A few months back, we launched a campaign to encourage creative partners to Get Studio Certified. Since then, we've focused on improving our training content to help developers grow their skills and get more comprehensive Studio training.

As we continue our revamp of the DoubleClick Studio Certification program, we're thrilled to announce our new Studio Certification study guides. These guides bring Studio training content from presentations, videos, & separate help articles into a central location in the Rich Media Help Center. Use these guides to walk through the details of exactly what you need to know to pass each exam.

DoubleClick Studio Certification study guides include:

• Core certification for Flash & HTML5
• Updated QA badge: The QA badge guide covers all areas for testing Flash, HTML5, and dynamic creatives. If you took the QA Certification exam before March 13th, 2014, you'll need to get re-certified with the new QA badge by July 1st, 2014.
• Advanced badges: Engagement ads, Dynamic creative, YouTube mastheads, & VPAID.

Visit the Rich Media Help Center and try these guides today!

Questions about the Studio Certification program? Download our Certification poster to learn the benefits of getting Studio Certified (including a few tips and tricks). Find out more in the Rich Media Gallery.

Even if you're already certified with one badge, keep developing your skills by reviewing the new training guides and getting certified with new badges.

Reminder: If you took the QA Certification exam before March 13th, 2014, you'll need to get re-certified with the new QA badge by July 1st, 2014.

Posted by Paige Birnbaum, DoubleClick Studio Certification Training

Need to beat the heat? Set aside time this summer to catch up on DoubleClick Campaign Manager training. We offer cool ways to learn like DCM Academy, a role-based learning path to help you learn based on how you use the product. We also offer Fundamentals eLearning and live webinars covering Reporting, Event Tags, Attribution, and more. And don’t miss our New Features Webinar to learn about the latest product releases.

Register today and find upcoming webinars via the Training page in the DCM or DFA Help Centers (sign-in required).

Start with DCM Fundamentals eLearning

Are you an ad trafficker, analyst, or media planner who needs to learn the basics? Try DCM Fundamentals eLearning and Certification to learn key DoubleClick Campaign Manager concepts. If you need an introduction to the fundamentals and want to learn best practices, this is the place to begin.

Pass the exam and get a certificate of completion demonstrating your knowledge of DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Register

Join a DoubleClick Campaign Manager webinar

If you want to learn about DoubleClick Campaign Manager in a live setting, register for an upcoming training webinar.

DFA6 to DCM for Existing Users – 7/2, 7/9, 7/22, 8/13, 9/17
Upgrading to DoubleClick campaign Manager? Learn about the latest features and key functionality and workflow differences compared to DFA6. 

DCM Fundamentals – 8/12 (North America), 7/9, 8/13 and 9/10 (Asia-Pacific)
If you want a live webinar experience to support the DCM Fundamentals eLearning, join this 2.5 hour session to learn how third-party ad serving works along with the steps for setting up Floodlight and trafficking your first campaign. This session also touches on remarketing. 

Campaign Trafficking Demo – 7/16, 8/6, and 9/3
Join our product trainer for a walkthrough of how to create a campaign and assign campaign elements. 

Prerequisites: This session is a companion to DCM Fundamentals, and assumes that you’ve taken the DCM eLearning and Certification (or attended the DCM Fundamentals webinar). Before attending, make sure you know how DoubleClick Campaign Manager defines a campaign, placement, ad, and creative. 

DCM New Features Webinar – 7/8
Join our product trainer for a walkthrough of the latest product features.

Advanced webinars
In these webinars, we’ll discuss featured topics to help you more effectively manage your campaigns. Before attending, make sure you’re familiar with basic reporting and DFA6/DoubleClick Campaign Manager concepts.

Reporting Basics – 7/10, 8/14, and 9/11
Learn how to run reports in Report Builder, and slice and dice data in the Summary tab (dashboard view). Get a demo of Reporting as well as how to pull common reports, including Standard/Performance, Reach, and Floodlight.

Understanding Event Tags – 8/7
Learn about the Event Tags, a DCM feature that helps you to apply 4th party impression and click pixels to your creatives. This webinar will cover Event Tag creation, application and site whitelist/blacklisting.

Reporting: Attribution – 8/28
In this session, you’ll learn about the attribution options available in Reporting, and uses for Multi-channel funnels, Attribution, and Modeling. This session is also helpful if you’re upgrading from DFA to DCM and want to expand your knowledge of what the Reporting tool offers.

Prerequisites: Make sure you’re familiar with ad trafficking in DFA6 or DoubleClick Campaign Manager before attending these sessions. If you’re not, attend the Fundamentals webinar first.

DFA webinars
Still using DFA6? That’s okay, we still offer webinar training! Get trained online with DFA Fundamentals eLearning and Certification (eLearnings and exams available in Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, and more). We also offer webinars for DFA6 Fundamentals and MediaVisor.

DFA Fundamentals – 7/30 and 9/10
Join this webinar if you're using DFA6 and are new to third-party ad serving. This webinar mainly focuses on the basics of ad trafficking, but also touches briefly on Floodlight tags and DFA Reporting. 

MediaVisor Fundamentals – 8/5
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.

Running into a scheduling conflict? Check out the pre-recorded webinars and training videos in the DCM Help Center, and DFA Help Centers – you might 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, DoubleClick Campaign Manager Product Trainer

Today, we're excited to shine a light on several new features of the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform that help advertisers more seamlessly embrace cross-screen advertising.

Mobile advertising is, without question, top of mind for marketers; but according to the latest "Internet Trends 2014" report from Mary Meeker, it's also the biggest opportunity gap of all forms of media spend. Although 20% of time spent on media is within a mobile environment, only 4% of US advertising spend is on mobile. (1) Marketers still struggle to get up to speed on the new technologies and strategies that cross-screen campaigns require.

That's why we're excited to bring new tools that make it easier to build, buy, target, execute and measure your campaigns across screens:

Google Web Designer integration:

• Build HTML5 ads easily in Google Web Designer and publish them into DoubleClick Campaign Manager. This allows you to quickly get your HTML5 ads live and serving to any device.

Mobile inventory growth:

• Buy more mobile inventory -- Programmatic mobile inventory on DoubleClick Bid Manager has grown 130% since Q4 2013 across 12 exchanges and includes both display and video formats. Adding mobile inventory on DoubleClick Bid Manager allows you to incorporate mobile into the rest of your media strategy and optimize across all of your media buys.

In-app remarketing:

• (Re)target your customers using audience lists within mobile app environments, so that you can drive and measure re-engagement with your existing mobile app users. 

Publisher Certification program for in-app creative formats:

• Execute your mobile campaigns with the confidence. While mobile rich media standards are widely accepted across the industry, publishers still vary in their implementation, resulting in discrepancies and inconsistent behavior of in-app creative. We are certifying publishers and networks to ensure their mobile apps can accept and run standard mobile in-app ad units (59 certifications completed to date.) 

In-app conversion tracking:

• Measure in-app view-through and click-through conversions with Floodlight to report on mobile app downloads or any other in-app activities. Whether you are running an app install campaign or driving in-app purchases, you can now attribute these activities to your in-app media and better measure app campaign effectiveness.

TalkTalk drives 12% decrease in eCPA with HTML5 creative and mobile programmatic.

TalkTalk, a Telecom company based in the UK, has embraced cross-screen strategies for their campaigns and drove a 12% decrease in their eCPA using DoubleClick and Google Web Designer. Their creative agency, 22Design, used Google Web Designer to quickly learn and build HTML5 into TalkTalk’s campaign, getting the campaign live in a third of the expected time. 

Not only was the learning process much easier than anticipated, the HTML5 ads actually performed better than the Flash ads, indicating that TalkTalk’s audience was more receptive to the brand message on mobile devices than on desktops. Equipped with their new HTML5 creative and audience insights, TalkTalk was able to add mobile inventory to their programmatic media buy for the first time. 

Rather than waiting on the sidelines, TalkTalk has taken a proactive approach to trying new mobile strategies and techniques with DoubleClick. They started slow, tested what worked, and iterated on their findings, to get their campaigns running successfully across screens. 

Check out the full case study here. 

We are excited about these new tools and will continue to improve our technology to help marketers and agencies more seamlessly build, execute and measure cross-screen campaigns.

Posted by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

(1) Mary Meeker’s “Internet Trends 2014” - http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends 

In May, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

• Public launch of Shopping campaigns in DS
  You can create and manage AdWords Shopping campaigns in DS, a feature that we initially rolled out in beta in March. Shopping campaigns are a new campaign type for AdWords Product Listing Ads that streamline how you manage and bid on your products, report on the performance of your ads, and find opportunities to grow your traffic from Google. Learn more.

• Specify and report on sitelinks for ad groups
  Sitelinks are an ad extension available in AdWords engine accounts. They appear beneath the text of your ads (and in addition to the main landing page), link to specific pages on your website, and help customers find what they're looking for on your site with just one click. By default, all ads inherit sitelinks from the campaign, but now you can add different sitelinks for each ad group or prevent an ad group from displaying sitelinks. Learn more.

• Include custom dimensions and metrics in DS reports
  If you use Floodlight activities to track conversions, you can add details to your DS reports that are customized to your business needs, such as the genre of a movie that a user purchases, the zip code to which an item is shipped, shipping costs, and so on. Learn more.

• Upgrade to the new AdWords “Search Network with Display Select” campaigns
  AdWords will soon be replacing “Search & Display Networks” campaigns with a new campaign type, “Search Network with Display Select”, that offers 35% better Google Display Network performance than your current “Search & Display Networks” campaigns. You can upgrade your “Search only" and “Search & Display Networks" campaigns one at a time from AdWords, or use DS bulksheets to upgrade multiple campaigns with a single upload. Learn more.

We also made the following feature updates:

• Executive reporting: Filter data sources in charts
  By default, charts display metrics from all data sources that are in a report. If you want a chart to display metrics only from specific campaigns, devices, or even keywords of a particular match type, you can add a filter to the chart. The chart will contain data only for items that match the filter.

• Support for the AdWords "Rotate indefinitely" and "Conversion optimize" settings
  DS now supports the “Rotate indefinitely” and “Conversion optimize” settings for AdWords campaigns in addition to the “Rotate evenly” and “Optimize for clicks” settings that were available previously. Learn more.

Watch the recorded webinar for May features to see these updates in action.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Since announcing support for Shopping campaigns in DoubleClick Search a few weeks ago, we've seen strong momentum with clients taking advantage of this new way to manage, bid, and report on Product Listing Ads. In fact, over half of DoubleClick Search retail clients have already tested Shopping campaigns, and we see this number rising on a daily basis.

As Justin Johnson, Paid Search Program Manager at Cabela's notes, "DoubleClick Search was quick to provide complete support for Shopping campaigns -- mirroring the ease of setup and product-centric management and letting us be a first-mover to adopt Shopping campaigns.  We are eager to continue using these new tools to help us get the best performance out of Shopping campaigns."

With regular PLA campaign types retiring in late August 2014, we know that Shopping campaigns continue to be top-of-mind for retail search marketers. Today, we wanted to share a few best practices to those of you just getting started with Shopping campaigns.

Tip #1: Scale bid management of product groups with automated rules. Unsure what to bid on your new product groups? Let automated rules for Shopping Campaign product groups lead the way. Set up automated if/then rules to change product group bids based on performance. If you want even more control over your product group bids, try using bulksheets. DS bulksheet allow you to download your Shopping Campaigns, assess their performance, and upload new bids, whether you’re managing 10 product groups or 1000 product groups at a time.

How to take control over your product group bids: Because DS has easy bulksheet reporting for both legacy PLA campaigns and your new Shopping Campaigns, it’s easy to use historic data from PLA campaigns to inform bids for your new Shopping Campaigns. Talk to your DS support team for more information and tips on how to migrate CPCs from old campaigns to Shopping campaigns.

Tip #2: Know how to subdivide a product group. Product groups can be subdivided at any time into more refined groupings so that you can bid more granularly on any part of your business, e.g. breaking out Product Type Level 1 = Electronics product group into three product groups subdivided by Product Type Level 2: Computers, Video, or Phones, with a high max CPC on Phones, with lower CPCs on Computers and Video. This makes it easy to continually adapt the product group tree to your business structure, especially if you find that different products within the same product group require different max CPCs.

How to best subdivide a new product group: When we subdivide a product group, that product group’s bid, landing page, and status are passed on to the new subdivisions. For example, if we just broke out Electronics (below) into Computers, Video, and Everything else, the bid and landing page URL we set for Electronics will be passed onto the three subdivisions. But, this also means that if we try to delete that Electronics row, the three subdivisions beneath it (Computers, Video, Everything Else) will also be deleted! As you create new subdivisions, you should take the opportunity to update the bid and landing page to the right value, specific to the newly created group.

Tip #3: Experiment with PLA reporting. Take Shopping Campaigns as an opportunity to experiment with how you report and think about PLAs! Shopping Campaigns makes it easy to structure your campaigns and product groups around a certain set of attributes (maybe splitting out products by Product Type or Category), but slice performance data by different fields, including custom labels or product IDs

How to try it out: Custom labels are a great way to experiment. We’ve seen advertisers use custom labels 0-4 to mark products as high or low margin, seasonal or year-round, etc., and add additional information like parent SKU.. Segmenting by custom label in the Products tab allows you  to report and take action on these custom metrics, without necessarily committing to that organizational structure. More insights for all!

Can’t get enough of Shopping campaigns? Check out our webinar from April or our help center and keep an eye out on our blog and our feature releases page for more updates to Shopping campaigns.

Video is how brands tell stories, how they surprise us, make us laugh or make us cry. No other medium brings together sight, sound and motion, and now with digital, interaction. As I’ve said for a while, our goal is to make digital work for brands. To do that, we have to make online video work for brands and their publisher partners, a topic I’ll be addressing this morning at our annual DoubleClick customer event. 

Introducing Google Partner Select, A Programmatic Premium Video Marketplace

Publishers are investing like never before in compelling, high quality video experiences. Brand marketers are eager to buy against this content -- in fact eMarketer projects video ad spending to grow from $4 billion last year to nearly $6 billion in 2014. One big hurdle to growth remains, though: much of this content is hard to access. 

Our brands and agencies want to buy this premium content programmatically, but have difficulty finding the high quality inventory they want. Our publisher partners also want to take advantage of the ease and efficiency of programmatic to connect with top brands, but with transparency and control over how that happens. In order to grow the marketplace for everyone, we need to invest in the systems that will make it easier for brands and premium publishers to transact at scale. 

As a step towards that goal, today we are introducing Google Partner Select, bringing together the best of brand with the best of programmatic. This new premium programmatic marketplace will connect a select set of publishers investing in top-quality video with the brands that want to buy against it. 

What we’re most pleased about is the reaction to Partner Select that we’re getting from clients:

“As a longtime Google partner, we are excited about what this marketplace has to offer. Video is the fuel for effective brand marketing and having more top quality video content available programmatically is going to open up all sorts of new possibilities for brand clients,” said Josh Jacobs, Global CEO, Accuen & President, Platforms and Partnerships, Omnicom Media Group. “That’s what Google is looking to accomplish with this marketplace and we look forward to working with them as it evolves.”

“Video has become central to our strategy, and being able to sell premium video programmatically to top brand partners is a requirement in this dynamic marketplace,” said J.R. McCabe SVP, Video, Time Inc. “We are looking forward to working with Google to enable this technology and to develop this premium marketplace.” 

Partner Select helping marketers and publishers also requires having the right buying technologies in place. Along with Google Partner Select, we’re introducing a way for marketers and publishers to execute direct, reservation-based sales through the DoubleClick platform. This new option is meant to help streamline what today can be a cumbersome process, involving days of back-and-forth negotiations, dozens of phone calls and sometimes, yes, a fax machine. We hope brands and publishers will be able to spend less time on logistics and more time building partnerships and winning creative and content.

I’m inspired every day by the rich experiences that brands and publishers are creating. Together with our partners, we can make digital a medium where brands, agencies and publishers can flourish. 

To hear more of our thoughts on this, join us for our livestream here. 

-- Posted by, Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products, Google