DoubleClick Search gets UI, control, and transparency improvements with new Performance Bidding Suite

As a search marketer, you know that bid optimization is one of the critical aspects of managing search at scale, providing sophisticated technology to meet your unique business goals. Over the past 18 months, the DoubleClick Search team has been focused on enhancing our automated bidding tools -- understanding that this is the engine that drives campaign performance. We've rebuilt our bid optimization platform from the ground up -- no single line of code is the same! -- and our users are already seeing some impressive results: 88% have experienced significant improvements in campaign performance, with 50% doubling their conversions at half the CPA.¹



Our investments in bid optimization span beyond revamped technology and algorithms. We wanted to make it easier for you to state your goals and monitor performance, to better harness and discover the power of automated strategies. The result is our new Performance Bidding Suite, which includes updates to the user interface (UI), new strategy options, and increased transparency into bid engine decisions. With our Performance Bidding Suite, you can:

• Quickly find the right goal with a refreshed user interface. Easily express bid optimization goals that match your business objectives. Whether you’re looking to maximize revenue or target a position, the new UI makes it even easier to find the right strategy for your unique goals. Our updated UI is designed to capture new bid strategies as they are released.


• Easily enter your Target Spend goals. With our new Target Spend strategy, maximize important KPIs like actions, transactions, revenue or clicks within a given monthly spend. Learn more


• Efficiently set default minimum and maximum bids on a strategy. Spend more time managing bid limits for the keywords you care about most, while DoubleClick Search handles the rest through a bid strategy-wide setting.


• Exercise even more advanced controls. The Advanced Configuration tab in the new bid strategy UI is designed for those who want to even further influence bid strategies. The first option we’re releasing gives you control over how a bid strategy handles high-traffic or low-converting keywords in ROI strategies. Stay tuned for more advanced controls. Learn more

In addition to a cleaner interface, new strategies, and advanced controls, the Performance Bidding Suite provides increased transparency into bid decisions and impact. Drive more insights with features that allow you to:

• Chart your Max CPC bids to visualize trends over time. You can now chart keyword bids for a defined date range, alongside any other metric in our UI to easily analyze bidding frequency and bid changes.


• Better understand our decision-making with bid rationale summary. As part of the change history tool, our new bid rationale feature (beta) reveals the reasoning behind any changes to specific bids.


• Preview intended bids. Our bid preview feature shows the target bid DoubleClick Search intends to submit for a particular keyword. This provides insight into the range of bids the system is likely to submit, based on the current bid and performance, to offer guidance in setting bid limits.

With these transparency features from the Performance Bidding Suite, you have powerful insights into how different settings impact campaign performance, and can tweak these settings if needed.

If you'd like to get started exploring the Performance Bidding Suite, you can check out the latest release notes and updated articles in the Help Center, or view our recorded webinar here.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

1. Google internal data, 2012

See a preview of the bids for a bid strategy

We recently announced the launch of the Target bid column in DoubleClick Search (DS) reporting, which shows you the bid that DS would have used if there were no secondary constraints in the keyword’s bid strategy. Here’s a way you can use the column to get a preview of the bids in a bid strategy, so you can feel confident that it will result in a solid return on your investment.

You’ve heard about all the great things DS has been doing to improve the Performance Bidding Suite, both in the UI and behind the scenes with improved algorithms. You’re ready to try a bid strategy, but you’d love to have some idea as to what DS is going to bid before giving over full control. Based on your bid strategy settings, how is DS going to bid on your keywords?

To get an idea, just follow these steps:

1. Create your bid strategy and apply it to some keywords.


2. When applying the min and max bids for the selected keywords, set a tight bid range that you’re comfortable with. For example, you could set the bids so they match the range of max CPCs, as shown in the following example:
   


3. Let the bid strategy run.
   The bid strategy won’t be able to update the bid beyond the tight min and max bid limits, but it will update the Target bid column.


4. Navigate to a Keywords page that contains the keywords in the bid strategy.


5. Filter to the keywords in the bid strategy.


6. Above the performance summary graph, click Columns and then select the Target bid column.
   


7. Review the target bids. If they look reasonable, relax the bid limits to give more control to the bid strategy. In the following example, you may want to set your min bid to $5.00 and max bid to $60.00 for the keywords, to ensure that the Performance Bidding Suite has the room to set the target bids.
   

After you give the bid strategy control, remember that you can use Change History to gain insights into bid strategy changes with a summary of the bid rationale. In addition to the target bid, this feature lets you know how often bids are evaluated and provides details on why a change was made to a target position strategy. You also receive guidance on how to improve bid strategy performance by discovering where settings like max bid inhibit the bid changes. Learn more.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Announcing the July 11 DS release!

The latest DoubleClick Search (DS) release includes the following new features:

• AdWords conversion tracking reports: You can now report on AdWords conversion tracking data separately in DoubleClick Search (DS). To see these columns in DS:




1. Above the performance summary graph, click Columns.


2. Under Available columns, navigate to Engine stats > AdWords Conversions.


3. Add the desired AdWords conversion tracking columns to your report.


4. In your report, look for the columns that begin with aw.

Learn more about AdWords conversion tracking reports, and look for a detailed blog post coming soon.

• Target bid column for bid strategies: This new column shows you the bid that DS would have used if there were no secondary constraints (such as minimum/maximum bids or a secondary position goal) and just a primary goal. This is useful for advertisers who want to first see what DS would bid before deciding to relax their bid limits. It also gives some guidelines on how much to relax the bid limits. You can use the column selection tool to choose this column, under the Bid strategy > Bid limits section. You can also see it from the Bid strategy performance default view. Learn more.

We also added support for including close variants for phrase and exact match keywords in AdWords. This allows you to capture additional traffic by focusing on user intent in queries. With this option, AdWords will display your ads even on search queries that are common variations such as misspellings and plural forms. When you create an AdWords campaign in DS, the Include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants option to activate the near exact match type will be selected by default. If you want your DS campaigns to inherit the near exact match settings you have on AdWords, please run a sync on your account. Learn more.

Read the Help Center release notes for more information on these features, and on issues fixed in this release.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Announcing the June 20 DS release!

The latest DoubleClick Search (DS) release includes the following new features:

• Change history: Provides you with details on changes made to your account, including user changes, inbound sync updates, and automated changes from the DS bid strategy system. Auditing search campaigns is a crucial business need for many advertisers. This feature makes auditing easier with the ability to sort on changes by user for a specified date range. Look for a more detailed blog post on Change history in the coming days. Learn more.


• Bid strategy change history: Within Change History, you can gain insights into bid strategy changes with a summary of the bid rationale. Brought to you by the bid strategy team, this feature will let you know what target the change was intended to hit, how often bids are evaluated and, for target position strategies, details on why a change was made. You also receive guidance on how to improve bid strategy performance by discovering where settings like maximum keyword bid inhibit the bid changes. Learn more.

• Filter by specific table rows: You can now choose the specific rows you want to see in a UI reporting table. Just select the check boxes next to the rows and click the Filter to selected button above the table. This allows you to easily chart any campaign, ad group, keyword, etc.


• Reporting stats for labels: Labels are a great way to manage and report on keywords outside the traditional campaign structure. With this new feature, you can now see stats for these labels. Click the Labels tab in the left nav as you normally would to see a list of your labels, and you’ll now see reporting stats. You can also download label reports to make it easier to share with others. Learn more.

We also made an improvement to the way we bid on low-traffic keywords. For low-traffic keywords with no impression potential, we’ve reduced unnecessary bid increases. We now predict the correlation between bids and impressions. As a result, we differentiate keywords that don’t have impressions due to:

• Low bids


• No search traffic

For the keywords in the "no search traffic" group, we’re much less likely to increase bids in a futile attempt to get more impressions. This is beneficial because:

• Now there is a much smaller chance of reaching the max bid on low-traffic keywords, which reduces the risk of high CPCs if an impression and click do occur for these keywords.


• The bids of low-traffic keywords will be more stable, which will also result in better position control.

Note that this change applies to position bid strategies only.

Read the Help Center release notes for more information on these features, and on issues fixed in this release. And keep an eye on the blog for news of the upcoming full release of deferred uploads. This feature will allow you to delay the start of processing an upload until a specified date and time.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team