Introducing Agile Creativity

Join us tomorrow, August 8th, at 10am PDT/1pm EDT for a special Google+ Hangout On Air featuring advertising industry executives in conversation with Google engineers.



Over the past year we’ve had many discussions with ad agency executives about how they are reinventing their business models to excel at the pace of digital. Many of our agency partners are applying practices inspired by the tech world in order to work faster and more collaboratively.



Tomorrow, August 8th, we will be hosting a live streamed panel called “Coders and Creatives: Two Angles on Agility”, where we'll uncover the links between agile practices at play at Google and in the advertising world. Torrence Boone, Managing Director of Agency Business Development at Google will moderate the conversation between:

• Greg Andersen, CEO BBH NY


• John Boiler, CEO, 72andSunny 


• Engineers from Google+ and Google[x], the group that developed Google Glass and the self-driving car

We hope you’ll be there and be inspired to maximize the agility of your agency with some of the concepts discussed. RSVP for the event to have it appear in your calendar. If you have a question for the panel, leave your questions as a comment on our hangout announcement post.



On August 8th at 1pm EST, to view the Hangout on Air, visit the Think with Google Google+ page, look for the “Hangout on Air” post within the stream, and click “Play” to tune in. Don’t forget to be signed into Google+!



Posted by Torrence Boone, Managing Director of Agency Business Development, Americas

Webinar this Thursday: Multi-Channel Funnels

Over the past few months, we’ve hosted a series of webinars on marketing attribution, exploring how you can get better results by understanding and valuing your customers’ full journey -- from the first ad they see until they make a purchase.







This week, please join Neil Hoyne, Google’s Global Program Manager for Attribution, for an in-depth look at Multi-Channel Funnels. Neil will discuss how Multi-Channel Funnels can reveal customer interactions across different digital media, show how these channels work together to create sales and conversions, and how these tools tie to the larger attribution narrative. We’ll explore the different reports and discuss how to get the most out of Multi-Channels Funnels to improve your campaign performance.



Date: Thursday, August 9, 2012

Time: 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT

Register: http://goo.gl/B49ma



Hope you’ll join us on Thursday!



Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager for Conversion and Attribution

Neural Network for Breast Cancer Data Built on Google App Engine

Today’s guest blog post comes from 17-year-old Brittany Wenger, the winner of this year’s Google Science Fair. Brittany built an application on Google App Engine called the "Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer." This artificial neural network can detect complex patterns in data, learning how to classify malignant or cancerous cells it hasn’t seen before. Learn more about her project. 







When a patient has a palpable breast lump, the first step a doctor takes is to determine whether the mass is malignant or benign. One relatively simple diagnostic procedure is a form of biopsy called fine needle aspiration (FNA). Though these tests are less invasive than others, they are historically less accurate as well. My goal was to create a tool for doctors to use when interpreting test results from these procedures.



For this project, I decided to create a neural network built on Google App Engine, using data published to the Machine Learning Repository by the University of Wisconsin. A neural network attempts to replicate the brain as a form of artificial intelligence through networks of computers and can be used to detect extremely complex patterns. It learns from its mistakes, so it can classify a case it hasn’t seen before as malignant or cancerous based on specific criteria like clump thickness or bland chromatin. Because the diagnostic power of the network improves the more data it has, building on App Engine is a way to ensure the app can continue to scale easily, no matter how much information goes into the system.

         

I got started integrating my neural network application code, written in Java, with App Engine in a few hours using the SDK’s Greeting Service sample code as a starting point. The application has two main parts, a training module, that implements the neural network itself and runs the training process over the input data stored in static files, and a web interface that takes input data and returns the network’s analysis.



Google App Engine provides the scalable infrastructure I need to collect information from every hospital in the world and run when there are many concurrent requests, as usage of my application increases. Because my network is built as a cloud service, not only is my app working on the web, but mobile tablets, smartphones, old PC systems, or new technologies can also easily access the service from any hospital with an internet connection.



The neural network I developed is 99.11% sensitive to malignancy when using leave-one-out testing with original data. Thus far, I have run 7.6 million trials. Moving forward my goal is to make the application accessible to the global medical community so more data can be deposited and used to improve the diagnostic power of the network.

DoubleClick Search: Manage your search campaigns around the clock

For improvements in search management worflow, DoubleClick Search has just announced two new features for increased automation: 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.

The addition of scheduled uploads and scheduled interface edits contribute 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.



 For more information on these two automation features, visit the DoubleClick Search blog.

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

Space

Join Learn with Google at SES in San Francisco!

If you're planning on attending Search Engine Strategies San Francisco in August, stop by our in-conference Learn with Google event, Search and Beyond with Google AdWords and DoubleClick, to learn how Google makes the web work for you. We'll have speakers across Google Search, the Google Display Network, and DoubleClick Search, with question and answer sessions following each presentation.

Tuesday, August 14

• Hear about recent enhancements to Google AdWords, Google Display Network and DoubleClick Search, as well as real-world examples of how these new solutions are already helping business solve some of their biggest challenges, presented by Ariel Bardin, Product Management Director - Google Search Ads


• Dive deep on how you can win the moments that matter with effective AdWords social, mobile and local solutions to reach your users, presented by Shannon Snow, Head of Industry - Education


• Learn about how DoubleClick Search helps marketers and agencies running some of the world's largest search campaigns more efficiently and effectitvely with Anthony Chavez, Senior Product Manager - DoubleClick Search


• Close the day with David Monsees, Product Manager - Google Display Network, to hear about how you can use the power of display advertising to extend the impact of your search campaigns with remarketing and contextual targeting

Wednesday, August 15

• During How to Win with Google & Bing, Ryan Gibson, Manager on the Agency business Development Team, will join the discussion on best practices for optimizing your campaigns, keywords, match-types, ads, bids, targeting, landing pages and quality scores for each network and highlight the most important differences that can make all the difference in highly-competitive markets


• Learn about Better SEM in a Cross-Channel World with Head of Emerging Products & Markets Stephen Yap, who will explore what marketers and agencies should expect from the next generation of search management platforms

The full SES agenda can be found here.

Additionally, we'll be offering 20-minute account optimization sessions with Google AdWords specialists, and 20-minute product demonstrations with DoubleClick Search specialists. If you’re interested in learning more about new features or best practices, let us know by filling out the form here. The deadline to sign up is Wednesday, August 8, 2012.

Still haven’t registered? We're happy to offer advertisers a promotional code for 20% off when you buy a Conference pass to SES SF. Reference our discount code 20GOOG upon registration.

If past conferences are anything to go by, this should be a fun and educational event, with lots of folks to meet, contacts to make, and tips and tricks to learn. We hope to see you there!




Posted by the DoubleClick Search team