With online advertising expanding across different ad formats, new devices, and multiple channels, it’s no surprise that reporting continues to be a challenge for marketers. In fact, 69% of business and technology leaders have pinpointed the inability to gather, understand, and act on all the data about their customers as a leading challenge(1). To answer this growing complexity, we at DoubleClick Search have been focusing on developing the right tools to power your business with all the insights you need. We want to make reporting on all your data easy, to help drive insights exactly when you want them, where you want them.
Conversions API for easy offline conversion integration
DoubleClick Search already lets you leverage a variety of solutions to report on conversions, including our proprietary Floodlight tag, AdWords conversion tracking, or Google Analytics goals. But we understand that online advertising also fuels offline conversions. To capture these lost conversions and bring offline into your online world, we’re announcing the open beta of our Conversions API for uploading offline conversion automatically. Upload new conversions to account for in-store transactions, call-tracking, or other offline activities, or edit existing conversions to account for discounts, returns, credit, or fraud through integrated API access. Today, you can combine this information with our Performance Bidding Suite to optimize your campaigns based on even more of your business data.
Additional information about this feature, appended on December 20, 2012
We’ve received additional questions about this feature and wanted to provide further detail.
The Conversions API feature allows advertisers using DoubleClick Search to factor in conversions that occurred offline for transactions that started online from users interacting with their online search ads. Today, when a consumer initiates research online for a purchase and clicks on an ad, but completes his/her purchase offline (or via phone), advertisers don't have an easy way to connect the dots and attribute those offline conversions to their online advertising campaigns.
Advertisers are prohibited from sending personally identifiable information using this feature, as outlined by the Terms of Service for the API. Further, this API provides no ability to target advertising. The conversion data is used by advertisers to better manage and report on the amount they pay for advertising and the ROI they get from it. Below are example use cases for how advertisers take advantage of this feature:
- Example 1: A user might call a phone number to complete a purchase on the advertiser’s website that started by clicking on a search ad. The Conversion API would allow the advertiser to upload these conversions that occurred over the phone and associate them with the appropriate search campaigns.
- Example 2: An advertiser can use the API to modify the value of an online conversion at a later point in time. For instance, they may want to edit a conversion value to account for discounts that were applied after an online purchase was made (such as a mail-in-rebate), returns that occurred with a restocking fee, or credits that were applied after the purchase.
Google Analytics website data, with the rest of your search
Couple this with the integration of Google Analytics metrics (beta), which incorporates statistics including bounce rate, page views, transactions, and revenue from Google Analytics, to get a clear picture of how search influences customer interaction on your website. These recent developments in reporting mean faster decision making with all your data holistically captured in DoubleClick Search -- all without mashing up and matching reports or worrying about the potential data drop off of reporting from separate tools. In the next few months, we’ll introduce the ability to use bid strategies with your website metrics, ensuring your campaign’s bid optimization is informed by important user engagement metrics.
Formula magic, directly in the interface
With this wealth of data at your fingertips, how do you more easily make sense of it all? In the past, you’d need to use a spreadsheet tool like Excel to create these calculated columns. Formula Columns lets you create your own customized columns, based on calculations that you apply to existing columns. Now, apply formulas directly in DS and streamline your workflow: track custom KPIs, re-express columns in your own terms, and calculate customized fees, costs, and weights, among other applications.
Web query for easily accessible data
And finally, when it comes to easily accessing all your important data right where you want it, we’re introducing Web query support: instead of scheduling or downloading a file to access your reports, DoubleClick Search now provides a URL that you can use to automatically download and refresh that report’s data -- directly in Excel. This makes it even easier for you to create common report templates in Excel and populate those with the latest DS data, removing the need to manually download and import reports.
Formula Columns, instant conversions, and Web Query support are are available now in DoubleClick Search. To learn more about the Conversions API or Google Analytics integration in open beta, please reach out to your Technical Account Manager, or our support team at ds-support@google.com.
Posted by the DoubleClick Search team
1. Source: PricewaterCoopers (PwC), “4th Annual Digital IQ Survey,” Jan 31, 2012
