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

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

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

AdWords conversion tracking reports in DS

DoubleClick Search (DS) is expanding into supporting conversion tracking solutions beyond Floodlight activities. As a first step, we now give you the ability to pull AdWords conversion tracking columns directly from the DS interface!

• Save time: You no longer need to pull these metrics from two different sources to complete your reporting.


• Get fresher AdWords conversion data: AdWords conversion data is processed throughout the day for near-real-time conversion reporting. Read this Help Center article for more information on the freshness of this data.


• Onboard new advertisers more easily: This feature can be very beneficial for new advertisers who only track conversions in AdWords and have not yet implemented DoubleClick Floodlight activities.

To see these columns in DS:

1. Above the performance summary graph, click Columns to access the column selection tool.


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.

This initial launch is reporting-only, but if the demand is there as we hope, we’ll make plans to support bid strategies on top of AdWords conversion tracking data.

Simplify your workflow today with these new reporting columns!

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

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

Announcing the June 12 DS release!

With the June 12 DoubleClick Search (DS) release, you can now make changes to existing customized Floodlight columns. From the column selection tool, click Floodlight activities under the Available columns header. In the list of your existing Floodlight columns, click the pencil icon and update the name, selected Floodlight activities, and metric as necessary.







Read the Help Center release notes for information on other updates, and on issues fixed in this release.



Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

May 31 release: Full launch of Search Query reports

On May 31, DoubleClick Search released Search Query reporting to all customers. This powerful new feature provides you with insight into the search queries, or terms, that are driving visits for your ads and the revenue you derive from these queries. Due to search engine broad and phrase matching, your ads are often triggered for more search queries than the exact keywords that you’re bidding on. While this is desirable, often you’ll want to view the exact queries that are triggering your ads and the cost and revenue impact of those queries. Read this blog post to learn more about Search Query reporting.



Read the Help Center release notes for more information about this release, including the issues that were fixed.



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

Announcing the April 24 DS3 release!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working on some exciting new features that will change the way you use DoubleClick Search V3 (DS3). While none are ready to be fully released, some of these features are currently in limited release to a few customers and include:

1. Search Query reporting: As described in this blog post, Search Query reporting will provide you with insight into the search queries, or terms, that are driving visits for your ads and the revenue you derive from these queries.


2. Floodlight column reporting: Will give you more power to select the level of Floodlight reporting you want to see, in an easy-to-read column format. You’ll be able to create the equivalent of a column (such, as Actions, Cost/action, etc.) that’s filtered to the selected Floodlight activities.


3. Change history: Will provide you with details on all changes made to your account, including user changes, inbound sync updates, and automated changes from the DS3 bid strategy system.


4. 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’ll be able to see stats for these labels.

If you’d like to get a sneak preview of any of these features, and help us to test and improve them before they’re fully released, please contact your Technical Account Manager or email ds-support@google.com.



For this release, we did make an improvement to the bidding process for bid strategies: The bid strategy system now breaks up large bid changes. When the system determines that a large bid change is needed to optimize against the specified goal, it will now break up that change into increments. Previously, the system would change the bid all at once. This new bid smoothing feature helps to alleviate customer concerns over drastic bid changes. For example:

1. In a bid strategy, the DS3 system determines that the ideal bid for its keywords is $9.


2. The max strat bid is $2, so DS3 is constrained from applying the ideal bid. DS3 sets the bid at $2.  


3. The user changes the max strat bid from $2 to $10.


4. Before this release: The system would change the bid from $2 to $9 all at once.
   With this release: The system will make a series of bid changes. For example, it may change the bid from $2 to $4, then to $6,  and $8. As the system recalculates bids over time, at this point the system determines that the ideal bid is now $8.56. So the next bid change will be to $8.56.

Read the Help Center release notes for information on issues fixed in this release.



Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

New AdWords labels: unrelated to DS3 labels

As you may have heard, Google AdWords recently launched a new labels feature. We just wanted to let you know that this is separate functionality from DoubleClick Search V3 (DS3) labels. DS3 labels are set at the advertiser level and can span several engine accounts. AdWords labels are not currently supported in DS3, and they will not be imported into DS3 when you run a sync.


As a reminder, DS3 labels are a great way to categorize and report on keywords. Because multiple labels can be applied to a keyword, you can track many different attributes, such as whether it’s a brand keyword or if it’s in a particular category. You can also note keywords where your site doesn’t feature well in the organic search results.


To create a DS3 label:

1. Click the Labels tab in the left nav, click the New button above the table, and name your label. 


2. Navigate to a list of keywords and select some of them.


3. Click the Labels button above the table to apply labels to those keywords.

Coming soon, you’ll also be able to see reporting stats for DS3 labels.





As an example of the power of DS3 labels combined with reporting, an advertiser may manage brand and generic keywords separately. Using keyword labels, the advertiser will be able to easily compare the performance of these sets of keywords and take action accordingly, such as raising/lowering bids.


Learn more about creating and applying DS3 labels on the Help Center. And keep an eye on the blog for news of the release of reporting stats for labels.


Posted by DoubleClick Search team