard about all the great things DS has been doing to improve the Performance Bidding Suite, both in the UI and behind the scenes with improved algorithms. You’re ready to try a bid strategy, but you’d love to have some idea as to what DS is going to bid before giving over full control. Based on your bid strategy settings, how is DS going to bid on your keywords?

To get an idea, just follow these steps:

1. Create your bid strategy and apply it to some keywords.
2. When applying the min and max bids for the selected keywords, set a tight bid range that you’re comfortable with. For example, you could set the bids so they match the range of max CPCs, as shown in the following example:
   
3. Let the bid strategy run.
   The bid strategy won’t be able to update the bid beyond the tight min and max bid limits, but it will update the Target bid column.
4. Navigate to a Keywords page that contains the keywords in the bid strategy.
5. Filter to the keywords in the bid strategy.
6. Above the performance summary graph, click Columns and then select the Target bid column.
   
7. Review the target bids. If they look reasonable, relax the bid limits to give more control to the bid strategy. In the following example, you may want to set your min bid to $5.00 and max bid to $60.00 for the keywords, to ensure that the Performance Bidding Suite has the room to set the target bids.
   

After you give the bid strategy control, remember that you can use Change History to gain insights into bid strategy changes with a summary of the bid rationale. In addition to the target bid, this feature lets you know how often bids are evaluated and provides details on why a change was made to a target position strategy. You also receive guidance on how to improve bid strategy performance by discovering where settings like max bid inhibit the bid changes. Learn more.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

New AdWords labels: unrelated to DS3 labels

As you may have heard, Google AdWords recently launched a new labels feature. We just wanted to let you know that this is separate functionality from DoubleClick Search V3 (DS3) labels. DS3 labels are set at the advertiser level and can span several engine accounts. AdWords labels are not currently supported in DS3, and they will not be imported into DS3 when you run a sync.

As a reminder, DS3 labels are a great way to categorize and report on keywords. Because multiple labels can be applied to a keyword, you can track many different attributes, such as whether it’s a brand keyword or if it’s in a particular category. You can also note keywords where your site doesn’t feature well in the organic search results.

To create a DS3 label:

1. Click the Labels tab in the left nav, click the New button above the table, and name your label. 
2. Navigate to a list of keywords and select some of them.
3. Click the Labels button above the table to apply labels to those keywords.

Coming soon, you’ll also be able to see reporting stats for DS3 labels.



As an example of the power of DS3 labels combined with reporting, an advertiser may manage brand and generic keywords separately. Using keyword labels, the advertiser will be able to easily compare the performance of these sets of keywords and take action accordingly, such as raising/lowering bids.

Learn more about creating and applying DS3 labels on the Help Center. And keep an eye on the blog for news of the release of reporting stats for labels.

Posted by DoubleClick Search team

Report on weighted actions

The following is part of a series of tips and tricks on using DoubleClick Search V3 (DS3) more effectively. Stay tuned for more suggestions on using DS3 in future blog posts!

DS3 can report on all actions equally. However, what if you’re an advertiser whose complex website includes a variety of user interactions, where every interaction is not the same value? For example, a website can have free and premium downloads. While premium downloads are the primary action that you care about, a free download may be worth a fraction of a premium download. How can the advertiser account for these various actions in DS3 reporting?

With the Weighted Actions feature, you can change the importance of certain actions by applying a priority, or weight, to them. A numerical weight can be applied to actions that originate from a specific webpage based on its Floodlight tag. In the example above, if a free download is worth 10% of a premium download, you can set the following weights:

• Premium downloads: 1.0
• Free downloads: 0.1

The Weighted actions column would then record each free download as 0.1 action. The other weighted columns (such as Clicks/wt action and Wt action conv %) would also treat it as 0.1 action when calculating their values.

Apply weighted actions

First, contact your Technical Account Manager or email [email protected] to set up the Floodlight instructions for the desired weighted actions. Note that you can only set weighted actions on action (counter) tags.

After the Floodlight instructions are configured, you can select any of the following columns to see the weighted performance in DoubleClick Search V3 (DS3) reporting:

• Weighted actions: The number of actions that are included in the Floodlight instructions for weighting.
• Clicks/wt action: The average amount of clicks it takes to result in a weighted action.
• Cost/wt action: The average amount you're spending per weighted action that a consumer performs.
• Wt action conv %: Weighted actions divided by clicks. This percentage gives you an indication of how frequently customers are completing actions based on the number of clicks. For example, if 10 users click on an ad, four of them sign up for catalog subscriptions, and the weight is 2.0, the Weighted Action Conversion Percentage will be 80%, calculated by (4 x 2) / 10.
• Wt actions/cost: The number of weighted actions for each dollar you spend.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Weighted actions do not affect automated bid strategies in DS3. It is solely a reporting feature.
• Setting up Floodlight instructions for weighted actions does not affect the Actions column and other actions-related columns. If no instructions are set for weighted actions, the Actions and Weighted actions columns will have the same value.
• DS3 will calculate weighted actions starting on the day you enter the weights. For example, if you enter weights today, the stats up through yesterday will not be weighted.

For more information on weighted actions and other reporting features in DS3, please visit the Help Center.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team