A few months ago, we launched the new version of DFA - DoubleClick Campaign Manager - globally.

The launch coincided with DFA’s 15th anniversary, so we wanted to use this opportunity to hear from some of our longtime partners. Surely, the world has changed since the early days of DFA, 15 years ago. With new opportunities to reach consumers in more ways than ever, come many new challenges for digital marketers. And marketing platforms must continuously evolve to meet the demands of a shifting and ever-growing industry. 

We asked industry leaders Kurt Unkel, President of Product & Solutions at VivaKi, Megan Moldovan, Director of Platform Logistics at Annalect, and Angelina Eng, VP of Digital Media Ops at Carat what they value in a platform in this day and age, and how DoubleClick has evolved to address those needs. Here’s what they told us:

• Efficiency, reliability, and simplicity are crucial to helping marketers streamline the campaign management process. Kurt Unkel said, ”What we get with DoubleClick that we struggle to see anywhere else is simplicity - the ability to integrate a lot of disparate technologies into a common stack. That’s something that really makes a difference in our business, because it allows us to focus on the bigger, strategic things.”
• Marketers need integration across channels and screens, and to be able to track and execute across their efforts within one system. Angelina Eng notes, “When we talk about all of these different things that are coming out - verification, video, mobile - how do make that work all together? A company that’s embracing that is one that we want to work with.” 
• Platforms must help marketers gain more actionable insights and act on them in real-time. “We have almost too much data at our disposal,” Megan Moldovan tells us, “and it can sometimes be hard to sift through all of that information and understand what it really means, and particularly understand what everything means when you look at it together.”

With DoubleClick, we are investing in tools to help your digital teams work more efficiently to maximize your results across channels and screens. 

In the coming weeks and months we will deep dive into many of the new product features available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Stay tuned to the blog to learn about the new tools that will simplify digital, help you engage across channels, and enable better decisions.

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 following us on our Google+ page.

Studio Certified developers, do you want to tell the world that you can create engaging in-stream video ads? With the new Studio Certification VPAID badge, you can do just that.

VPAID (Video Player Ad Interface Definition) is a hybrid creative format that runs as a pre-, mid-, or post-roll with the publisher’s content video. When watching in-stream ads, users can pause and resume videos, pull up options to learn about products, and more. For example, you can watch a video about a car, pause it, and learn more about the car right from the ad – without leaving the player on the publisher’s website. Check out the VPAID format in action.

VPAID gives brands a way to create a micro-site experience directly within an ad unit. Users can interact with the brand and learn more about the products without ever having to navigate away from the original page they were on. So it's good for the user, it's good for the web publisher, and it's great for the brand.

VPAID badge certification gives you:

• A badge that identifies you as a Studio Certified user able to create interactive in-stream ads
• Exclusive access to DoubleClick hosted events and workshops
• Early access to betas and product features
• Promotion as a Studio Certified user with a VPAID badge via DoubleClick Rich Media properties and associated sites

• Listing with other Studio certified users on the Rich Media gallery
• We'll announce your achievement via our Twitter account
• Promotion via Rich Media Gallery and marketing materials
• A badge you can use for self-promotion

Pass the exam and get the badge to demonstrate your expertise in creating rich, in-stream ads to boost user engagement. Take the VPAID exam and get certified.

Note: You must be Studio Certified in Core Flash or HTML5 to take the VPAID certification exam.

Not Studio Certified? No worries! Get Certified today. We have these Studio Certification badges available:

• Core Studio Certification exam for Flash developers
• Core Studio Certification exam for HTML5 developers
• Integrated QA certification
• Advanced badge certification for Dynamic creatives and YouTube Mastheads

Learn more about Studio Certification in the Rich Media Gallery.

Posted by Arnold Sealey, Program Manager, DoubleClick Studio Certification

Search marketers managing multiple campaigns across multiple accounts have to visualize their data in many different ways and tailor reporting for each group of stakeholders. Often, this means spending time pulling and aggregating reports, building macro-enabled spreadsheets, and wrangling your data into a specific format for a specific presentation -- only to do it all over again in a slightly different way the next time around.

DoubleClick Search believes in making search marketing faster -- and over the past year we’ve invested in time-saving features like bulk editing enhancements, new scheduling options, and automated rules. Today, we’re excited to announce executive reporting, a fundamentally new way to report on and share your search campaign data.

With executive reporting, quickly get to the insights you need. Take the data from all your search campaigns, segment as needed, present it in an easily consumable visual format, and share with team members and stakeholders -- all within the UI, without spending hours downloading, reconciling, and updating spreadsheets.


As we designed executive reporting, we worked closely with our clients to ensure our solution was built to address the unique needs of search marketers, agency account managers, and executives. Matt Grebow, Sr. Manager, Search Marketing at TSA, who participated heavily in our feedback sessions, shared his needs for richer export fidelity with the engineering team.

“Most reporting platforms let you export data in a raw format, but this means extensive formatting in Excel and a lot of coding. DoubleClick Search Executive Reporting is flexible enough to use across clients with different goals. We can create templates on the fly and export reports in a client-ready format.” 

Three ways to get started with executive reporting

1. Daily account management and stakeholder communication: As an account manager, you can easily pick the subset of data and the visualizations you need for each set of stakeholders. The reports will stay up to date, and you can have them ready for meetings, or download and share through email at a moment’s notice -- saving you time for strategy.
2. High-level team management and oversight: As a business leader, you can see an overview of your entire business in one place. If you’re needed for an escalation, you can quickly pull reports to understand account health and spot issues -- so you’re never unprepared.
3. Market insights for competitive advantage: Another advantage of seeing your entire business at a glance: if you manage a large volume of accounts, you can quickly analyze market-level data and see which account or campaigns are underperforming. Then, dig in to understand why and get them back on track. 

Keep an eye on the blog next week for a follow up “Success with DS” post on how the get the most out of executive reporting. In the meantime, give the new reports a try and let your account team know what you think. If you don't see the 'Executive Reports' tab in the DoubleClick Search interface, ask your account team to enable it for you.

Over the coming months, we’ll continue to invest in easy, flexible reporting options for DoubleClick Search. If you have a data warehouse, business intelligence tool, or visualization software and you’re interested in seeing your search data alongside other metrics for reporting purposes, check out our reporting API, currently in open whitelist.

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? 

This season, we wanted to share a few of our favorite digital marketing “stocking stuffers” to put the cheer back in your holiday and help you plan, build, manage, measure and optimize your campaigns with ease. We took our best time-saving features that you can apply across your search and display campaigns, so you can find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your toasty apple cider -- while we take care of the rest. 

Plan your media buys strategically:

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, set up search campaigns in DoubleClick Search and 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.

Build your ad creative beautifully:

Schedule your asset swaps or make them on-the-fly with dynamic creative. Admit it: manually updating every ad unit with new logos or creative assets can leave you feeling like a Grinch. When you know you’ll have to change the assets for a campaign, use dynamic creative to schedule the updates in advance. The new assets will automatically replace all the old ones in your ads, and you’ll be singing fa-la-la-la-la all the way home.

Don’t get tangled up with your holiday designs. Google Web Designer lets you create beautiful HTML5 ads with ease, for free. Build cross-screen creative directly for DoubleClick Studio -- all the ad tags and rich media metrics are automatically built into the ad, so your designs can shine on every screen.

Manage your campaigns easily:

Do the work of a team of elves with automated rules from DoubleClick Search. 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 search campaigns are in tip-top shape. That means you can spend less time on repetitive tasks, and more time setting up those reindeer traps.

Meet mobile under the mistletoe. As consumers turn to their devices to research and shop, you can turn to us to reach and engage them. Whether you’re running search or display, our system is device-aware. With DoubleClick Search support of AdWords enhanced campaigns, seamlessly reach your customers across locations and devices with custom mobile bid adjustments based on your Floodlight tag activities. With Bid Manager mobile-specific targeting and formats, we automatically detect if users are on a mobile device, so you can engage your audience on both mobile web and apps -- without any additional work. So cozy up with mobile this season!

Measure and optimize your campaigns successfully:

Get a new perspective on the year - and your performance - with data visualizations. While Santa eagerly awaits his midnight milk and cookies, you can treat yourself to “infosnacks” - data visualizations that give you a snapshot of your campaign performance - right from the DoubleClick Bid Manager UI. Infosnacks bring information that’s commonly viewed - like conversion and CPA - to your fingertips. In addition, you can see how these metrics are trending over time. So you’ll spend less time digging through data, and more time spreading the yuletide cheer.

Race to the top with real-time bid and campaign optimization. Looking for a solution that’ll help you go as fast as Rudolph? Put your best bid forward with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite and DoubleClick Bid Manager automatic campaign optimization. Both suites are designed to drive campaign performance through speedy, data-driven bid optimization. Our systems use instant conversion data to update bids in near real-time, and on DoubleClick Bid Manager, we automatically shift your budget to the best performing line items.

Do you have a DoubleClick tip or trick that gets you through the busy holiday season? Email it to us at dclk-holiday@googlegroups.com with your name and title. We’ll feature the best tips on this DoubleClick blog!

*Bonus* If you want even more product-specific tips, check out our DoubleClick Search and Rich Media Gallery blogs next week!

Posted by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

In October, we added the following feature to DoubleClick Search:

• Optimize to Google Analytics conversions: When you create a conversion-based bid strategy in DoubleClick Search (DS), you can now optimize to conversions based on Google Analytics goals. This feature extends the conversion options for DS bid strategies, which already support optimization to Floodlight activities and formula columns. We’re adding another layer of flexibility by allowing you to use the conversions you track on Google Analytics to get the most out of your keyword bidding in DS.

We also made the following feature updates:

• New Google Analytics columns: By linking your DS and Google Analytics accounts, you can add columns to your DS reports that display data from Google Analytics. With this update, DS added the following columns: GA bounce rate, GA pages / visit, GA avg visit duration, and GA new visits %. DS also renamed some of its existing columns to align with the column names in Google Analytics. Learn more.

• Updates to formula-column operators: The Days() and Months() operators in a formula column can now count backwards in addition to counting forwards. For example, if today is October 15, clicks.for_date_range(today(), days(-14)) returns the number of clicks from October 1 to October 14. Also, you no longer need to nest IF operators to evaluate multiple conditions and outcomes. For example, now you can write an IF operator like this: If(Impr / Num_days() < 10, "Very low run rate", Impr / Num_days() > 500, "Very high run rate", "").  Learn more.

• New macros: DS has added new macros that you can use to pass additional information to your landing pages. Specifically, you can now pass the name and ID of the ad group, campaign, and engine account containing the keyword that was responsible for a click. See the available DoubleClick Search macros.

• Download negative keywords and edit for upload: You can now download negative keywords and edit them for upload in DS. To help with creating negative keywords, we added templates specifically for negative keywords in the Help Center.

• Easier to upload offline conversions: When you upload offline conversions using bulksheets, you can attribute those conversions to visits by just specifying the click ID. To attribute the conversion to a keyword, you can specify just the keyword ID. Learn more.

• DoubleClick Natural Search now reports on HTTPS-encrypted searches: DoubleClick Natural Search now reports on encrypted natural searches in DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM), with the value Not provided. In addition, conversions can be attributed to encrypted natural searches, so you may see fewer paid search or display conversions. Learn more and see an example.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Throughout the month of October, we’ve sparked a conversation around mobile in our industry; we’ve uncovered some of the challenges preventing widespread mobile advertising adoption, and we’ve discussed potential solutions to invigorate cross-screen advertising in the ecosystem. Today, we’ll summarize our learnings and the solutions we’re working on to ease these issues.

Most people know that smartphone and tablet usage has increased drastically in the last few years. These new screens provide a golden opportunity for advertisers to place their brands in front of people through unique and personal experiences. But even though we recognize this opportunity exists, there are still many challenges throughout the industry that prevent the movement of advertising dollars onto mobile platforms.

According to our Mobile White Paper, “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?”:

• Creative agencies don’t develop more mobile creative because they believe there is a lack of demand from clients, they think re-using the desktop version works adequately and they think building HTML5 is too time consuming. There is also a high switching cost due to the fact that Flash is ingrained in their processes.  
• Media Agencies don’t buy more mobile impressions because they don’t think there are enough validation metrics from the networks, they find it too difficult to work across network vendors, and the target audiences for tablets in particular are not available.
• Only 1/4 of agencies build creative specifically for smartphones and only 1/5 build creative specifically for tablets, while 42% of agencies say they reuse their desktop creative on mobile devices.
• Because creative agencies aren’t building HTML5 creative and media agencies aren’t buying mobile impressions, publishers are unable to monetize their highly trafficked mobile websites with rich mobile ads.

      

To begin unlocking the mobile opportunity, we need answers for publishers, agencies and advertisers, and on our end, we’re actively upgrading our platforms to provide these solutions.

• To make HTML5 creation easier for creative agencies, we launched Google Web Designer, a free, professional-grade HTML5 authoring tool that provides drag and drop design elements as well as fully editable code. We also launched a number of features in DoubleClick Studio, including tight integration with both Google Web Designer and Adobe Edge Animate, to insure that developers are able to manage and run all their mobile rich media creative through DoubleClick.

• To make mobile reporting and metrics more available to media agencies, we launched DoubleClick Campaign Manager with built-in mobile capabilities, so even if you don’t target mobile metrics specifically, you can still report on standard metrics (such as connection type, mobile carrier, OS and device) as well as HTML5 rich media metrics (such as avg. display time, interaction time and expansion time.)
• To educate brands about the need for mobile advertising, we hosted our “Month of Mobile,” to uncover these issues and we provoked a dialogue with our Hangout on Air. We plan to continue this conversation throughout 2014 so that we can incite change and move the needle forward for mobile advertising adoption across the industry.

With continued dialogue and improved solutions, we can reach a point where mobile advertising is second nature to everyone in the industry and brands can take full advantage of the cross-screen presence of consumers today.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick