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(cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search Blog)

During the 2013 holidays, we shared some tips and tricks on how to adjust your bid strategies to take advantage of seasonal opportunities. Today, we wanted to take a look back and highlight one of our holiday success stories with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite for real-time bid optimization. The following story comes from the VivaKi Search Hub -- VivaKi’s marketing support service that uses a deep knowledge of DoubleClick Search to drive results for their advertisers’ search programs.  

 One of the VivaKi Search Hub’s advertisers, a large retail brand, looked to the team to overhaul their current strategies for maximizing results over the 2013 Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days. To prepare for this peak time, the team turned to the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite to automate bids based on real-time conversion data, and respond immediately to market changes. 

 Timothy Lackhouse, Team Lead for Bid Strategy at the VivaKi Search Hub, was in charge of managing the advertiser’s bid strategies. “The bid strategies in DoubleClick Search are incredibly clear to set up and modify,” said Lackhouse. “With near real-time and granular reporting, we don’t need to spend countless hours or days waiting for the data. We’re able to get a deep level of insight into our performance right away -- assessing what’s working, what’s not, and making tweaks as necessary.” 

 Within days of launching the new bid strategies, the positive results were irrefutable. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the VivaKi Search Hub was able to increase its advertiser’s conversions by 360 percent while lowering CPO by 27 percent -- all while saving 90 minutes a day. 

 To get the full scoop on the VivaKi Search Hub’s success with the Performance Bidding Suite, read the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog and Google+ page for even more customer success stories.
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Posted:
(cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search Blog)

In an earlier blog post, we highlighted how shoppers exposed to a brand’s Product Listing Ads (PLA) and text ads are more likely to engage with that brand. To take full advantage of this opportunity across ad formats, it’s important that retailers have both a complete, accurate product feed and the tools to manage their campaigns at scale.

Today we’re excited to announce that DoubleClick Search will integrate feed management and optimization capabilities from Channel Intelligence. As an add-on solution to the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, the first step in this integration combines the data feed expertise from Channel Intelligence with the core workflow and optimization features from DoubleClick Search. Especially with the announcement of Shopping campaigns, having a detailed product feed is crucial for retailers to run high-impact search campaigns. This integration benefits retailers in the following ways:

  • Build optimized product feeds. Channel Intelligence works with retailers to refine product feeds -- ensuring that the feed is comprehensive, the data is organized, and product attributes are accurate.
  • Use improved feeds to dynamically create and update PLAs and text ads. Channel Intelligence feeds can power DoubleClick Search inventory-aware campaigns for automated campaign management. Using these optimized product feeds, DoubleClick Search can generate customized PLAs and text ads at scale, and keep them up-to-date based on changes to a retailer’s physical inventory.
  • Optimize in real time to maximize ROI. To further boost performance across these ads, DoubleClick Search bid strategies update bids up to 4 times a day, based on up-to-the-minute conversion information. This scale and speed allows retailers to respond to product inventory changes and market trends at the drop of a hat -- even during the busiest holiday shopping days.

Performics pilots solution for major retail client
Global leader Performics is one of the first agencies to take advantage of the integrated offering for one of their clients, a large department store retailer.

"We're really excited to team with Channel Intelligence and DoubleClick Search to optimize and fully integrate the search experience for our retail brands,” says Eric Papczun, President US of Performics. “The integration is greater than the sum of its parts, and we feel that these combined technologies will give our clients a clear competitive edge in the marketplace."

Even more to come
To learn more, join us for a webinar on March 10th where we’ll cover the integration, as well as discuss the power of moving toward real-time for retail campaigns. Sign up for the webinar here http://goo.gl/cBlAcx

Our teams will also be attending eTail West coming up March 3 - 6. Come meet us during the pre-day panels and roundtables, hear us present a keynote on Day 3, or find us on the conference floor.
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Here at DoubleClick Search, we’ve been focused on developing tailored solutions for retail advertisers  -- delivering the scale, performance, and speed our customers need to maximize revenue for their businesses. Today, we’re excited to introduce the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, a robust toolset offering a smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management. The suite is comprised of solutions that help you automatically create and update text ad and PLA campaigns based on your product catalog, leverage real-time data to optimize against your product or category-level business goals, and measure it all with flexible, product-based reports.

Putting “product” at the core of commerce investments
We designed the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite with products at the core, letting you efficiently build, manage, and optimize campaigns by seamlessly integrating with your existing product investments. As the only platform directly integrated with Google Merchant Center, we make your product inventory visible and accessible within DoubleClick Search -- meaning there’s no need to navigate a separate interface, manage a manual upload, or wait for a separate team to deliver product feed data. Instead, anyone on your marketing team can act on live updates, as they happen.

For example, inventory-aware campaigns uses this live product information to automatically create and update text ads, keywords, and bids based on real-time changes to your Google Merchant Center feed -- inclusive of updates to pricing, availability, product descriptions, and more -- with no extra work, and at no extra cost to set up.

For ATG Stores, an ecommerce company for home goods, the ability to directly interact with Google Merchant Center data in DoubleClick Search was crucial in allowing the team to quickly iterate across their four million SKUs. “Inventory-aware campaigns have been a game changer,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG Stores. “It’s impressive to see that what would previously have taken a full week to do is now being updated in the system in less than an hour.” In addition to time savings, this smart automation also helped the team take advantage of broader long-tail keyword coverage to widen reach and uncover incremental revenue. As a result, ATG Stores tripled their return on ad spend (ROAS) for their inventory-managed campaigns.

Today, we’re extending the power of this product-centric automation with two new capabilities for Product Listing Ads (PLAs):

  • Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation, an extension of inventory-aware campaigns, lets you automatically generate and update PLA campaigns in real time, based on your Google Merchant Center feed.
  • Product Listing Ads optimization with intra-day bidding based on the freshest data lets you react quickly to changes in the market -- executing bids to meet your ROI goals on both high-volume products, as well as the long tail.

Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation
In addition to your text ads, you can now dynamically manage your PLA campaigns using the same, seamless workflow you use for the rest of your campaigns  -- ensuring you’re always up to date, maximizing coverage, and driving better ROAS and volume.

Already, advertisers are seeing the benefits. “The ability to auto-generate PLA campaigns from existing product inventory drastically simplifies our setup process,” said Carissa McStay, Associate Manager at global marketing firm The Search Agency. “I was able to generate new PLA campaigns with over 1000 ad groups by product type in a matter of minutes -- not only saving us hours of time, but ensuring that our new customers see the most compelling ads that are relevant to them.”

Product Listing Ads optimization (beta)
Our Performance Bidding Suite offers the flexibility to optimize from a variety of signals and conversion sources including formula columns, external data (like calls), and Google Analytics goals; now, these same powerful bidding algorithms extend to your PLA campaigns. With more product-level information available, DoubleClick Search bid strategies can fine-tune bids on high-volume products to drive the most revenue, as well as handle the long-tail products that may receive less traffic.

And like with the rest of DoubleClick Search bid strategies, PLA bid strategies benefit from access to the same real-time data, with bids based on up-to-the-minute conversions to capture every new opportunity. This allows advertisers to respond to market changes at the drop of a hat -- even during the busiest holiday shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Valentine’s Day.

As the global leader in performance marketing, iProspect understands that speed is often the difference between seized and missed opportunities for retail clients. "Real-time is the future of retail, and DoubleClick is leading the way with the ability to optimize from real-time conversion information,” says Jeremy Hull, Director of Bought Media at iProspect. “With fast, accurate data, DoubleClick Search offers clients the tools they need to optimize throughout the day as traffic shifts occur.”

Just the beginning
This product-centric focus will continue to guide our feature development, helping us quickly innovate additional tools that will drive revenue for the ecommerce business. To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and new technology integrations and partnerships, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, or follow us on Google+.
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(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search Blog)

 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?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve shared some best practices to whip your campaigns into shape, just in time for the holidays. Today, we wanted to recap a few of our favorite search marketing “stocking stuffers” to put the cheer back in your holiday and help you go faster, smarter, and better than ever before. With tools to scale and streamline your seasonal campaigns, find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your toasty apple cider -- while we take care of the rest.

Deliver just the right gift with inventory-aware campaigns.
Admit it: Manually managing your product inventory to stay on top of changing products, new promotions and seasonal search trends can leave you feeling like a Grinch. To lighten your load this holiday season, inventory-aware campaigns let you use your existing Google Merchant Center Feeds to automatically update your search campaigns -- showing the right product to the right customer, when they’re looking to buy. To get started with inventory-aware campaigns, check out some tips and tricks here.

On our “nice” list: ATG Stores. Search advertising is the primary driver of traffic to ATG’s website and is key to helping ATG scale their online marketing across a breadth of products -- spanning four million SKUs from 3,500 different manufacturers. Using inventory-aware campaigns, ATG Stores expanded their reach with 160 new campaigns containing over 6 million new long-tail keywords -- resulting in 3x higher ROAS for their business. “Inventory-aware campaigns help our customers by showing them how many units we have in stock, and at what price. It’s going to be a much more compelling experience for our shoppers,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG.

Do the work of a team of elves with automated rules.
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 campaigns are in tip-top shape (which means you can spend less time on repetitive tasks, and more time setting up those reindeer traps!). To get started with automated rules, check out some tips and tricks here.

On our “nice” list: Media Experts. As Chris Sylvestre, Manager of Search Marketing at Media Experts puts it, “USing automated rules this season, I’ll be more focused on what ingredients to put in my eggnog than I’ll be about our campaigns launching on time!” Maurice Revah, Senior search Marketing Analyst, continues: “Automated rules allow us to activate and pause time sensitive promotions for our clients, regardless of the time of day. This enables us to operate outside of regular business hours, increasing productivity beyond measurement.”

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, 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. To get started with display remarketing from search ads, check out some tips and tricks here.

Race to the top of the search page with real-time bid optimization.
Looking for a solution that’ll help you go as fast as Rudolph? Put your best bid forward with our Performance Bidding Suite, designed to drive campaign performance through speedy, data-driven bid optimization. DoubleClick Search uses instant conversion data to update bids in near real-time, to more closely track to your seasonal goals, and help you get the ROI the size of a holiday feast. To get started with display remarketing from search ads, check out some tips and tricks here,

Get a full view of your online advertising with more data integrations.
To capture sales that occur after the inevitable rush to the malls, our Conversions API allows you to upload and edit conversions automatically so you can factor in purchases that started with your search ads, but resulted in transactions outside of your website. With this feature, you can upload new conversions to account for in-store transactions, or edit existing conversions to account for discounts and exchanges (...let’s face it -- we knew you didn’t need another pair of snowman pajamas).

On our “nice” list: ymarketing. With the DoubleClick Search Conversions API, ymarketing easily and automatically integrated their call tracking information (as well as data from other outside data sources) into DoubleClick Search. Steven Hellbusch, Performance Media Supervisor at ymarketing, says: “With the Conversions API, we can attribute calls to the specific keyword by search engine in almost real time. The ability to then optimize off of both online and offline conversions has allowed us to better meet our clients’ goals. With all of our data in one place, we have a more accurate picture of what’s happening from a user experience, and more importantly, we have ability to unearth new opportunities for our client.”

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 here on the blog!
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From managing inventory levels, to juggling promotions, to tackling catalog churn - online retail moves quickly, and so should you.

To help you navigate the rapidly-changing retail landscape, we invite you to join our Hangout on Air: Moving at the Speed of Retail. Come hear search leaders from iProspect, Performics, and DoubleClick discuss the latest industry trends, challenges and use cases in retail SEM today. Some of the topics we’ll cover include:
  • Tying inventory levels and promotions to search campaigns, in real-time
  • Boosting performance with retail-specific bid optimization strategies and best practices
  • Finding more cross-channel opportunities through remarketing tactics

Participants: 
Jessica Dearien, Account Leader, iProspect
Dave Strong, Group Account Director, Performics
Matthew Eichner, Head of DoubleClick Search
Dan Arwady, DoubleClick Search Account Manager

Register here to attend the Hangout on September 25th, 2013 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST. Tune in for the session, and interact with the panel via Hangouts-enabled Q&A.

We hope to see you there!

Posted by Justin Huskamp, The DoubleClick Search Team
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Posted:
(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)
 
Dust off your textbooks and boot up your laptops: it’s time to go back to school!

While “Back to School” might be a dreaded time for students, it also presents unique challenges (and opportunities) for retail search marketers. More than 60% of shoppers will begin their Back to School shopping online, and most shoppers report that online research will have a notable impact on their in-store purchase decisions. In a highly competitive online space, how can you as a search marketer work faster, act smarter, and make better decisions -- all before that final school bell rings?  

Today, we want to help you beat the Back to School blues and take advantage of the second largest retail event of the year. So we’re opening our school supply box and sharing a few successes we’ve heard from search marketers who’ve done their homework. Below are just a few powerful tools from DoubleClick Search to make sure you’ll get voted “most likely to succeed” in retail this school year, and beyond.  

Keep your promotions organized with inventory-aware campaigns
Shake off that lazy summer feeling and get your new Back to School promotions in tip-top shape with inventory-aware campaigns, which let you use your existing Google Merchant Center feeds to efficiently and automatically update your search campaigns.

Our star student: Piston. Jennifer Johnstone, Performance Marketing Strategist at Piston, mentions: “Inventory-aware campaigns allow us to save time from manually managing product inventory, enable us to spend money on more efficient product level keywords and help us drive more revenue than manual campaign builds.” The team cut out the busywork by setting up inventory rules to automatically pause keywords when products go out of stock, and change landing page URLs when links in their feed change. The team also increased profits by expanding their keyword lists, auto-generating highly relevant SKU-level keywords. In a matter of weeks, Piston saw a 51% uplift in ROAS, 26% higher CTR, and a 50% higher conversion rate for their retail client -- all while saving around 38 hours over the past quarter.


Get to the top of the class (and the search page) with smart bid calculations
Become a math whiz with powerful bid management tools from the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite, which considers dozens of factors to make intelligent bidding decisions in near-real time.

Our star student: iProspect. To better manage their search campaigns at scale, iProspect adopted the Performance Bidding Suite for automated bid optimization—with some impressive results. Casandra Jones, Account Supervisor at iProspect, notes: “The one feature from DoubleClick Search that our team can’t live without are the bid management tools. It’s saving us 8 hours a week, compared to manual bidding.” Within 6 weeks of adopting Floodlight tag bidding -- a bidding strategy that leverages Floodlight to set unique goals for varying conversion types -- iProspect saw significant improvements for their retail client: 10% increase in click volume, 20% increase in daily revenue, and 20% decrease in costs.


Secure cross-channel opportunities with display remarketing from search ads
Not sure how to juggle your cross-discipline studies? With display remarketing from search ads, use paid search clicks from DoubleClick Search to show consumers display ads across major ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across the Google Display Network, all with an easy and tagless workflow.
Our star student: VivaKi. In the search for the best deals, online shoppers can quickly get distracted. VivaKi implemented DoubleClick's display remarketing from search ads to make sure they didn’t lose their audience. With a turn-key setup on one integrated platform, the VivaKi team set up their remarketing lists in just a few clicks, and were ready to begin reaching customers with display ads via DoubleClick Bid Manager. As a result, VivaKi increased conversions by 32% for a leading insurance company, and reduced CPA by 66% for an automotive client.


Take notes on the important details, using labels across your entire campaign
Don’t get lost in all the “noise”. Highlight the need-to-know details using labels from DoubleClick Search to categorize, manage, and report on your most important campaigns, ads, groups, or keywords at a glance.
Our star student: The Search Agency. The Search Agency used labels from DoubleClick Search to break out of their existing campaign structure and easily track and manage attributes most important to them. Matt Grebow, Director of Paid Search at The Search Agency, notes: “Labels help us quickly identify account segments that are important to our clients, and provide the flexibility to adjust these segments along with any shift in business focus.” Beyond simply tagging different campaign attributes, we’ve seen our customers use labels in unique ways with other DoubleClick Search features, including combining labels with automated rules to manage their promotion schedules.

Ace your “report” card with better measurement from DoubleClick
Find out how your campaigns are stacking up with insights from our real-time, holistic reporting solutions. With a single view of your customer across display, rich media, mobile, video, and more, discover what’s working, hone in on new opportunities, and find your spot on the digital marketing honor roll.
Our star student: Digitas. In a dynamic search space, waiting 24 hours for reports to be updated, then mashing up and matching data from those separate reports, can feel like nails on a chalkboard. “I think the biggest factor that goes into our decision-making process for a platform is its ability to handle data, “Sean McDonald, Vice President and Group Director at Digitas, remarked. “DoubleClick really allows us to view the data all in one place, and make decisions based off of what’s best for our clients, rather than what's best for our individual teams.” With reporting by device type, quickly compare how campaigns are performing on desktop computers, mobile devices, and tablets, down to the individual keywords. For cross-channel insights, use DFA Attribution tools to better analyze conversion paths.

Ready for the next lesson? Play teacher’s pet and tune in to the DoubleClick for Advertisers blog later this week to learn how DoubleClick Bid Manager can help advertisers engage with in-market consumers during the Back to School season, and get set up for success for the upcoming holidays.

Posted by Kim Doan, The DoubleClick Search Team


1. Google data, 2013: http://googleshopping.blogspot.com/
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