Announcing the September 6 DS release!

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

• Budget pacing report: Allows you to set a budget (different from a campaign’s daily budget) across multiple campaigns and see if you’re on track to spend it. Tracking spend against a budget goal is a common need for many users. These reports save time for agencies that need to look at such data on a regular basis. You can:




• Enter KPI expectations and see if your campaigns are on track to deliver on them.


• Visualize week-over-week, day-over-day, or month-over-month trends and changes easily.


• See how each campaign is contributing toward budget and KPI.

Learn more about Budget pacing reports on the Help Center, and look for an in-depth blog post in the coming days.

• Inventory management is now fully launched: We recently blogged about the beta release of DS inventory management, which allows you to use your Google Merchant Center feeds to efficiently and automatically update your search campaigns. This feature is now available to all DS users. Check out the Help Center to learn more about managing your inventory in DS.

• See the number of changes to campaigns and other objects: These new columns display the number of changes to campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords for the specified date range in the upper righthand corner. They introduce change history information into the main campaign management functionality. You can:




• Discover the number of changes for any object by using the new Impact analysis default view (above the performance summary graph, click the first dropdown to the right of View). This view displays all changes columns, along with some stats such as clicks, actions, and revenue. You can use this view to help track these metrics and quickly determine the campaign changes that caused the metric changes.


• Click a number under one of the changes columns, and DS will take you to a Change history page with details on each change.


• Use impact analysis and date comparison together to correlate performance variations with changes made to objects.


• Chart these columns on the performance summary graph. For example, select Ad changes from the Select a metric dropdown, and see a visual representation of the total number of ad changes within the current date range.

• See when an object was created in DS: Find the new and not-so-new by adding the Creation time column to see when an object (such as a keyword) was created in DS. To access this column, along with the individual changes columns, click the Columns button above the performance summary graph. Under Available columns, navigate to Change history > Change stats.

We also added quarterly and yearly options for date range. When selecting a date range in the DS UI, there are new options for This quarter, Last quarter, This year, and Last year.

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

Inventory Management now available in DoubleClick Search

If you’re a search marketer managing a large product inventory, you know that staying on top of changing products, new promotions, and seasonal search trends can be incredibly time-consuming. The DoubleClick Search (DS) team is pleased to announce the release of our inventory management solution (beta), which allows you to use your Merchant Center Feeds to efficiently and automatically update your search campaigns.

With our new inventory management feature, you’ll be able to update your online advertising based on your physical inventory. To do this, DS monitors changes to your inventory feed and updates your campaigns accordingly.

With inventory management, you can:

• Integrate with your Google Merchant Center feed to leverage your existing investment in product search. The hardest part of inventory management can be the initial setup in integrating your feeds. With our solution, you can avoid this by simply continuing to update your Merchant Center account to keep the inventory fresh and up-to-date. Once you connect DS to your Merchant Center account, DS will automatically reflect any changes.


• Tie the behavior of ads and keywords to inventory levels. For example, you can pause keywords when the related product is out of stock, and reactivate them when it’s back in stock. You can also change landing page URLs when the links in the feed change.


• Refresh ad copies with feed parameters. For example, you can specify templates that would update ads based on price or description updates from the feed.

For example, let’s say you’re a retailer managing two ad groups with different types of kitchen appliances: EZ Freez Ice Cream Maker, and FroYo + Ice Cream Maker. Below is an example of how you can use a template to create relevant, customized ads for your products.

1. Create a template for your ads using an inventory ad template, a generic message that can be modified based on the values of product attributes.


2. Connect the template to the two ad groups via creating a new inventory rule, which binds together inventory items and search entities.

User setup in DS	Auto-created, inventory-managed ads
Free Shipping Template: <TITLE> Free Shipping Today Only! Available for <PRICE> <LANDING_PAGE_URL> Destination URL: [http://www.productpage.com]	EZ Freez Ice Cream Maker Free Shipping Today Only! Available for $34.99 DisplayURL.com/EZFreez FroYo + Ice Cream Maker Free Shipping Today Only! Available for $49.99 DisplayURL.com/Combo

Create and customize rules to automate your keyword states, ad copy, and landing pages. Sample rules:

• If, or when, product sells out, pause keywords.


• If price changes, create new ads based on the ad template to reflect the new price.


• If product landing page changes, update keyword landing pages.

Visit our Help Center article to learn more about Inventory management. To be included in the beta, please contact your Technical Account Manager.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

DS helps you manage your campaigns around the clock!

The DoubleClick Search (DS) team is excited to announce new scheduling functionality: Scheduled uploads (available now) and Scheduled interface edits (coming soon). These new features will enable advertisers to work during their regular hours and still have DS work on their campaigns 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Scheduled uploads: Do you have a campaign for a promotion scheduled to start on New Year’s Day? Or a campaign that needs to be paused after working hours on a Friday evening? The latest update to DS now means that you don’t have to stay late or wake up early to do those kinds of operations.  

With scheduled uploads, simply upload your bulksheet as you always do and set the schedule for when it will be processed. DS will first do an initial validation to give you a chance to make corrections before the scheduled upload time.

Then, at the scheduled time, DS will wake up when you’re asleep, run through your changes and send those changes to the Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, or Yahoo! Search Marketing engines and let you know when all is done.

Scheduled interface edits: If you prefer to use the user interface to make changes to your campaigns, you’ll soon be able to use the scheduled editing functionality for:

• Temporarily lowering the bids on keywords during weekends or during the nighttime hours, when search traffic for their products is lower.


• Scheduling one-off events, such as enabling a new campaign at midnight to coincide with the launch of a promotion.

In addition to scheduling one-off edit operations to occur later, you can also schedule daily or weekly operations. For example, you can use Scheduled interface edits to raise the bids on keywords every day at 9:00 AM and then revert those changes at 5:00 PM, so you can reach key customers at the best possible cost per click.

These features add to one of DS’s key strengths - providing a powerful, flexible workflow that lightens the management load on your team, allowing them to concentrate on higher-level tasks.

The Scheduled interface edits feature is expected to roll out to all accounts over the next few weeks. To learn more about Scheduled uploads and the other updates in the current DS release, please read the release notes in the Help Center.

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 May 10 DS release!

On May 10, DoubleClick Search released the new Floodlight column reporting feature to all customers. This gives you more power to select the level of Floodlight reporting you want to see, in an easy-to-read column format. It allows you to create a column (such as Actions, Cost/action, etc.) that’s filtered to the selected Floodlight activities. And you have all the same options as with other reporting columns, such as chart metrics, see the summary in the scorecard, sort, and download. Look for an in-depth blog post on Floodlight columns in the coming days.



We also made the following updates to existing features:

1. Improved status and error messages for uploads: You’ll now see real-time status updates in the Results column of the Uploads list in the UI, from processing in DS to items sent to the engine. When you start an upload, the Processing row line will tell you how many rows of the upload DS has analyzed. When the DS processing phase is complete, it will display the number of rows that were Booked on DS, as well as the number of Failed rows. DS will then attempt to send the booked items to the engine. DS will display Sent to engine, or the number of items that successfully made it to the engine, as well as the Failed items. Finally, when you click Download error sheet to see the changes that encountered errors, DS will now also include trafficking error messages. This provides even more data to help you troubleshoot upload issues.


2. Improvements to reporting table: On April 6, we introduced an updated reporting table in the UI. With this release, we made some improvements to the table. If you’d like to see more rows in the reporting table, click the arrow directly beneath the summary of data; the graph and summary will be hidden and replaced with more rows. We also reduced column width, which allows you to see more columns on the screens at once. In addition, you can now sort by the Status column.

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