Budget pacing insights arrive in DoubleClick Search

Our team has been focused on bringing you more tools for better measurement and actionable insights, right in the interface. Until now, marketers have been using labels in DoubleClick Search (DS) to easily organize and report on keyword performance by placing keywords into custom categories, regardless of which campaigns they live in.

Now in our latest release, we’ve added another layer of reporting flexibility with Budget Pacing Reports. These reports allow you to track performance against a budget in the DS UI. By visualizing week-over-week, day-over-day, or month-over-month trends, Budget Pacing Reports allow you to quickly identify campaigns that are under-spending or underperforming.





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. Budget Pacing Reports provide:

• A rich language for entering KPI expectations with your budget target. Define your KPI goals, set expectations and constraints, and see if your campaigns are on track to deliver on them. For example:  I want CPA of $40.00 and I tolerate +-10% error.


• Data visualization for quick projections and insights. Given your entered specifications and expectations, easily visualize different date ranges to see trends and projections of intended outcomes to help you make the best decisions.


• A holistic view across campaigns. See how each campaign is contributing toward budget and KPI.

To learn more about Budget Pacing Reports, see our Help Center, or reach out to your Technical Account Manager for tips and best practices. You can also watch our training video below:








Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

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

Creating better relationships and improving productivity

We’ve been amazed at the adoption of the recommendation engine, a new tool that helps advertisers and publishers find new relationships and links based on relevance and revenue potential. Google Affiliate Network now sees over half of all new relationships being created from our recommendations. Today, we’re excited to share new enhancements that further simplify the process of creating relationships and getting links.



For publishers:



Creating relationships

The Advertisers tab includes three sub-tabs to help you easily sort through new opportunities.

• Recommended is now the default view for the Advertisers tab, featuring a customizable list of available advertiser programs that Google algorithms predict may be a good fit for you.


• Invitations are from advertisers that want to work with you -- including those with private programs. To join, just click the ‘Join’ button for that invitation.


• Browse existing shows the status of advertiser programs you’ve already applied to.

Getting the best links

The Links tab features recommendations for links that we estimate will perform well for you, and we now include new criteria for recommendations, like Staff picks and Exclusive opportunities. You can still view ‘Browse all links’ to search for links as normal. You'll also notice three new sub-tabs – we've consolidated Products and Subscriptions under the Links tab.

• Recommended links are ranked primarily based on average earnings.


• Staff picks are curated by Google Affiliate Network account teams based on relevant performance or seasonality.


• Exclusive opportunities feature links only available through Google Affiliate Network.

For advertisers:



Creating relationships

The Publishers tab includes three sub-tabs to help you easily sort through high-potential publishers that may be a good fit for your program.

• Recommended is now the default view for the Publishers tab. New search filters enable you to quickly narrow down the list of publishers that are a good fit.


• Pending makes it easy for you to review publishers and quickly approve them in bulk. We sort publishers by relevance to help you approve the best recommendations first.


• Browse existing shows the status of publishers that you’ve already taken action on, as well as any non-joined publishers you can recruit.

Please let us know what you think by posting a comment here or in the Google Affiliate Network forum.




Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Robin Anil, Software Engineer

Introducing the Links API

Since we launched our first set of API’s, we've consistently heard from publishers that they want an automated, flexible way to access and serve affiliate ads to scale their marketing efforts, create more unique advertising experiences, and better monetize their websites. Today, we've launched a beta of the new Links API, enabling publishers to query for links, banners, and even create publisher-specific links in real time.



If you're using our existing API's or are looking for more advanced ways to distribute affiliate links, try our Links API to programmatically access and show ads from Google Affiliate Network advertisers in new and creative ways. To get started, take a look at the documentation.



To start testing now, try out the Links API in Google APIs Explorer. Try running some sample requests like listing available free shipping promotions from approved advertisers (requires authentication).

Want to learn more about using Google Affiliate Network APIs to their full potential? Check out our presentation at Google I/O:

As always, we’d love to hear from you. If you have comments or suggestions on our new Links API, please visit our forum and share your feedback.



Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Shaun Cox, Software Engineer

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

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

Launched: Switch between your preferred currency and timezone

With our international launch earlier this year, we enabled you to set your preferred currency and timezone. We’re pleased to announce that if you changed your settings, you can now switch between your preferred settings and the default currency (USD) and timezone (Central Time) when viewing reports. This enhancement allows you to view your reports in the format that's most relevant to you, and is available for all reports except for payment reports.



 Switch between your preferred and default currency:

Switch between your preferred and default timezone:

If you're a Google Affiliate Network publisher, please note that you can only view the reporting currency you’ve chosen in your AdSense account. It’s not possible to change this once you’ve set it.



Posted by: Kurt Spoerer, Google Affiliate Network Product Manager

Recommending the most relevant advertisers, publishers, and links

Over the past year, we've heard from publishers and advertisers that they want a network that can help them create meaningful relationships. We've listened, and today, we've released a completely new recommendation engine that redefines how you can find and take advantage of affiliate marketing opportunities.



Publishers can find advertiser recommendations under the Advertisers > Recommended advertisers sub-tab. This is where they can find a list of available programs ranked based on relevancy and predicted performance. Each recommendation also shows why the recommendation was made, along with an estimate of earnings potential for that advertiser. We display advertiser recommendations based on the criteria below:

• Similar category: Advertisers are ranked by relevancy to your publisher category.


• Revenue potential: Advertisers are ranked primarily based on estimated payout fees.

In addition to the average advertiser EPC, each recommendation has an estimated advertiser EPC. Estimated EPC is a brand new metric designed to help publishers understand how much they could potentially earn with that advertiser.

Advertisers can now see publisher recommendations, too. Using the recommendation engine, the Publishers > Recommended publishers sub-tab shows a list of publishers that Google algorithms recommend as a good fit based on similar categories and revenue potential.

We've also brought the power of recommendations to the Links tab to help publishers find and promote the most relevant ads with the highest performance potential. Under the Links > Recommended links sub-tab, we display recommended text and banner links that Google algorithms predict may perform best for each individual publisher.

For more details, we suggest reviewing these Help Center articles:

• Recommended advertisers


• Recommended publishers


• Recommended links

Sign in to your account and try out recommendations. After you’ve taken a few minutes to review, we’d love to hear from you in our forum.



Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Robin Anil, Software Engineer

Chart bid history in DS

With the latest DoubleClick Search (DS) release, you can now chart Max CPC as a metric in the performance summary graph. This gives you a great visual representation of a keyword’s bids over time. With one glance, you can see:

• How frequently the bid is updated. We chart intra-day bid changes, so if a bid was updated 10 times in a day, there will be 10 time markers on the graph.


• How the bid is trending over time. Are the changes gradual, drastic, increasing or decreasing, etc.


• How the bid changes have affected other metrics. The Max CPC bids can be charted at the same time as any other metric, such as Cost.


• How the Performance Bidding Suite is managing your keyword. If the keyword is in a bid strategy, you’ll get greater visibility into DS-managed bid changes.

To chart a bid history:

1. Go to a Keywords page in the UI.


2. Select one keyword in the statistics table and click Filter to selected.


3. In the upper righthand corner of the performance summary graph, select Max CPC as a metric.


4. You may also want to select a second metric like Cost, so you can see how cost correlated with your bids over time.

Learn more about charting a bid history in the Help Center.

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

Compare performance by date range

DoubleClick Search (DS) now gives you the power to evaluate the performance of campaigns over time and see the impact of changes. With the new Date Comparison feature, advertisers have another valuable tool to manage and improve the results of their search ad campaigns. You can:

• See performance changes at a glance for all metrics in the scorecard, or for a single metric in the chart.


• Easily compare to prior period or prior year: Comparing this week to last week is just a click away in the UI, as is comparing this month to the same month last year.


• Set your own date ranges with Compare custom date ranges.


• Download date comparison reports to Excel for more in depth reporting.


• Compare by percentage change or absolute change so you can rely on the metric that is most important for your business.


• See date comparisons in columns to easily sort and view multiple items.


• Detect trends even with day of week variations with a chart that smartly aligns to show you the most meaningful performance comparisons.


• Work effectively over longer time periods with automatic aggregation to weeks for ranges 3 months or longer.

To compare date ranges:

1. In the upper righthand corner of the UI, select the first date range as usual.


2. Select the Compare to past check box.


3. Select the second date range in the dropdown that appears.


4. Click Apply.

That’s it! You’ll see a visual comparison of the two date ranges in the performance summary graph, a summary of the changes in the scorecard below the graph, and more detailed information in the statistics table below the scorecard. Learn more about Date Comparison in the Help Center.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Introducing DS Change History

Ever wish you could remember exactly when a change was made in DoubleClick Search (DS) or who made it? Or, perhaps you’d like to investigate an unexpected spike or dip in your campaign performance and link it back to a specific change. Help is now available directly in your DS account. We’ve just launched DS Change History, which enables you to audit what changes were made to your account, when, and by which user.

We’ve integrated DS Change History directly into the Campaigns tab, to allow you to seamlessly switch between analyzing campaign performance and the changes made during that same time.

Imagine you see a huge increase in impressions for a campaign and you’d like to know if there is a specific change that caused this. With one click, you switch from Statistics mode to Change history mode and quickly assess that a colleague accidentally increased the campaign budget from 100 to 1000 dollars. A quick click back into Statistics mode allows you to fix the budget and move on with the rest of your work. (Hint: Use our new filter to selected feature to narrow the scope of your view to the specific data rows you’d like to investigate.)

Let’s look at some of the specifics. With DS Change History, you can:

• See the changes for campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, labels, and bid strategies.


• See when a change was made and when it was trafficked, as well as which system and user made the change. DS Change History will report of changes made through the interface, bulksheets, inbound sync and bid strategies.


• Gain insights into bid strategy changes with a summary of the bid rationale. This 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


• Get guidance on how to improve bid strategy performance by discovering where settings like maximum keyword bid inhibits the bid changes

To view a change, navigate to the engine account, advertiser, campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, labels, or bid strategies whose change history you want to see. Once you select your scope, select the Change history link in the right hand corner of the performance summary graph.




After reviewing your changes in the interface, you’re able to download the report for offline analysis, by selecting the download button as you would any other report.

We hope this new workflow makes it even easier to keep track of changes made in DS. For more information on DS Change history, read the relevant articles in our Help Center or contact our support team for more information.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team