In December and January, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

• Forecast the performance of a bid strategy: Using historical data from an existing bid strategy, DS can estimate how the bid strategy may perform with a different target or spend amount. 
  You can use the forecast to gain such insights as:
  
  • The CPA, ERS, or ROAS target you need to achieve a specific range of conversions. If you know how many conversions you want to achieve per week, you can see which target you're likely to need.
  • How the bid strategy is likely to perform with a specific amount of weekly spend.
  • The trade-offs between cost and conversion volume as you adjust your CPA, ERS, or ROAS targets.
  Learn more.
• Copy campaigns to AdWords, Bing Ads, and Yahoo! JAPAN engine accounts: If you need to manage the same campaigns on multiple engine accounts, instead of manually creating the campaigns in each account you can copy an existing AdWords account. If you make additions or changes to one of the campaigns, you can copy the additions and some of the changes into the other accounts. Learn more.

We also updated the following features:

• Create and apply sitelinks by uploading a bulksheet: You can now use the same bulksheet to create and edit sitelinks and add them to campaigns and ad groups. Before this update, you needed to create sitelinks in one bulksheet and apply them to campaigns and ad groups in a second bulksheet. Learn more.
• URL templates no longer encode URL parameters: If you use a redirect URL to pass tracking data to an additional tracking system, the additional system may require you to HTML-encode your landing page URLs. Instead of adding this redirect URL to each keyword's landing page, you can use a URL template to automatically apply the redirect URL and encode the landing page URLs. Previously, if you set up a URL template to encode landing page URLs, DS also encoded any URL parameters you specified in the template. DS has been updated so that it no longer encodes the URL parameters in a template. Learn more.
• Bid strategy health column: The bid strategy health column now lets you know if any bid strategies are constrained because it's been too long since offline conversions have been uploaded into DS. Learn more.
• Pause engine accounts: Agency managers can now change the status of an engine account from Active to Paused, temporarily stopping such activities as trafficking, bid optimization, and inventory management. Learn more.

See these updates in action in the new features training video.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

With increasing video spend in digital and the higher media cost of in-stream video ads, it’s crucial for marketers to understand where their video ads are running and whether they were actually seen by their intended audience. As a first step to address this need, we announced the availability of Active View, Google’s viewability metric, for Video in January. Today, we are excited to build on this with the launch of Video Verification, now available to customers on the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, globally. Video Verification enables advertisers to gain insights unique to video to help ensure they’re getting what they planned and paid for.

Advertisers can now confirm not only that their ads are viewable, but that every view is as prominent as possible. This means you’ll know whether your video ads are mostly displayed in large players, front and center, or in little players off to the side. With these insights, advertisers can take steps to ensure that every video dollar spent goes toward high-quality, relevant inventory.

With DoubleClick Verification, here’s what advertisers will be able to measure for video ads, including those that run on YouTube:

• Average player size
• Average player position
• Measurable impressions for player size and position
• Viewable video impressions
• A graphical illustration of player size
• Number of impressions that were muted at start
• Prominence score (low, medium, or high), which is calculated by combining the above metrics

Video Verification UI. Player size: red = small, blue = large, green = HD

MEC uses DoubleClick Verification to ensure brands are safe, smart, and cutting edge online

As one of the world’s leading media agencies, MEC is committed to getting the highest-quality, most relevant and cost-effective buys for its clients. To ensure their clients’ messages only appear next to brand appropriate content and that their marketing dollars are well spent, MEC started using DoubleClick Verification.

With DoubleClick Verification built right into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, the team has access to unified data, which helps them make better decisions across search and display.

The team also found that they save 48 hours of turnaround time on every campaign since DoubleClick Verification requires no extra work, such as tagging. This makes the team more efficient and ensures campaigns launch on time.

Beyond peace of mind and time savings, MEC has moved from a reactive to a proactive approach to protect their clients’ brands. Tools like ad blocking guarantee that ads only appear next to brand safe content. For example, MEC recently implemented ad blocking for a major healthcare client to ensure their ads don’t appear on websites containing adult content, which could damage the healthcare firm’s brand.

To learn more about the team’s approach and results, read the full case study here.

Below are upcoming events and available resources to help you learn more about DoubleClick Verification:

• Join Oren Mor, Product Manager for DoubleClick Verification, in a Hangout on Air at 12pm EST / 9am PST on Tuesday, February 24th. Register here.
• Download the whitepaper, “5 Keys to Protecting Brand and Budget,” which guides advertisers through the process of evaluating a winning verification solution.
• Visit the Help Center.

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This morning AdWords announced upgraded URLs, a fundamental change to the way they create and track URLs. The change is an easier and faster way to manage and track important information about each click on your AdWords ads.

As part of this upgrade, AdWords is moving from the concept of “destination URLs” to “final URLs and tracking templates”. In addition, AdWords will retire the existing {copy} valuetrack param available for sitelinks today. The upgrade will require that DoubleClick Search make some changes to landing page management for AdWords accounts.

No immediate change to DoubleClick Search workflows 
While we work on supporting upgraded URLs, DoubleClick Search customers should continue to use the existing destination URL format to ensure tracking and campaign management capabilities. If you’re interested in saving time managing URLs, check out the DoubleClick Search URL builder to help simplify your workflows and save hours per week.

Stay tuned for upgrade details 
AdWords will continue to support destination URLs until July 1st. We’ll share more details in the coming weeks about the recommended upgrade process for DoubleClick Search customers.

There’s no doubt that technology continues to transform the pace of business. In the past, it wasn’t possible to track online conversions back to ads in real-time. You couldn’t always be sure you were advertising only in-stock items or immediately traffic out seasonal assortment changes.

But now advanced digital marketers are able to take advantage of real-time conversion and product data in their advertising campaigns to great effect.

Forrester recently completed a global study of 240 retailers’ search campaigns. What they found was… opportunity. Most retailers still don’t take advantage of existing real-time capabilities in digital marketing, and leave a significant opportunity for savvy marketers who do.

Come hear Forrester and Google talk about: 

• Results from Forrester’s retail search study 
• Insights about the retail search market, and where you can take advantage 
• How to become more “real-time” in your own digital advertising 

Speakers:
Shar VanBoskirk, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Henry Tappen, Retail Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Time: 
Wednesday, February 18th at 11AM PST/2PM EST

Register now on the event site. 

We look forward to seeing you there.

When running an e-commerce site, you need an analytics solution to gain insight into visitors’ digital journeys and make swift & educated decisions. To help tie your eCommerce transactions with your search campaigns we’ve launched support for IBM Digital Analytics (prev. known as CoreMetrics) in DoubleClick Search.

IBM Digital Analytics is an enterprise class cloud based digital analytics platform and it collects and analyzes customer’s digital journey including data about conversion events on your site, such as cart additions, abandonments, bounces...etc. DoubleClick Search regularly pulls in the data and uses it to attribute visits & conversions to keywords and populate IBM Digital Analytics reporting columns. In DoubleClick Search you can access the columns via online reports, downloaded reports, and the reporting API. You can also take advantage of the ability to create formula columns and executive reporting charts that incorporate IBM Digital Analytics data.

If you’re interested in getting started, please share your IBM Digital Analytics client ID, DDX API auth token, username, timezone & currency with your DoubleClick Search support contact or ds-support@google.com. They’ll give you a heads up when your DoubleClick Search advertiser and IBM Digital Analytics account have been successfully linked.