As part of our series exploring the value of audience signals in search marketing, we went behind the scenes at leading agencies and marketers and asked industry experts to share their views on what the opportunity is.

Here’s what we heard: According to these industry leaders, audience insights enable advertisers to go beyond simple keywords and use other signals to inform their search marketing. They can make smarter bidding decisions, but more than that, advertisers can improve the message  they’re presenting to their audience, making their  search ads even more relevant and compelling. And of course, as search strategies become sharper, ads perform better.

To see the latest from the front lines, watch our video featuring Martin McNulty of Forward3D, Ben Wood from iProspect, Paul Frampton of Havas Media, Steve Chester from the Internet Advertising Bureau and Khurram Hamid from GlaxoSmithKline.

Hope you enjoy the video above; we will continue the series next week with our next post focusing on getting our partner’s views on how audience signals may impact search marketing in the future.

We are happy to announce support for AdWords Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) in DoubleClick. If you are a DoubleClick Search customer, you can now manage and report on your RLSA campaigns directly in our platform. Further, you can now report on the ROI performance of each individual remarketing list, regardless of how they spread across different campaigns and ad groups.

With this new capability, we’ve made it much easier for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of each remarketing list and their list strategies overall. Up to now, advertisers using RLSA through Adwords have had to duplicate and complicate their ad groups, in order to understand each remarketing list’s value. We are excited to see advertisers enhancing their search marketing campaigns by embracing audience signals, and below we’re shining a light on how customers are improving their results with RLSA:

"Within the remarketing campaigns, renewal customer target groups showed a 89% higher ROI than acquisition customers. Also, 90% of the target group customers turned out to be customers that renewed their contract"  

- Irina Stutvoet, eCRM Marketing Manager, T-Mobile Netherlands

"When AdWords launched RLSA, it offered us a new opportunity to engage with our customers. Now with the addition of conversion reporting in DoubleClick Search, we can finally measure and realize the true ROI of RLSA. Across our agency portfolio we have seen RLSA campaigns improve conversion rates by 70% and CPA of 53% on average compared to non-RLSA campaigns”  

- Matt Wright, Head of Paid Search, iProspect Manchester

As we continue our investments in our audience capabilities, we work closely with our partners to understand what they’re looking for.

With that in mind, over the next three weeks we’ll be hosting a series on the topic of the role of audience signals in search engine management. We’ll share perspectives from organizations like iProspect, Havas Media, and the Internet Advertising Bureau on what the opportunity is, how audience signals will impact search marketing and how marketers can get started.

We hope you enjoy the forthcoming series on audience signals in search engine management!

This post is part of the Evolution of TV series. In this series we identify the risks and opportunities around 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape as TV programming shifts to delivery over the Internet.

The lines between TV and the web are blurring, as people increasingly watch TV online on all their devices and watch online video on their TV’s.

In part 1 of our Evolution of TV series, 7 Dynamics Transforming TV (article, PDF of whitepaper), we introduced the increasing shift of TV to delivery over the internet.

Here, in Part 2, we dig into the first dynamic — reaching fragmented audiences spread across hundreds of screens and devices — and explore how scale, measurement, technology and brand safety come together to address the challenges and create huge opportunities for broadcasters, distributors and advertisers to grow their audiences and increase brand engagement.

Download the whitepaper

Read the Article on ThinkWithGoogle

-
Anish Kattukaran

Product Marketing, DoubleClick Video & Brand Measurement

We’re excited to unveil our redesigned Rich Media Gallery website, Google’s destination for digital creative inspiration and education. The new design provides a seamless experience across screens, and makes it easier to find the right product and ad format you need to build your campaign. 

Two and half years of content:

The original website launched two and half years ago, in September 2012, and since then, we’ve added over 1000 creative examples to the gallery and seen 50% year over year growth in unique viewers.

Why the redesign?
The new design optimizes the website experience for every device and removes complexity, allowing users to quickly reach the right answers. 

Seamless, cross-device experience: We used Google’s Material Design Principles to create a consistent look and feel across smartphones, tablets, and desktops. The site incorporates mobile-friendly elements, such as easy scrolling, full-screen interactive gallery examples, and clever transitions.

The Rich Media Gallery website is now fully responsive, resizing content automatically based on the size of the device you’re viewing it on.

Get to the right answer quickly: We want the Rich Media Gallery to be an intuitive guide to Google’s creative solutions, to help you identify the best tools and ad formats for your campaign.

• Filter the gallery by ad type or feature, to see the most relevant creative examples for your campaign. 
• Check out the Creative Recommendation Tool, which provides a recommendation for the best product to use for your campaign, based on your answers to a few questions.

Start Exploring:

• The new homepage offers a curated set of the best creative examples from the gallery. You can “deconstruct” these ads to uncover which formats and features were used to build it. (See below)

• The new Ad types section will provide an overview of each format type, and then aggregate the build guides, gallery examples, and other relevant resources in one place, so you have everything at your fingertips to build your own version. 

• Make sure to check out the new HTML5 Lightbox format. It's Google’s first truly responsive framework that allows you to build your creative once and deploy it on any device or screen size. Think of these like a DoubleClick Studio Layout, except that the expanded state of the Lightbox is completely responsive to screen size. (Overview video here.) 

• If you’ve already downloaded Google Web Designer, you have the option to open HTML5 templates from the website directly in Google Web Designer, so you can immediately get started on a project.

Interested in building your own mobile-optimized website?
Read the behind-the-scenes scoop from the Rich Media Gallery design and development team to better understand their strategy and approach to this redesign. They discuss how they applied Material Design principles to create a mobile-optimized experience, and they walk through the various challenges they faced as they built the new site.

Posted by the Rich Media Gallery Team

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.

Stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

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.