Now that we're back from the winter break, it's time to study up on programmatic with DoubleClick Bid Manager. We'll help you be a star student with our Optimization Webinar Series over the next two months. Need to learn the basics, or are you already advanced? We offer basic training via eLearnings, as well as webinars for users already familiar with the platform.

Take a look at our schedule below and enroll through the Training page in the Bid Manager Help Center (sign-in required).

Optimization Webinar Series

In this series, experts will discuss key features in DoubleClick Bid Manager to help you more effectively manage your programmatic campaigns.

Buy Facebook Exchange (FBX) inventory using DoubleClick Bid Manager - 2/4

Did you know that you can use DoubleClick Bid Manager to bid on FBX, Facebook's real-time bidding exchange? In this session, our product experts will teach you tips and tricks on how to get started with DBM line items targeting FBX inventory. Join this webinar If you’re a Bid Manager customer looking to build your campaigns, expand reach, and explore new options. Register

vCPM Bidding - 2/18

Learn how to implement Bid Manager's automated bidding tool to enhance your campaign performance. Register

Targeting - 3/4

Learn how to assign targeting and make adjustment for your prospecting, audience targeted, and remarketing line items. Register

Reporting - 2/25

Join our live webinar on generating reports and reading inline statistics in Bid Manager. We'll cover how these reports can help you optimize prospecting, audience, and remarketing campaigns. Join this webinar if you run reports, review data, or make optimizations. Register

Advanced webinars

Launch your campaign - 1/23

Join this webinar if you’re ready to set your bid strategies. In this webinar, you'll walk through how to turn a media plan into a live campaign in Bid Manager. We'll also cover different strategies for gaining reach and increasing ROI, as well as setting up remarketing recency. Register

Private Deals - 3/19

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to set up private deals with ad exchanges, what’s needed to get started, and steps to launch. This webinar is intended for users of Bid Manager who are interested to learn more about available inventory and direct deals. Register

These webinars are intended for Bid Manager users who have completed Fundamentals training. If you’re a Bid Manager customer but are not yet with the tool, complete the Fundamentals eLearning.

Pre-recorded webinars available

We also offer pre-recorded webinars in our Help Center, covering the Overview for new users, as well as topics like Keyword contextual targeting, Creative approvals, upgrades, and more. While you’re there, be sure to read about our latest product releases.

Some sessions mention prerequisites where we recommend background knowledge. Please note these to make sure you get the most out of each session. Lastly, be aware of any regional time differences before enrolling in any of the live sessions.

Posted by Molly Larrison, DoubleClick Bid Manager Product Trainer

Your media plan is only as good as your creative message. Once you reach the right people, are you telling them something they actually want to hear?

- Pete Crofut, Creative Platforms Evangelist, Google

For the past six months, we’ve partnered with iMedia Connection on a series of articles that explore modern storytelling and the ways that new digital technologies are making ad creative more intelligent. We laid out the challenges advertisers face, examined engaging and data-infused creative examples, and discussed how to make these ads captivating across screens, measurable and scalable. 

Today, we conclude this series with a final article, “Technology makes creative more intelligent,” which provides new creative examples and explains how the creative imperative fits into Google’s broader perspective on the "what,” "why" and "how" of modern brand building (entitled the Engagement Project.)

The tools and technology are available to help make your stories come to life online. Now’s the time to embrace the opportunity and think about your creative from a cross-screen, digital-first perspective, to craft messages that will engage people wherever they are. 

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Marketing

With the new year, now is the perfect time to learn the DCM interface and dive into the new workflow. Whether you're upgrading or haven't yet used DCM, we offer multiple ways for you to learn the basics, and learn about advanced training topics.

Take a look at our upcoming DCM and DFA webinars and enroll through the Training page in the DCM or DFA Help Centers (sign-in required).

DCM webinars
Whether you’re upgrading to DCM or have already upgraded, attend these webinars to better understand and use DCM.

DCM Fundamentals – 2/12, 2/26 and 3/12
Designed for new DCM users, this webinar will teach you everything from how 3rd party ad-serving works to how to set up Floodlight tags and traffic your first campaign. This session also touches on Remarketing. Attend this webinar if you need an introduction to the fundamentals of DCM and want to learn best practices.

DFA6 to DCM for Existing Users – 2/5, 2/19, 3/5, and 3/19
Learn what's changed in DCM. Get a demo of the key differences in DCM compared to DFA6. Attend this webinar if you’ve been using DFA6 and want to know about functionality and workflow differences between DFA and DCM before you upgrade. 

Reporting: Report Builder – 2/6 and 3/6
Learn how to run reports in Report Builder, and slice and dice data in the Summary tab (dashboard view). Get a demo of Report Builder (Reporting) as well as how to pull common reports (Standard/Performance, Reach, and Floodlight). This training also covers the differences between Report Builder and ReportCentral.

This session is designed for users with a basic knowledge of DFA6 or DCM. If you’re not familiar with DCM or DFA, attend the Fundamentals webinar session first.

Advanced webinars
In these webinars, experts will discuss featured topics to help you more effectively manage your campaigns in DCM. Before attending, users should be familiar with basic reporting and DFA6/DCM concepts.

Understanding Ads and Creatives: Properties – 1/23
In this session, you'll learn about the properties of your ads, including priority, delivery goals, creative rotation, and targeting. This will also cover creative labeling, which can be used to isolate and view the performance of similar creative messages in reporting.

Understanding Event Tags – 2/27, 3/20
This session addresses the new Event Tags feature in DCM, which helps you to apply 4th party impression and click pixels to your creatives in DCM. Learn about Event Tag creation, application and site whitelist/blacklisting.

Understanding Remarketing – 3/13
This session will cover the use of remarketing in DCM, including the creation of remarketing lists and the use of those lists for the purpose of targeting ads in DCM.

Reporting: Attribution – 2/20
In this session, you’ll learn about the attribution options available in Reporting. Get a look at uses for Multi-channel funnels, Attribution, and Modeling. This session is also helpful if you’re upgrading from DFA to DCM to expand knowledge of what the Reporting tool offers.

DFA webinars
Still using DFA6? No worries! Get trained online with our DFA Fundamentals eLearning (available in Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, and Swedish, Italian, and more). We also offer webinars for both DFA6 Fundamentals and MediaVisor.

DFA Fundamentals – 1/21, 2/19, 2/26, and 3/26
Learn the basics of trafficking in DFA6. The bulk of the session focuses on ad trafficking, but touches briefly on Floodlight tags and DFA Reporting. DFA Fundamentals is the first step if you’re new to third-party ad serving and DFA.

MediaVisor Fundamentals – 2/11 and 3/11
Learn the most common uses of MediaVisor, including how to plan and create campaigns, advertisers, and site placements. You’ll also learn how to send RFPs and IOs, as well as how to traffic placements from MediaVisor to DFA.

Some sessions mention prerequisites where we recommend background knowledge. Be sure to note these to make sure you get the most out of each session. Lastly, be aware of any regional time differences before enrolling in any of the live sessions.

Running into a scheduling conflict? Check out the pre-recorded webinars in the DCM Help Center as well as the DFA Help Center – you might be able to find a pre-recorded session ready to watch.

Don’t forget to sign up for the DoubleClick Digest to get the latest DoubleClick news, research, events and product updates!

Posted by Sarah Payne, DCM Product Trainer

Before the new year, we discussed a number of new capabilities in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, like the audience features that allow you more deeply understand your customers, and the integrations that help streamline the tagging process. Today, we’re going to deep dive into the area that makes the execution of all of these capabilities possible: the new trafficking workflow. 

Trafficking can be one of the most labor-intensive aspects of managing digital campaigns. In fact, of the 25+ pain points agencies and marketers have across the campaign life cycle, many involve manual work like difficult-to-edit data entry and quality checks, according to a Boston Consulting Group study. Reducing the time spent on inefficient activities is crucial to maintaining a competitive advantage. We completely re-imagined the workflow that agencies and marketers use to traffic their campaigns by building a faster and more intuitive interface:

Simplifying cross-screen campaigns:

• You no longer have to create separate ads and placements for mobile devices. Mobile is now a natural extension of your campaigns, with one campaign for all screens. 
• Additional mobile targeting features — Platform Type, Operating System and Version, Connection Type, Mobile Carrier and Browser — enable you to serve the right message to the right user.
• With HTML5 support, so you can create just one HTML5 creative that will serve across devices and automatically adjust to the corresponding ad size.

Faster and sleeker interface:

• The user interface loads in a fraction of a second, and it’s up to five times faster than DFA in responding to your actions.
• Campaign changes go live in just minutes, whether it’s changing ad targeting or updating creatives. With a faster time-to-live window, you can QA and modify campaigns and rest assured they’ll go live in a fraction of the time.

Easier to use with a redesigned workflow: 

• A single-page view of all campaign elements allows you to see placement, ad, creative, and tag information in one place. You no longer need to flip through multiple tabs and risk losing your place while navigating across your campaigns. 
• Efficient assignment workflow makes it much easier to assign multiple placements, ads, and creatives all at once. In fact, the number of clicks to perform common trafficking tasks has been reduced by several orders of magnitude.
• Bulk edits allow you to change multiple object properties at once, significantly reducing the amount of time it takes to make changes to your campaigns. For example, with bulk name editing, you can make mass naming convention changes, like adding a prefix or suffix, across multiple entities in seconds. And with in-line edits, it’s easier to edit placements, ads, and creative details from the campaign view, without going to a property page.
• Event tags help you streamline the process of applying and managing pixels in bulk across campaigns or groups of campaigns.
• You can customize and save your campaign view to your workflow needs, with any combination or grouping of columns. This makes it easy to work your own way.
• Built-in reporting dimensions make it easy to QA campaigns, with impression and click data directly in the trafficking interface. 
• A new timezone selector makes it easy to traffic global campaigns without manual time conversions.

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.”

Watch the webinar, under “Learn about DCM”, where we live demoed these new features, and many more.

If you're an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Ian Fulton, Product Manager

Cross-posted from the Wildfire by Google blog

Social has morphed rapidly over the last several years, yet sustaining engagement with social audiences continues to be a top priority for marketers, and it remains the key metric of social success. In the second infographic of our Wildfire by Google State of Social infographic series (based on exclusive research in partnership with Ad Age), we reveal the top expectations and challenges for brands in social and how they are measuring social’s value. For example:

• 42% of brands say the #1 impact of social is increased engagement (24/7 customer interaction is a distant second at 12%).
• 90% of brands agree that it’s crucial to integrate social into their other digital media initiatives.
• 57% of companies say content shares are the most important social metric, but conversion impact is closing the gap at 54%.

What are your brand’s top expectations for social and which metric leads in measuring social success? INFOGRAPHIC #2